Duer M.

specializes in Patient Tutor: ESL, Mandarin, Elementary, Spec. Educ., Gen. Curr. · male

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Personal Statement

My Education Methods, Skills and Philosophy My strengths: clear pronunciation, sufficiently audible speech, patience, respectful demeanor toward all students, teachers, administrators. Effectively read aloud, possess clear handwriting, write clear, specific, effective comments on students’ academic work. Seek and thoroughly answer students' questions. I assist each student by offering extended teaching and practice time to ensure retained learning. Offer protracted patience, ceaseless encouragement, repetition—according to each student’s needs—of any not yet grasped academic, social, moral idea or aspect. I provide each student time to adjust to his/her new study area. My personality traits are: positivity, optimism, empathy, benevolence. These traits help me in daily conversations and academic and social interactions with students, administration and staff. I am humble about self-recognizing a mistake I make and/or with regard to accepting correction from another person. I believe laughter is the best medicine; I have a good sense of humor. Some recent accomplishments are attaining appointment to Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Recommended List of Excellent English Teachers (I’m fluent in Mandarin) to Native Mandarin Speakers; 2 Massachusetts Department of Education Academic Educator Licenses: Elementary, Grades 1-6; Special Education: Moderate Disabilities, Grades Pre-K—8. These latter two licenses include proficient attainment of the MTEL (Massachusetts Test for Educator Licensure) named Foundations of Reading, which requires knowledge of teaching and evaluating reading skills among Pre-K—8th grades students. I have been achieving success teaching English (speaking, listening, reading, writing) to Chinese people of all backgrounds, nationalities and ages. I have studied Mandarin for 7 years and have been utilizing it in speech, listening, reading and writing for over 15 years. I am gratified providing translation of essays, transcripts, and conversation interpreting. I write artistically promotional evaluations of a folk-rock band. Music provides increased phonological awareness and vocabulary learning via hearing-singing-encoding (identifying and learning) rhyme-sound equivalent words and close-rhyme words; rhythm; enjoying the sharing of singing in unison as in choral singing; making friends when taking turns harmonizing with each other’s vocal passage. I thus happily bring music into the classroom to offer and share all these refined, educational, musical aspects with students by means of performing-teaching children’s songs with students singing along while I play guitar and unison sing with the student group. These three accomplishments highlight my diversity of thinking, interesting other people’s hobbies, and multiculturalism increase my helpfulness toward others. My musical compositions share meaningful thoughts, ideas, humor, insights with other people. I have abundant knowledge of General Curriculum, English, Mandarin, social behavior and psychology gained through academic learning and enhanced by continuously reading past and current written works on many subjects. Studying Mandarin has improved my English: I utilize the following Mandarin sentence pattern S.T.P.V.-O. = Subject, Time, Place, Verb-Object; adverbs precede verbs; “I think” followed by assertion/negation, i.e. “I think her sadness will begin to be ameliorated soon after she resumes respectively spending equal time with her Mom and Dad.” My sense of meaningful English word usage is broadened by Mandarin’s abundance of characters; their often multiple meanings; conciseness of Chinese proverbs’ meanings; Mandarin’s mainstream non-use of articles. I am tenacious; my employer can rely on me to maintain focus and complete my assigned projects. I give adequate consideration to matters: think, decide, act [contemplate action’s result(s)], accordingly modify decision in order to arrive at, or evolve to, the best choice. My six years teaching in the Boston Public Schools have given me insights about a diverse range of student abilities, achievement efforts, motivational methods, multicultural appreciation for differences among and between people and various opportunities to engage and teach students with varying special education needs. I, furthermore, fortunately received excellent private school education at elementary, middle, and high levels. At age 9 with my family I experienced 5 weeks of cultural study in 9 European countries. I was immersed in an enlightened learning environment of world-class museums and major cities with challenging histories featuring highly developed cultures bringing me profound appreciation of both the U.S.A. as a western cultural product and my home classroom textbooks’ voluminous contents, photos, graphics and graphs. Each Center for International Studies and the Liberal Arts paper assignment required me to analyze, synthesize, and form a massive coherent thesis while answering: 1. What are the origins of modern global society? 2. What can we gain from a dialogue with the past? 3. What are some future spiritual and material challenges? We focus on modern global society’s past, present and future. This knowledge helps me to be a well-versed teacher not only to students of Reading, General Curriculum, Mandarin and English, and homework focus, but also to Special Education students having mild to moderate needs. My special qualities of consistent willingness toward seeking to understand others, focus on details, helpfulness in attitude and action whenever a need arises, and sense of humor are manifested in all settings. In the past these qualities have helped me be successful as a team member offering medical treatment. I always ensure that my students have necessary nutrition, and provide secure and safe supervision of students in classrooms, hallways, dining and athletic areas and upon public transportation.

Boston, MA 02125