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Theresa

Certified Tutor

I am a Secondary Education teacher specializing in English Language Arts. I earned my Masters of Arts of Teaching from The Citadel and Bachelors of English Literature from Clemson University. I graduated with honors from both institutions and was inducted into Kappa Delta Pi, an honors society for Education majors. I'm a member of the National Council of Teachers of English.

Over the summer, I advanced my professional development with seminars from ASU's Arizona Virtual Teacher Institute and joined the Diversity and Inclusion Book Club of the Arizona English Teachers' Association.

The past few months, I took a book club approach to summer reading with my one-on-one students. It was a great opportunity for them to choose books that weren't part of the standard curriculum. For my students with required summer reading texts, we still met periodically to discuss them in a book club format. One of my favorite things about literature is that there's no single correct answer. I'm always interested to hear my students' perspective on what they've read and the connections they make.

This summer, I took on the challenge of teaching Introduction to Japanese for the first time. It can be an intimidating language for English-speakers, so it was rewarding to lay the foundation with students who had never spoken the language before. My grammar expertise as an English Language Arts teacher served me well as my students got to the point where they could begin constructing their own original sentences. Next summer, I may take on Introduction to French!

I enjoy teaching and tutoring English Language Arts at the high school, college, and adult level. ELA covers a wide umbrella: I teach grammar, writing skills, composition, reading comprehension strategies, rhetoric, literature, and public speaking skills. I teach grammar with a practical approach, centering it around writing and grounding new lessons in students' prior knowledge. I have experience teaching High School English at the honors and remedial level. I had students with IEPs or 504 plans in my classes at every academic level. I pride myself in breaking down difficult texts (Shakespeare! Beowulf! Chaucer! Milton!) so that students find them approachable.

I enjoy being able to work one-on-one with students who benefit from specific strategies and extra instructional time, particularly due to dyslexia and/or ADHD. In my experience, encouragement can make a world of difference when students struggle with a subject, no matter what the reason. Often students who struggle with a learning disability want to do well, and are motivated to do the work when someone listens to them and offers concrete strategies that may help. It can be frustrating and discouraging when students keep trying harder on their own without seeing a result! My job is to make tailored suggestions so they can try things differently instead of just trying harder to no avail.

I teach American Literature, British Literature, World Literature, and Japanese Literature. Additionally, I enjoy teaching and tutoring Humanities classes, especially History, Social Studies, and Cultural Studies.