Raphael

Hello - you should hire me.

Some prosaic information about me: I am from London; I was born and raised here and I have lived here for the vast majority of my life. I attended New End Primary School and University College School, and then Magdalene College, Cambridge, where I read History. As well as tutoring and teaching, I have worked as an actor, writer, and comedian (though, since the coronavirus lockdowns, I have not returned to that sort of thing (yet)) and as an editor and proofreader. I am also a keen musician and received Grade 8 distinction on the cello towards the end of my school days. My Myers-Briggs personality type is INTJ, bordering on INFJ. Is that important information? I don't know. Regardless, the overall point is evident:

You should hire me.

Tutoring Experience

2016-2018: Private tutor in London with Blue Tutors – predominantly one-to-one tuition in History and English at GCSE and Key Stage 3 levels.

2016-2020: Private tutor in and around London with Akademeia Warszawa – predominantly one-to-one tuition, from Key Stage 3 up to undergraduate levels. Subjects range from Politics, History, International Relations, Economics and English (Literature and as a Second Language). Worked closely with an adolescent with chronic low self-esteem, anxiety and depression, from age fifteen to eighteen. Specialised in preparation of students for Oxbridge entrance, including mock interviews.

2020-2021: History teacher in Warsaw, Poland with Akademeia Warszawa – mainly one-to-one teaching of A-Level students but also a large class of eleven- and twelve-year-olds. Included experience of working with children with attention-deficit disorders and Asperger’s syndrome. Responsibilities were pastoral as well as the usual for a teacher – preparing and giving classes, setting and marking homework, arranging students’ internal and external exams, maintaining organisation and discipline within and outside the classroom. Many students required rapid catch-up before exams, which I arranged and delivered. One student, for example, needed to be taught the entire History A-Level syllabus in one year flat rather than the usual two - she received an A* grade.

2024-2025: Private tutor in London with Blue Tutors in Politics A-Level.

Tutoring Approach

It is difficult to describe what 'my teaching approach' is... I try to do as good a job as I can.

Though I do a lot of talking, it seems to me that the most important thing I do as a teacher is listen to the student. It is imperative to understand what place a particular student is at before seriously trying to improve things for them: The only step a student can ever take is the one that's, for them, the next one. For one student, that might be better retention of information; for another, it might be more freely putting their own impressions and beliefs into language; for another, it might be beginning to care at all about the subject at hand. Students are all human beings and have to be met as human beings before proper teaching can occur; barking historical dates at someone (say, if you're teaching history) achieves nothing. So, this is probably the first thing I would point to concerning my 'teaching approach': I understand I am dealing with people, not interchangeable units in need of pieces of paper declaring them to be 'qualified' for this or that, and this fact underpins everything else that I do.

In practical and more banal terms, what I do in a lesson is, well, present the student with the material of the day (say, today we're doing the Exclusion Crisis) and, once the facts are established, we talk about its meaning. I guide the discussion as well as participating in it, and then once the meaning of it is clear we make notes and perhaps the student is given an exercise to do off the back of what we've looked at. Not every class goes exactly this way, of course, but it's a broad outline.

I have taught many subjects, as is obvious from my 'Experience' section; History, however, is where I am strongest, it having been my degree subject. What I find especially good about History - though this is also true of a few other subjects - is that it gives me as a teacher both the challenge and the opportunity of bringing the material alive for a student. When teaching English Literature, in contrast, all the poetry is already in the material - the play, the novel, or (well, it's obvious enough in this case) the poem. But when teaching History, what one has is a set of facts and events, and teasing out the meaning of them is the point of the lesson. History being human nature writ large, there comes to be an opportunity to enrich the student's understanding of life itself as well as to get them moving towards a good exam mark. This is very appealing and enjoyable to me - I love playing the role of bringing the student into this kind of reflective space.