Alex

I was born and spent my childhood in Zimbabwe and attended one of the leading private schools in Harare. I then spent my high school years in Norfolk, where I sat my GCSEs and A Levels, achieving A and A* grades across the board.

I went on to read German & Translation at the University of Surrey in Guildford, where I was awarded a First Class Honours Degree and won the University's award for the highest attainment in German. During this time, I spent a year living and working in Frankfurt as a translator for one of the Big Four auditing firms.

Whilst I achieved high grades in all my examinations, I did not do so by simply turning up and writing my name at the top of the paper. There were times when I also struggled to understand certain concepts or was not sure how to structure my answers and sought the help of professional tutors to help me get to where I wanted to be. Therefore, I am well acquainted with the frustration and anxiety that can sometimes come along with needing extra support.

The personal relationship with my students is something I value greatly and spend some time in the first lesson establishing areas of common interest, as well as trying to get to know what interests them and what particular hurdles they face. It is this relationship that is vital to ensuring that I am able to tailor my lessons according to a specific child's abilities and interests.

I am extremely passionate about the subjects I teach and try to extend this passion and enthusiasm to my students to help them gain the confidence they want and need to tackle their exams successfully. I hope to challenge and stimulate them in a way that gets them to think critically about the subject and thereby learn transferrable skills that are not merely limited to an exam or test, but which will also be applicable in other areas of their lives.

Whilst I am someone who generally thinks best 'the old fashioned way' with a pen and paper, my lessons profit greatly from the various multimedia resources that technology allows us to access. I have found students really engage well with the 'new' resources available and these can really help to bring some subjects to life, or allow them to be viewed from a new or unique perspective.

The interactive whiteboard used for online lessons allows me to engage closely with what the students are up to during lessons, whether they are in Singapore, Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia or even closer to home in Switzerland or the UK and makes it seem as though we are in the same room, despite the distance. I often incorporate the whiteboard in my face to face lessons as well, as it is such a versatile resource, and it allows us to build up a bank of revision resources that children can access in between sessions, wherever they are, in the run up to exams.

Outside of tutoring I work on various translation projects of academic papers and books from German into English. Most recently, I translated a thesis on a Chinese educator called Ma Xiangbo, about whom very little has been written in English. This was then used as the basis of an academic paper looking at the pedagogical developments proposed by Ma Xiangbo and John Henry Newman.

The ability to travel is a very important part of my life and I relish the opportunity to go to new places, experience new foods or activities and interact with people who may have very different views on the world to my own. That being said, I'm not a huge fan of the cold, so if there is an excuse to head to somewhere hot and sunny, I'd sooner go there than end up knee-deep in snow! Malta, Italy, Mauritius and my native Zimbabwe are particular favourites.