math-tutor

I tutor in Mathematics at the collegiate level (Calculus and above). No, I won't be posting advertising to this site. I might share a few snapshots.

My profile picture is in the public domain. I found it on Wikipedia.




Things I should mention ...

1. I am an adult (over 18). I'm not going to be friending people under the age of 18 (at least, not knowingly) because that would look wrong. Google "appearance of impropriety" if you are unclear on the concept.

If any teens on this site should feel slighted by this, that's not my intention, but I would ask them to ask themselves this - would they hang out on a playground? The same principle applies in this case.

2. While I'll be posting to a number of vegan and vegetarian groups, I, myself, am not a vegan or a vegetarian. If you follow me, you'll be seeing recipes for meat.

3. I'm not very interested in connecting with people online, in any sense. I'll be posting content to share with people I've met offline. If you enjoy looking at that content, that's fine, but really, my intended audience is a small group of people who you'll probably never meet, even if you are in Chicago.

4. While I don't support political correctness, on the whole, the causes I tend to support are usually ones that most people consider to be liberal ones (peace, the environment, death penalty abolitionism, gay rights, etc) and I'm not a huge fan of corporations or unregulated capitalism. I am, on the other hand, very much a supporter of small business, so there should be something there to annoy almost any activist alive. I neither celebrate nor apologize for this fact. I simply state it outright, so that those who will be distressed by it will know to stay away from my pages.

5. Yes, I've really been to graduate school. No, I'm not going to apologize to anybody for that fact. Amazingly, I've found that some people expect me to do just that, and given just how much work I put into earning (yes, earning) my education, I find that really annoys me a lot.

My patience with postmodernism and most of the other brands of anti-elitism ran out quickly, a while ago. I'm probably not going to look down on somebody for not having been to school, and if he's trying to expand his knowledge, I'll probably be there, encouraging him. If he wants to learn more about one of my subjects, I might even put together a reading list for him. But the 21st century notion that knowledge is supposed to be "democratic" and that all points of view on all subjects are inherently of equal value (because the truth is nothing more than a social construct) is one of the many forms of folly that I won't suffer gladly. I might (in fact, probably will) ignore somebody who writes to me about such nonsense, but I won't be tactful with him, either online or off.

6. No, I am not going to give you free tutoring online. That's my livelihood, and the livelihood of a number of other people coping with the realities of a job market in which nobody seems to care what you did in class, and everybody cares about who you were getting drunk with on campus - which in my case is nobody, because I never got drunk and never joined a frat, having the strange idea that I was supposed to be at school to study.

The Human Resources offices for a number of companies apparently disagree.

7. I am, however, available for tutoring offline at rates kept more reasonable than the market would demand, in a practice known as "working on a sliding scale" - I give other poor people a break on the rates. As DeviantArt would probably rather not have me use this space to advertise paid services, I will say that I can be contacted through the Math Department at DePaul University in Chicago, which maintains a tutor list.

8. I'm not going to be tactful with people on the Far Right who will get angry about the "socialism" that goes into giving poor people a discount. I will think about money, because I have bills to pay, but money isn't all that I'm going to think about. If it was, I'd probably have gone for an MBA - and then wondered why life seemed so empty for me.

"Practicality" is not a synonym for "greed" - there is such a thing as having enough stuff, as far as I am concerned. At my sub-poverty income level, I'm not there, but I am eating regularly (if not very luxuriously), I do get out for a little entertainment, and so I feel I can manage a little bit of charity.