"Hi, I’m Mike. I had an early love of math and computer science, winning a national award in the Westinghouse Science Talent Search in my senior year of high school. I graduated from Caltech and then worked at NASA for 16 years where I fit naturally into the role of teaching the rocket scientists how to program. That’s when I first discovered how passionate I am about teaching! After that I moved on to tutoring math and computer science to students in middle school, high school, and college. I’ve been teaching computer science for ten years and math for five years.

For 10 years I’ve been practicing a form of mindfulness meditation called Vipassana. For 12 years I’ve been studying another method of applying mindfulness to learning called the Feldenkrais Method. These mindfulness practices have given me insight into how we learn, and I apply those insights into my teaching approach.

In fact, you can hack your learning! Here are some techniques I give my students:

- If you push yourself too hard, you’ll block your creativity. Patience and gentle encouragement are key.

- Use both focused concentration and lateral thinking.

- Take regular breaks from studying to refresh your attention and allow unconscious lateral connections to form.

- Understand that confusion and mistakes are integral parts of learning.

- Put your confusion into the form of a question. Don’t worry about answering the question right away.

- Practice recall with flash cards.

In particular, students struggle with types of problems they haven’t seen before. As someone who used to participate in math competitions in high school, I have a lot of experience with this kind of problem solving. Approaching a confusing problem is like being lost at sea. You have to locate yourself and the direction you want to go and navigate toward the solution. I love teaching students this guiding intuition and seeing them understand the “why” of math.

For computer science, I also Haskell and AP Computer Science." less...