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11/10/2011

The Story of a Tutor

Posted by John     |     One comment

This guest post is written by a very interesting private tutor from Romania that I met a couple weeks ago during my first #EdChat.  I asked him to share his story and here it is.

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It all started about two and a half years ago, when I was told to leave Oracle. I returned home quite dejected and not knowing what to do, all confounded and lost. Positivity came in the form of my dear wife, who said that now we have a little work to do on my CV.

She pointed out that, after having secured the highest grades in my HS Math career, I never showed off my expertise or my Math knowledge to anybody. She suggested that I start a job as a Math tutor or a freelance Math instructor. I started off by making a brief bio about myself (of course my wife helped me again) and then I distributed these fliers in the various International schools in Bucharest and passed them to all my expat contacts.

Later on, I received an innocuous letter stating that a family was looking for a Math tutor. I went to meet the parents and soon started a  class once a week.  And thus I began a career which was totally unforeseen but also untapped — and one which I was destined to be pioneer in this part of the world.

Today I coach 27 individual students.  The grades range from the third till the twelfth grade and I am always striving to give the best to them. They work in tandem with me and do all the homework and the tests that I assign them.

I work every day of the week, generally around 50 hours weekly, but here I would like to quote the great Chinese philosopher Confucius: “If you love what you are doing, you will never work for the rest of your life.”

Long Live Math!  I am loving it.

 

About the author: Vijay Krishnan is an independent mathematics, physics, and chemistry tutor based in Bucharest, Romania.  You can follow him on Twitter orcheck out his tutoring website if you want to find out more.

09/12/2011

New Flashcards By the Week!

Posted by John     |     2 comments

You probably don’t know this unless you keep a pretty sharp eye on our library page, but TestSoup comes out with new flashcard content every single week.  Sometimes we’ll revise or update an existing set (like we did just recently with the GRE), but often that means churning out brand-spanking-new flashcard sets available online, in the iOS App Store, and the Android Market.

Usually we send out an email to everyone on our mailing list announcing all the new content, but that really only helps people on our mailing list, now doesn’t it?  So I thought that it might be nice to write a short post about the three new flashcard sets we put out just last week.

  • First of all, there’s the Quincy Tutoring Grades 1-6 Math Vocabulary cards — all 736 of ‘em!  This is the set that we’re most excited about from last week (in fact, we even put out a press release about them!).  It represents the beginning of what we hope will be a very fruitful partnership between TestSoup and Quincy Tutoring of Boston, MA.  These cards are custom designed by the lead tutor at QT — a great guy named Eric Clark who has written a couple quality guest blog posts for us in the past.
  • We also came out with a free set of flashcards stuffed with facts about John Adams, the second President of the United States and key member of the founding fathers club.  If you don’t know much about him, be sure to check them out.
  • Finally, we put out another set of cards with information on the American Civil War.  This isn’t our first set of flashcards of this kind, which should go to show you how important we think this issue is.  Our country is facing divisive political forces almost daily, and they say that those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  Let’s hope not.  Go ahead and download our new Civil War flashcards today.

That’s it for this week.  Hopefully you saw something you liked.  And if not, just remember that we’re cranking out new content all the time.  Who knows — next Monday you might see something that really grabs you by the horns.

Oh, and one final thing: if you’re a teacher and you’re in the market for $150,000 of free edtech resources for your classroom and your students, head on over to the Back to School Giveaway.  It’s a (free) contest that we’re co-sponsoring with some other great edtech companies.  We would love for you to win.

Not a teacher?  That’s okay.  Feel free to spread the word!