Tutoring

I offer private tutoring for students from middle school through college. Although my primary tutoring specialty is writing — particularly the academic essay — I am also highly skilled as a tutor in all humanities subjects, as well as in math. I also offer SAT prep.

Recently I have served as a private tutor/teacher for a middle schooler in a quasi-homeschool context. In this capacity, I have devised and implemented a curriculum for seventh and eighth grade English, math (pre-algebra and algebra), history (U.S. history), science, and world religions. My student has excelled during his time working with me, and he was recently accepted to attend an elite private high school in the DFW area starting next fall.

I bring to the tutoring enterprise many years of experience working with undergraduates both in literature courses and in individual tutoring sessions at the University of Dallas’s Writing Center. Thus, I am acutely aware of the academic skills necessary for success in a college classroom, and I have the pedagogical expertise to help students at all levels successfully hone these skills.

Although I am perfectly willing to advise students regarding particular class assignments, I also approach tutoring as a wide-ranging teaching opportunity, and thus, at least in the context of writing, I typically employ various exercises and assignments of my own devising that guide students in a step-by-step manner to the goal of becoming more proficient, persuasive, and passionate writers.

My approach to teaching the art of the academic essay takes as its point of departure the classical canons of rhetoric. Most important of all, invention is the art of intuiting and thinking through a particular thesis, a distinct argument about a topic, a certain slant of thought that can be shared with others so as to enlighten and enliven. I follow the likes of Ernesto Grassi in construing invention as an inherently poetic capacity. Sensing the gist of an argumentative perspective and elucidating it with subtlety and depth requires not only logical discipline, a hard labor of thought, but also an imaginative leap—the intuiting of some spark of insight, lived truth, or new possibility that draws the mind onward into a process of contemplation and discovery. Writing well is thus an art of both logical rigor and imaginative sensitivity, and I aim to help students develop these capacities through exercises that foster both close reading and careful writing.

I enjoy helping students in the thick of the school year when they are facing innumerable challenges, as well as during the summer when they are often trying to bolster various skill levels, prepare for the SAT, or take summer-school courses.

I prefer to conduct my tutoring sessions in person, and they are therefore typically limited to the DFW area. However, in some instances I am open to “distance tutoring” via email, phone, and other modalities.

For more information, please feel free to contact me at profnowlin@gmail.com.