Laura M.

female

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Personal Statement

In my twenty years of teaching English, I enjoyed teaching and subbing at all grade levels from my seventh grade classes to my senior honors course. Working at a variety of grade levels, I learned the pleasure of working with the child who required just a few minutes of extra help and also the child that met me regularly for tutoring. During study halls of before and after school, I worled with students to help them better understand and progress with their work. After testing, I also worked with students requiring more extensive coaching, training, and time. I found ways to speak and listen to these children, and together, we developed plans for accomplishing work that sometimes stymied them after class instruction. In most every case, after hard work on each side, both student and I were able to "catch up" and even feel prepared, ready, and hopeful about the next year's course of study. Brining these skills with me to my tutoring business, I've learned so much more from working with different schools, different teachers, different students, and different styles in each educational area and age group. I've now worked with seven year olds, seventy year olds, and graduate students, while reinforcing my focus on the adolescent brain. I now work with students from JBS, MICDS, Thomas Jefferson, Ladue, Clayton, and so on. I feel confident and have enjoyed great success working with bright, talented high schoolers suffering with the distractions of anxiety and a variety of ADHD diagnoses. I've love helping my student with these issues additionally complicated by a diagnosis that falls within the autism spectrum scale. And I find my own interest in "mild autism" and Asperger's a help to me in working with children with diagnoses of this kind. Studying ways to communicate "lessons" to struggling children through the neuropsychological pathways of reading, writing, talking, and creative organizing has fascinated me in my tutoring work. Sometimes I now struggle to find time to read and reread Frankenstein, Of Mice and Men, 1984, The Scarlet Letter, Shakespeare, or Civil Disobedience with my students, as my fascination for reading about the brain and ways to access pathways to help children learn intrigues me. In graduate studies, with the help of my counselor-friends and refer-ers, and following suggestions from other educators, I vow to continue to enjoy my ongoing education and learning as I reinforce and add to my knowledge and skills, practices, and very best ways in which to help your child.

Saint Louis, MO 63105