About – Jay Van Raalte Tutoring

Hi! I’m Jay. I started teaching in elementary school, where multi-grade Montessori classrooms encouraged me to help my classmates while learning myself. I started freelance tutoring in high school and continued to do so while studying math and geology at the College of Charleston. Now that I’ve graduated, I’m excited to reach even more students.

I don’t believe that math is some specialized universe that the vast majority of people will never be allowed access to. It’s a language just like any other: the language of quantities, of relationships, and most of all, problem solving. The same skills of abstraction, pattern-spotting, and creativity that are so integral to critical thinking in general are the exact same skills required to become conversant in the language of math. From this perspective, math becomes not an esoteric collection of when-will-I-ever-use-this-in-the-real-world formulas but rather a natural extension of our existing ability to describe, analyze, and understand the world around us.

Credentials:

10+ years tutoring experience
B.S. in Mathematics (Pure Math) / Minor in Geology from the College of Charleston
Recipient of the Ewa Wojcicka Award
National Merit Scholar
Member of Phi Kappa Phi, Sigma Gamma Epsilon, and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

In 2021, I coauthored the paper “The Tyrant Lizard King, Queen and Emperor: Multiple Lines of Morphological and Stratigraphic Evidence Support Subtle Evolution and Probable Speciation Within the North American Genus Tyrannosaurus” with Gregory S. Paul and W. Scott Persons IV, which was published in Evolutionary Biology. The paper posits that the the current designation “T.rex” should really be broken into 3 separate species: T.rex, T. regina, and T.imperator. I did all the statistical analysis for the paper, which was both fun and challenging. It caused quite a stir in the scientific community! Read more about it here: https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/944606

What I Teach: elementary through grad school Math (course-based and enrichment / exploration), Writing, Study Skills, Test Prep. Select other courses available upon request.