Dialectic Services
About
As a teacher of classical literature, I have spent the last 20 years walking students through the process of outlining, writing, and revising essays interacting with great works of literature from _Gilgamesh_ to _A Tale of Two Cities_.
I have also walked juniors and seniors through researching and developing thesis papers for presentation.
In addition to that, I have spent the last 10 summers tutoring one-on-one, in person and on-line.
My goal in each of these relationships is long-term student success: to help students grow and to work myself out of a job.
Highlights
No reviews (yet)
Frequently asked questions
What is your typical process for working with a new student?
I have to assess the needs: what are we aiming for, and where are we starting from?
The kind of writing that you need to improve in as well as your willingness to put in the work are critical factors in my ability to construct a satisfying tutoring process.
My goal is always to work myself out of a job by helping you to learn how to learn.
What education and/or training do you have that relates to your work?
I have been teaching literature and writing since coming to Maryland in the middle of the school year, January of 2000.
For the past 16 years I have been teaching within the classical model - a model that relies on discussion in order to create life-long learners: people who can quickly pick up new ideas and new methods because they have been equipped with mental structures that help them do so.
In the course of my career, I have taught students as young as 8 all the way to college seniors, though my main focus by far has been on the middle school years - or, as we call them in classical education, the dialectic years. While doing this, I have read, graded, and given feedback on over 5,000 essay. My feedback has been meticulous, often taking an hour to grade because I am interested not merely in assessing what has been written but in explaining how the student can improve the next time.
I have also worked as an advisor on year long thesis projects, walking with advisees through year long research projects where students have to create papers between 15 and 20 pages in length. These papers are then turned into speeches which are presented and defended in public at the senior's capstone event, two weeks before graduation.