Ethan

Certified Tutor

I graduated from Oberlin College in May 2019 with majors in mathematics and East Asian Studies. While I was a student, I worked in a drop-in tutoring center, helping my classmates with math and chemistry. During my junior year, I tutored a high school junior in algebra, and I am currently tutoring a middle school student in Mandarin. Tutoring is something I genuinely enjoy. I like helping people. I empathize with my tutees because I know what it is like to struggle with a new concept; I know what it is like to not understand something you feel you should understand. These are difficult experiences with which I am personally familiar. Thus, my main motivation for wanting to be a tutor is to help people overcome these difficulties and feel good about themselves in the process. An added bonus is the reward of better understanding the material I am teaching.

Given that I have experience tutoring both math and Chinese, these are the subjects I am most comfortable teaching, specifically middle school and high school level math and beginning to intermediate Mandarin. That being said, I would be uncomfortable tutoring an absolute beginner in Mandarin because I believe pinyin and tones are best taught by a native Chinese speaker. In addition to math and Chinese, I would enjoy tutoring writing and English.

Outside of academics, I have a number of hobbies. I love doing ceramics and have been taking classes since I was eight years old. I mostly do hand-building and have gone through a number of phases. When I was very young, most of the ceramic sculptures I made were dragons because I was obsessed with them. When I first began studying Chinese in high school, I made ceramic tiles with Chinese characters on them. Most recently, I have been making ceramic lotuses and sunflowers. Origami is another craft I enjoy. It is a fun, relaxing, and portable activity as folding paper can be done virtually anywhere.