Email: sfitzgerald@prepmatters.com
Bio
Shea has always been a natural tutor. In high school in Cincinnati, he was always the go-to-guy for help with math homework. During his undergraduate studies at Temple University, he voluntarily led study sessions and mini-lectures for his classmates in Classical Mechanics, and was later hired by the university tutoring center to tutor physics and mathematics. (Fun fact: he was a double major in Physics and Music Composition for the first two years at Temple!) As a PhD student at the University of Delaware, he worked in the physics tutoring center, led discussion sections as a Teaching Assistant. Even when he was a lab TA, he voluntarily set up study sessions for his lab students before their tests.
Outside of tutoring, Shea plays the violin and saxophone, composes music, and he and his wife raise puppies for The Seeing Eye. They have one puppy in training and three more dogs of their own!
Philosophy
I have always found one-on-one teaching easier, more effective, and more enjoyable than standard lecture-based teaching: I love adjusting my style to adapt to a student’s mind. The personal connection is so valuable to me, and I feel it makes my tutoring much more effective and enjoyable – both for me and my students.
In learning, I have always preferred “understanding” over “memorization”: I often opt to not memorize something if I can learn how to work out the answer each time I need it. In tutoring both math and physics, one of the great joys is the moment of realization in my students’ eyes. In physics problems especially, that understanding is often visual: I will often repeat “if you don’t draw a picture, you’re doing it wrong!”