Biography

For about the first twenty years of my life, nearly every adult I knew was a teacher. My own father was an algebra and calculus teacher at a boarding school outside Philadelphia where I grew up, and this community of educators exposed me to a wide variety of academic subjects from an early age. When I was old enough to attend the school myself, I immediately gravitated toward the humanities, especially Latin, Greek, and history.

My love for these ancient languages and civilizations led me to concentrate in Classics during my undergraduate years at Harvard and drove me to continue that education by pursuing a Masters in Roman history at Oxford University and eventually moving to California to earn my PhD in Comparative Literature and Critical Theory at UC Berkeley. My research at Berkeley combined my passions for Latin and history and my dissertation examined how Roman history and Latin literature influenced the ideas that would lead to the birth of history as an academic discipline in Germany in the early 1800s.

During my years in graduate school, I also finally had the chance to see things from the other side of the classroom and quickly developed a passion for teaching and pedagogy. I found opportunities to both lead discussion sections for lecture courses in philosophy and theory and to develop my own curricula and lessons to teach college-level reading and writing to first- and second-year students. My Reading & Composition classes centered on topics ranging from historical fiction to ghost stories and covered texts from a variety of linguistic traditions and across eras, from ancient Rome to Shakespeare and the 21st Century. It was also very important to me that I share my experience with new teachers, so I took on the responsibility of running trainings and pedagogy workshops both within my department and at the university level.

Now that I have completed my time in graduate school, AJ Tutoring has given me the opportunity to continue working with the Bay Area’s wonderful students and help them to get the most out of their education and to be and achieve their best. The shift to one-on-one tutoring comes very naturally to me, as office hours were one of my favorite aspects of graduate teaching. Sitting down with students to talk through their own ideas and to work through their own writing with them was always a great chance to see the readings or the writing process “click” for them. Now, in both SAT prep and academic tutoring, my goal is to help students grow more confident in their thinking and learning – to make things “click” – and thus to enable them to pursue their educations in the fields and schools they want and, just as importantly, to thrive there.

Outside the classroom and the library, I enjoy reading fiction and nonfiction, watching horror movies, tabletop and video games, and exploring the Bay with my wife and exceptionally cute dog, Pretzel.