Hi, my name is Grant Maxson. I graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 2014 with a Bachelor of Science degree in Applied and Computational Math. After graduation, I was recruited as the Robotics Program Developer at the Pasadena Educational Foundation, serving middle schools across Pasadena, California. I moved to eastern Pennsylvania at the end of 2016 to be closer to family.
I was home schooled until 7th grade, and took the opportunity to pursue my math studies at my own pace. By the time I was a high school freshman, I was taking Pre-Calculus with seniors. I studied Differential Equations at a local community college as a junior, and started tutoring college students years older than myself in everything from algebra to calculus.
Even in my early years of high school, my fellow students would often come to me for help in math or science classes. Sometimes, they said, I explained things better than the teacher did. However, I hadn’t officially tutored anyone until my junior year of high school. Then one of my classmates in my Differential Equations class offered to pay me to work with him one-on-one to improve his understanding of the material. That was my first introduction to the concept of tutoring, and I found I had a natural gift for it and loved helping students gain confidence while improving their skills.
Over the years, I’ve worked with many different types of students, ranging in skill from remedial to accelerated. Some I’ve worked with for only a few short minutes, but with others, I’ve come to know them and their learning style over the course of several years. In total, I’ve probably had several thousand hours of tutoring experience with students from almost every educational background and grade level, from 3rd graders to college seniors to adults wanting to learn something new.
I enjoy solving puzzles, building robots, and playing video games. I try to channel my analytical skills when tutoring into helping the student work through a problem in an understandable sequence of steps. If one approach doesn’t work, I try a different one, until I find the one that works best with that particular student.
I tutor because I see a lack of proper learning relationships between teacher and student in today’s educational system. I seek to provide that relationship, which is one I believe every student needs in order to excel. I am a mentor as well as a tutor, and I wish to serve as a bridge for students to cross over into understanding.
