Harry F.
Private tutor in Vancouver, Canada
Education
PhD and MSc in Pure & Applied Chemistry, Fellow of The Higher Education Academy, Associate Member of The Royal Society of Chemistry.
Experience
Over two years of post-secondary teaching experience for all levels of university students (first year up to and including Masters level). I believe that I meet all of the essential criteria to offer highly effective tutoring, specializing in advanced chemistry with extensive knowledge in biology and mathematics. I have over two years of post-secondary teaching experience, a PhD in Pure & Applied Chemistry and international post-doctoral experience in organic chemistry, chemical engineering and biology. I was born, raised and educated in Glasgow, Scotland, UK with working experience in MIT, USA and Novartis, Switzerland and I am now resident in Vancouver, BC. My relevant experiences include completely designing two chemistry modules, experiments and continuous examinations for foundation-level international students from high school level up to and including PhD level in a very intense student-first quality-focused environment. Teaching my international students has been thoroughly enjoyable and I have received excellent feedback from the Quality Assurance Agency during their annual audit of our staff and study centre. I have extensive experience acting as an Academic Tutor to ensure that students have the appropriate study skills. Additionally, as Head of Organic Undergraduate Labs for 2nd and 3rd year students, I have completely reviewed and updated the courses with the redesign of 9 experiments and the introduction of 5 new experiments. I have also successfully gained a fellowship from the prestigious Higher Education Academy following panel review of a 4000 word reflective essay on my pedagogical approach to teaching. In order to keep up to date with modern chemistry, I have gained membership of the Royal Society of Chemistry. Throughout both my research and education career I have always taken the opportunity to strengthen my communication skills to various audiences through presentations, lectures, tutorials and learning support sessions with individual students. Pastoral support to students has played a vital role in my teaching positions and I am fully trained to work with students from various backgrounds and/or students with particular/special needs. I believe that good teachers view themselves as ‘learning facilitators’ with the ultimate aim of engaging students to enhance their learning skills. I draw on my relatively recent experiences as a student and constantly self-evaluate how I effective I am being as their teacher through their eyes. My pedagogical research for obtaining my Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy has allowed me to further enhance my learning-facilitator duties to allow students to excel in their classroom and exam performance. In the classroom each morning, I direct students to information sources and encourage them to draw their own individual conclusions rather than directly dispense information to them. My role in group discussions is facilitator as opposed to being ‘all-knowing’; often this can involve role-reversal where I ask students to teach me what they know. Cooperative learning is one of the key tools I use to teach classroom students e.g. my Chemistry 1 module involves group discussions on what determines the strength of an acid or base and in addition to this, individual students are encouraged to construct and reconstruct their own ideas. Similar strategies have been adopted for all of my modules during the past 21 months. In the lab position, confidence-building strategies have been increasingly incorporated e.g. since the second lab block of the academic year (weeks 4-6), I have asked 3rd year students to support 2nd year students wherever possible during their three week period and even to present and explain their reactions to 2nd year students. My classroom students learned in a modern classroom equipped with overhead projector, visualizer, PC and large whiteboards, which I fully utilize each lesson. All classroom students were given a module descriptor booklet that I developed, at the outset of the course. This booklet details every form of support I will offer from individual tutorial support and pastoral support to Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) support, including worksheet examples, revision exercises, past exam questions, useful video links to explain chemical concepts and quizzes. I also provide students with information on how I run each class, tips on self-directed study and marking criteria. In the lab, students are actively supported throughout each practical activity. I operate an ‘open-door’ policy in both positions. I have included far more ‘student support’-related information than required by the organisation in our module descriptor i.e. tailored to the needs of the class. Each class nominates a student representative to sit on the quarterly Student Staff Liaison Committee and monthly Quality Assurance and Enhancement Group, both of which I also attend to keep informed. I also meet with the student representatives every week throughout each term to obtain feedback on all forms of student support I offer.
Subject Expertise
Differential Equations10th Grade math11th Grade math12th Grade mathAlgebra 1Algebra 2Algebra 3/4Calculus 1Calculus 2Calculus 3ChemistryCLEP ChemistryElementary AlgebraSAT Subject Test in Mathematics Level 2IB Chemistry HLIB Chemistry SLOrganic ChemistryPCAT ChemistryIB Mathematics HLIB Mathematics SLNuclear ChemistryPre-AlgebraTrigonometryPre-CalculusSAT Subject Test in ChemistrySAT Subject Test in Mathematics Level 1
Availability
Any day at any time
Can Meet
Up to 45 minutes away for no additional charge
Hobbies
Hobbies include hiking, camping, swimming and writing. I strongly believe it is important to nurture creativity when studying scientific language and I will often visit shows by performance artists and musicians. I am also very fond of cooking and the combination of creativity, good old-fashioned common sense and methodology that it involves. I am also especially fond of animals, visiting zoos and aquariums as I find it fascinating how humans fit in to the natural world. I also tend to hang out with friends who are very different from me but still leading the charge in their field; many of my friends are accomplished musicians, artists and photographers in addition to my many scientific friends.
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