For twenty years, my job has been easy to describe and hard to do: make real learning happen. Not the look of it — the nodding, the notes, the highlighters — but the real thing: the moment an idea stops being mine and becomes the student's.
I started as a Colet Fellow at St. Paul's School in London, teaching Science and Drama. Then Saint Ann's in Brooklyn: Science, Psychology, Theater. Then Kaplan, then Manhattan GMAT, where my boss was a guy named Andrew Yang. He turned out fine. In 2012 I founded Latitude Tutors; in 2018 I sold it. Along the way, families started flying me around the world to teach their kids — which is a strange sentence to type, and a stranger life to live.
Somewhere in there, I became my own toughest student. Twenty years of sessions had shown me what great tutoring looks like; I wanted to know why it works. What actually causes learning to happen? I chased that question through a PhD in Cognitive Science in Education at Columbia — and I haven't stopped chasing it since.
The chase led to the work I'm proudest of. If great tutoring is a craft — with mechanisms you can name and skills you can practice — then nobody should have to learn it the way I did: by accident, one student at a time, over two decades. So I built the program I wish I'd had. The Columbia Professional Tutoring Program — housed in the Department of Cognitive Science at Teachers College, Columbia University — is the only university-backed tutor training program in the country, and training tutors on purpose has turned out to be the most rewarding work of my career. For the tutors who come out the other side wanting more, I started the League of Exceptional Tutors, an online community of top tutors from around the world.
Offstage, I run the Backyard Comedy Series with my wife — a backyard stand-up show that partners with Seth Rogen's Hilarity for Charity to raise money for Alzheimer's care. I make videos for the 110,000+ subscribers on Scalar Learning's YouTube channel. And I'm a Meisner-trained actor, improviser, and clown, which helps more in front of a room than you'd think.