Spanish with Clarence M.

I'm a scientist, farmer, traveler, writer and (most importantly) student. I'm deeply passionate about learning and hope to continue to do so throughout my life. I love to share the knowledge and perceptions I discover with others and have been told that I am skilled at simply and clearly conveying complex concepts. I have a bachelor's of science focused on environmental microbiology and ecology but have also studied history and writing at the collegiate level. I'm fluent in Spanish having spent about a year in Latin America (as well as attending a bilingual elementary school in New York City) and am comfortable teaching basic grammar and conversational Spanish. As a teacher I strive to not only bring understanding and competency to the subject at hand but to inspire enthusiasm. One of the ways in which I do this is through applying the subject matter to the world around us by making connections, deductions and inferences with that knowledge. Lots of material is presented in a dry and abstract manner in school, especially in the sciences. If it remains in that detached form it will forever be a burden, a chore to be completed and shortly forgotten. But if you can take that seemingly irrelevant material and start to recognize and explain the crazy micro-phenomena that compose our existence there is a chance you might actually retain something five years from now. I also try to promote a better understanding of the ways in which we acquire knowledge. Our generally rigid, hierarchical system of education can disempower and bore even the most curious people. We tend to slowly transition from inventive, experimenting, philosophizing children into dutiful and compliant "students". We are fed "facts" and primarily asked to regurgitate them rather than to draw correlations, inferences and predictions from what we experience. If you remain in academia you will realize (possibly well into college) that to gain new knowledge and succeed in your field you actually must find information that is not yet a fact. I attempt to describe some of the methods for obtaining new information for each subject I teach and push students to assertively seek out knowledge. I also teach my students to verify information through multiple sources, fact check, weigh potential biases and evaluate causality, especially with regards to information obtained through the internet. If any portion this long-winded monologue remotely resonates with you, please contact TakeLessons. I would love to tutor you!