To be a top-of-the-line, professional tutor requires three fundamental characteristics – depth and breadth of knowledge, the right personality, and adaptability.

Knowing a subject well seems like an obvious requirement for a tutor. It surprises people (most often parents) when they find out that a student who has received an excellent grade in a class is not qualified to tutor another student in that same subject. Good tutoring, like good teaching, requires a depth of knowledge that allows the mentor to point out important relationships and make connections between concepts and skills that very often seem unrelated to the beginner. In addition, good tutoring requires a breadth of knowledge that allows, for example, a tutor to say to a trigonometry student, “Hey, this is an important concept because you’re going to need this again when you study related rate problems in calculus.” Many tutors just don’t have the expertise necessary to be good at it – they are not professionals. With more than 20 years of teaching and tutoring experience, an interdisciplinary Ph.D. in chemical physics, and a minor in mathematics, I am able to tutor basic math through differential equations and all the sciences with the unique ability to make the connections not only within subjects but also between subjects.

Without the right personality, all the knowledge in the world will not make you a good tutor. Great tutoring requires someone who has infinite patience, a genuine love of each subject being tutored, and an innate desire to help people learn. Not surprisingly, very few people have all three of these personality traits. I do, but not by accident. Both my parents were teachers, so I believe I inherited the “teaching genes” from my mother and father.

Every student is unique: academic ability, personality, degree of interest in the subject, willingness to study, maturity level, and number of competing interests and activities vary widely from one student to the next. A tutor who has a fixed agenda or blueprint for tutoring is ill-equipped for one-on-one mentoring. Flexibility with regard to how I interact with students is one of the important components of my tutoring.

The fundamental goal of tutoring is not to get a student into a "stretch" or "dream" college, but to help a student master a subject and, more importantly, to appreciate the beauty and usefulness of the subject being studied. Take my word for it, all good things come from that.

When I'm at home with you or your children, you can relax. I am a faculty member of Empire State College, a member in good standing of the Better Business Bureau, and carry educators professional liability insurance required for contract home tutoring when I am hired by local school districts.

For the above reasons, I have gained a reputation as the premier math and science tutor in the Hudson Valley.

Serving Rockland, Westchester, Orange, and Bergen Counties
Lowell Parker, Ph.D.
845-429-5025
lowell.parker@esc.edu