ACT Prep From An ACT Ace (Perfect 36): Learn the skills to beat standardized tests from a friendly and experienced instructor!

Find out more about Davis

• 1) When did you develop an interest in your chosen field and in private tutoring?

  I first became interested in private tutoring during my last year of undergraduate studies in 2012, when I took a part-time position as an engineering tutor for my university’s athletics department. What started as a side gig to earn some spending money quickly evolved into a lifelong passion, and I’ve been involved with one form of STEM education or another ever since.
  
  As for my chosen field, I’ve been fascinated by robots ever since my first Power Rangers episode back in 1992 or so. They don’t exactly sell giant monster busting mechas at the local Best Buy, though, so I decided to become a robotics engineer to hurry the process along a bit.

• 2) Tell us more about the subject you teach, the topics you like to discuss with students (and possibly those you like a little less).

  The most common subject that I teach is standardized test preparation, particularly the ACT exam, and within that subject the most important idea that I aim to communicate to my students is this:
  
  “Being a good test-taker is not a talent; it is a* skill.*”
  
  Some students are indeed naturally better than others at scoring well on exams while doing no more preparation than their peers. However, this isn’t because they have some extra lobe in their brain for filling out Scantrons; there are no Exam Faeries whispering answers into their ears. The people who naturally perform better on tests simply managed to teach *themselves* the right skills, either naturally or through special instruction.
  
  This is good news! Rhythm, for example, is a talent - you have it or you don’t, as the Gorillaz would say. Skills, on the other hand, can be learned. Literally anyone has the ability to excel at tests of all kinds: all you need is the willingness to practice some new skills, which you clearly already have since you’re here on Superprof, and somebody to teach those skills to you. That last part is my job, and I’d love nothing more than to do it for you!

• 3) Did you have any role models; a teacher that inspired you?

  Mr. Periman, my 7th-grade science teacher, really helped kickstart my love of the sciences by using hands-on demonstrations and emphasizing how science is all around us in the real world. One notable example: he kicked off our biology unit by bringing in a fresh deer carcass that he had hunted and dissecting it in the middle of the classroom to show us how different organ systems fit together in mammals.

• 4) What do you think are the qualities required to be a good tutor?

  Patience, empathy, and adaptability. Many students who require tutoring struggle with the classroom setting and the conventional ways in which subjects are taught. By listening to my students and ferreting out the obstacles that they are facing, I’m better able to help them grasp the meaning behind the content. This both improves their performance and makes the learning process itself more rewarding.

• 5) Provide a valuable anecdote related to your subject or your days at school.

  As a tutor in the athletics department at the University of Wyoming I was assigned a student who was a senior on their third attempt at Remedial Algebra. If they failed a third time then they would be unable to graduate and would need to drop out of their degree program, so the stakes were very high.
  
  After two sessions of working together I noticed that they really struggled with the concept of negative numbers. They explained to me that their high school education had not been good, and so they’d never really understood how negative and positive numbers could be used and combined.
  
  Since the conventional number line method didn’t seem to help them understand, I told them to think of positive and negative numbers as “hills and holes” - zero was ground height, positive values were the heights of piles of dirt, and negative numbers were the depths of holes dug into the ground. We practiced drawing holes in the ground and various ways of “moving dirt around” (i.e. combining positive and negative numbers together), and after just a few examples I watched the pieces all fall into place in their mind.
  
  That student breezed through the rest of the semester and graduated the following spring. This remains one of the proudest moments of my career as an educator, and a constant reminder that struggling in a subject is rarely due to aptitude but rather is most often a result of obstacles that outsiders cannot see.

• 6) Do you have a particular passion? Is it teaching in general or an element of the subject or something completely different?

  I have too many passions to count, to be totally honest. Teaching ranks very highly among them; others include 3D printing, reading, cosplay, combat robotics (i.e. building miniature BattleBots), science fiction, and advocating for accessibility.

• 7) What were the difficulties or challenges you faced or are still facing in your subject?

  The challenges I face professionally are less to do with subject matter and more to do with logistics. I developed a debilitating chronic illness (post-treatment Lyme disease) in early 2022 that completely upended my life; I could no longer work a full-time job or even leave the house for over two years, and my energy and clearheadedness frequently changed without warning from day to day (or even hour to hour). I had to completely change both how I live my life and how I make my living in real time while struggling with a brutal illness.
  
  
  Fortunately, thanks to an experimental treatment plan and multiple years of dedicated effort I have successfully restructured my life and built a successful engineering business and tutoring service from the ground up. My health remains a challenge, though, and I am also the sole caretaker for a family member who lives with me that is even more heavily debilitated.

• 8) What makes you a Superprof?

  There is nothing I’ve yet experienced that is as rewarding as watching the moment when the lightbulb switches on in a student’s eyes as something they’ve been struggling with becomes clear to them. It’s a priceless little nugget of revelation and I can never get enough of it!