"I am a Mechanical Engineering student at UCF/Valencia College, and I am in my second year. I have an IB (International Baccalaureate) Diploma from Winter Park High School and I have taken and passed every math course up until Ordinary Differential Equations with an A thus far.

In high school, I took great pleasure in my IB math courses (which were the equivalent of precalculus and Calculus 1). Later on in college I went on to complete Calc 2, 3, Physics 1 and 2 with calculus, and Ordinary Differential Equations, all some of my absolute favorite courses in college.

But while I excelled at these courses for the most part, I cannot pretend that I managed to fly through everything without difficulty and without hard work. Learning new math concepts takes a lot of work, and it took me a great deal of practice over the years to develop the best strategy both for my own learning and in assisting my peers and family who needed my help understanding concepts.

Mathematics is a skill that a person trains over time, through repetition and many, many practice problems. The objective, correct, ubiquitously agreed upon way to improve at math, irrespective of one's skill level, is to do repeated practice problems and learn how to solve different *types* of problems with different methodologies. When I have tutored fellow students in high school in the past, I have always, without fail, succeeded in starting with a review of the concept, and then following that with multiple practice problems in which I guide the student to the correct answer by letting them figure out the correct methodology through logical means.

Therein lies the essence of teaching mathematics. As a tutor, my goal is not to simply help a person do their math homework. My goal is instead to help guide the student help *themselves* to figure out on their own how to do different problems correctly. Ultimately, practice makes perfect and the more the student practices, the better they will understand the content." less...