I believe that there are a few key steps that must be taken before being able to successfully facilitating learning: getting to know a student and building trust, discovering strengths and finding ways to utilize them, and building a love of learning and an enthusiasm for the process of learning, while continuing to feed that enthusiasm, especially when challenges are encountered in the learning process. Perhaps your student's teacher has been too busy to really get to know him or her, or perhaps their personalities simply clash, which makes the learning process much more difficult for your child. This could have even led them to build barriers between themselves and learning. I can break down those barriers, discover your child's strengths and use those to help them conquer their difficulties. I'm very good at building trust with children. I worked as a camp counselor for 5 years with ages 9-18, and I've helped a lot of kids find their confidence and achieve things that they thought were impossible. I've also been working one on one helping students improve their writing since I was in high school. I started helping 4th graders with their writing portfolios at my old elementary school when I was fifteen, and in college I did a teaching internship there and at my old high school. I also gained a lot of experience in 6 years of creative writing workshops. I was lucky enough to go to Interlochen Arts Academy to study writing for the last two years of high school, and I spent all of college continuing to rigorously study the art of writing and the creative collaboration/critical experience one gets from writing workshops. I also learned a lot from getting a liberal arts education, where not learning what to learn but how to learn is the goal.

I'm a fiction writer and am working on a novel right now, so that takes up a lot of my time. When I need a break from work though, I love to go bird watching, hiking, and camping. I also have two kittens that like to charge around the apartment, wrestling and climbing into any strange box or paper bag.