I work with you on improving precisely the math skills your business requires

Are you a manager or employer whose business would benefit from improvements in your employees' specific math skills - whether in arithmetic, algebra, geometry, statistics, financial calculations, working with measurements, interpreting numerical data, understanding graphs and charts, or any other area of numeracy? Are you an employee who would function more efectively at work if you had some additional skills in any of those areas? I can help you in the most direct and effective way - by offering to you, or to your employees, individual or group lessons tailored exactly to your requirements, targeting precisely the areas you identify, and accommodating my teaching approach to each student's knowledge and way of thinking. I will give superb attention and care to fulfilling your company's educational needs with maximum effectiveness and a minimum of overhead. All the lessons are conducted via telephone and computer, on a flexible schedule that fits, as much as possible, the schedule of the students, and with no travel costs, classroom costs, or administrative costs involved.

If you would like to talk to me about ways to improve the mathematical skills you need for your work, or the mathematical skills within your company, please contact me by email, phone, or fax.

Workplace numeracy issues are the subject of many studies, surveys, programs and initiatives. It is widely recognized that the American educational system frequently fails to equip its graduates with mathematical skills adequate to the demands of professional life. It is suggested that wide-ranging educational reforms are needed if America is to compete successfully in the future global economy. The proposed programs for these reforms tend to be formulated in terms of national educational policies and involve issues such as greater equalization of educational opportunities, reforms in teacher education, development of new educational methodologies, the need to change academic attitudes towards what constitutes "mathematics", creation of partnerships between schools and industries. There are calls for further studies, assessments, grants, funding programs, organizations, policy proposals. The fact is, however, that educational systems are perhaps the most entrenched, bureaucratized and conservative areas of human endeavor, and that even if the proposed reforms ultimately take place and yield positive results, none of this helps you and your company solve whatever numeracy problems you have right now.

Furthermore, it is not at all clear whether the severe educational problems that America is experiencing can best be solved through globally instituted programs, standardized curricula, and uniform educational philosophies. Such solutions are well suited to small countries with essentially homogenuous populations, where the students can be assumed to have fairly uniform cultural backgrounds and aspirations - i.e. countries where these kinds of problems would not arise to begin with. But in the face of the staggering diversity that characterizes the populations of North America, even the validity of positing standardized instructional goals becomes questionable. Perhaps the only viable and truly efficacious solutions will be those that arise locally, through small initiatives capable of responding to very specific problems and conditions. Only such initiatives permit the development of flexible educational approaches tailored to the concrete needs of the students - as individuals, and as productive contributors to local industries and companies.

Obviously any real educational solutions, whetever their nature, have to begin with the students' early childhood, and not after the students have reached adulthood and entered the job market. But things being as they are, millions of adults come out of the educational system with serious numeracy problems which affect their work and the functioning of the companies that employ them. If you or your business is experiencing such problems, I can work with you - in the most direct, targeted and cost-effective way - to help alleviate them. I am not invested in any educational philosophy or methodology, except the philosophy of setting a firm, concrete purpose and striving for excellence in achieving it. It is my belief that any proper teaching of mathematics also teaches clarity and precision of language and thought and an improved ability to solve problems. Far from being exclusive characteristics of "pure" mathematics as an academic discipline, these qualities arise in the process of developing specific, adequate mathematical tools for understanding and solving concrete problems. I see teaching as a process of guiding the student in the development of these tools.

Contact me and let me help you with the specific math-skill problems in your company.