Current tutors
This is a list of students who are interested in tutoring:
- Daniel Varivoda <danikvar@gmail.com>
- Jam Kabeer Ali Khan <khan.jam@northeastern.edu>
- Jacob Kline <kline.ja@northeastern.edu>
- Ben Meyer <meyer.be@northeastern.edu>
- Michael Lembck <lembck.m@northeastern.edu>
About tutoring
Tutors are students in the class who are interested in tutoring other students. To be clear, this is not a formal role in any way: it is not done by the department or the university, there’s no paperwork, and no payments — it’s just students who are taking the class now. (An alternative way to view this is as a “learning partner”.)
The benefits actually go in both directions:
- If you need a tutor, then of course you benefit from someone spending time with you to go over the material. But bear in mind that the tutor is a student just like you, so you’ll actually both be learing.
- If you feel like you need to find a better way to learn the material, then tutoring someone is a perfect way to do so. You will find that going over the material and explaining it to someone else will make you understand it much better.
- And just to make the “learning partner” point stronger: it is perfectly fine if you want to make this a more of a partnership, and alternate the person who’s doing the tutoring.
Free tutoring?? — What’s the catch?
This is not a formal thing, and see the above: both side benefit from doing this, hence there’s no need for this to be anything more than that. If you really want to be nice, order a pizza for your tutor. And again, it makes perfect sense if you’ll want to swap roles from time to time.
Should I tutor? — What do I get?
Again, this is not a formal thing, there’s no payments or whatever. What you do get is a serious boost to your performance in the class. Tutoring someone is by far the best way to do much better in the class.
(Side note: this was initiated by students in the past. I can add that when I asked people who got to do some tutoring, they all said that they did much better.)
What can we do? — Is it OK to go over homework?
This is not intended for help with homework! For that, you have the course staff on one side, and your homework partner on the other side. It is rather intended for help with the class material in general. For example, discussing ideas for a PLQ suggestion could be nice since this goes in-line with learning the class material better.
Can I tutor? — How do I get listed?
In almost all cases the answer is “yes, of course you can be a tutor”. If you’re not sure about it, consider the fact that once you start doing it, you will go over the class material with intention to teach it, which will make you understand it much better than when you first saw it. And since this is not a formal thing, then there’s no formal commitment and if it turns out that it’s too much for you it’s fine to ask to be removed. The only thing that you do commit to is an interest in tutoring and willingness to allocate time for it.
If all of this makes sense, and you want to be listed, email me and I will add you to the list.