PrepNow Tutor - Sakeen S.
Sakeen’s career so far has been equal parts engineering and teaching. He holds a BS in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, and he plans to pursue graduate work in the field. As he managed his own studies, he also began to help others do the same. Indeed, he has years of experience as a reading and math tutor, working with math students in the areas of arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, and geometry. In addition, he has worked as Lead Coding Instructor at the CodingSchool, an organization dedicated to helping students understand and incorporate learning technologies and programming in responsible ways.
Sakeen says that his teaching philosophy can be distilled into one statement: “A teacher is one who makes himself progressively unnecessary." He means by this that he sees his job as pushing students to develop ways to become independent, confident learners. First, he begins with Socratic questioning, prompting students to come to their own questions and answers. Next, to help guide students, Sakeen relies on analogies and concrete examples, in order to make abstractions as “real” as possible for students. Then, he asks students to embrace uncertainty as a means to find more certainty. He explains, “Learning requires slowing down, probing, and being willing to sit in a state of confusion for a moment rather than rushing past it. When something clicks because the student reasoned their way there, it sticks.”
Given his interest and training in computer engineering, Sakeen enjoys anything that sits at the intersection of technology and creativity. As such, it is not surprising that he enjoys creating online content. In fact, one of his primary hobbies is editing sports videos and posting them on social media; and his content has become popular enough to gain tens of thousands of followers. He also enjoys others’ contributions to the creative use of technologies, as he is a cinema and anime buff. All this said, Sakeen enjoys being active, too, and one might find him on any off day kicking a soccer ball to teammates on the pitch.
|