My name is Joseph Mitteldorf, and I’m here to help you learn some math (and maybe even learn to like it).
As a Petroleum Engineering student, I discovered something important about myself: I really enjoy teaching math. Each semester, however, I found myself growing increasingly frustrated with my professors who seemed to make math instruction unnecessarily confusing and painful.
Many of my instructors wouldn’t take the time to help struggling students. The available math tutors were often “math-geek” grad students who couldn’t connect with students who didn’t immediately “get it.” Others were undergrads tutoring part-time on work/study who weren’t very good teachers.
Particularly at larger universities, a common complaint is about the TA’s who don’t speak English as their native language. This adds one more layer of frustration for students who are already having difficulty understanding subtle or complex concepts. It’s not the TA’s fault, but students have enough stress in their lives without adding a basic communication problem to the mix.
Now, students are dealing with online classes, professors who don’t teach, and the awful new world of “student, teach yourself.”
Based upon my undergraduate experiences, I decided to become the kind of math teacher I was lucky enough to have only one time in all my years of math education.
I started a tutoring practice which lets me teach, and provides my students with some relief from the awful pain of learning math.