Your student gets a teacher,
not a study buddy
That distinction is the whole reason this works. The research on tutoring is clear that the biggest gains come from tutors who were trained to teach, not from someone who happened to be good at the subject.
Hailey Johnson
Former middle school teacher, founder of Hailey Johnson Tutoring
I taught middle school science, the exact years where math and science both quietly go sideways. I know the Utah curriculum, the pacing guides, and the moment in a unit where half the room silently checks out, because I watched it happen from the front of that room.
I left because of the arithmetic. One teacher cannot stop 29 students to rebuild one kid’s understanding of negative exponents, no matter how badly they want to. In a class that size, the student who needed one more explanation simply does not get it, and nobody in the room is at fault.
Now that is my entire job. One student, one tutor, and enough time to fix the real problem instead of patching the symptom. Cedar City Tutoring is the local home for that work, alongside my practice as Hailey Johnson Tutoring.
My degree is in biology, which is why science comes easily to me. Math I chose on purpose. I am finishing a second bachelor’s in math right now and heading toward a PhD in it, so I can teach at the college level one day.
That matters for your student more than it sounds like it does. I am still sitting in math classes myself, which means I remember exactly what it feels like to be stuck on something everyone else seems to have already understood.
Outside of tutoring I travel as much as the school calendar allows, which is where most of these photos come from.
Classroom trained
Taught middle school science
B.S. Biology
Utah Valley University
Math degree underway
Second bachelor’s, then a PhD in math
Utah curriculum
Knows the Secondary Math sequence
Why a trained teacher makes the difference
A systematic review of 96 randomized studies of PreK-12 tutoring found that tutoring works broadly, but that the effects were strongest when the tutor was a trained teacher rather than a volunteer, a parent, or a peer. For a median student, teacher-delivered tutoring is associated with outscoring about 72% of their classmates, up from half.
That is the entire argument for hiring a former classroom teacher instead of whoever got an A in the class last year. Knowing the material and knowing how to rebuild someone else’s understanding of it are different skills, and the second one is what I trained in.
Source: Nickow, Oreopoulos and Quan, a systematic review and meta-analysis of the experimental evidence on PreK-12 tutoring.
Want to see if I am the right fit?
One short conversation and you will know. I answer every message myself.
Free first conversation, then $30 an hour. Email, text, or call, whichever you actually like doing.