Personal Description:

My name is Willem and I am currently studying Engineering at UBC. I was born in America but I have lived more than ten years in Japan. I have grown up in a very international community and am comfortable in those environments.

Tutoring Experience:

Throughout high school I would help my peers out with school work and realized that I loved teaching. I have worked part time at a Japanese preschool for over a span of three years, giving me more experience working with children. Before going to University I took a gap year and travelled to the tiny island of Yap to teach and help out at a school there. I was a teacher's assistant for fifth and sixth grade, taught math to 3rd-8th grade, wrote curriculum for and taught a science class for each grade from 1st grade to 10th grade. I also taught a weekly history lesson to grades 1 to 10.

Tutoring Approach:

I firmly believe that students aren't born geniuses, they just need to want it and work to get it. My goal is to help any student out on their path to understanding topics. In the teaching I have done I have found that sometimes the way topics are explained in class don't make sense to everybody, so I strive to come up with new and different ways to explain topics that will work for each specific student. I think these fresh approaches keep students from hating a topic which makes learning it that much harder, and not very fun.