FEATURED TUTOR: JULIA
Julia in Costa Rica with Tilly the Two-Toed Sloth
We sat down with Julia, one of our amazing math and science tutors, for an interview to learn more about her experiences tutoring, working with LTLS, and raising a baby sloth.
How did you get into teaching/tutoring?
I actually started in college, through work study. I was a receptionist and did various other jobs, but one of the things I very quickly figured out I could do was tutor other people. Sometimes I would tutor them while being a receptionist and get paid twice! I’ve also always kind of done a little bit of teaching. I’ve done a lot of craft teaching, like sewing and embroidery. When I moved to Seattle in 1996 my brother was a middle school math teacher and he suggested I be a tutor, so I promoted myself independently — basically the same way Andrea started — and I did that for almost 10 years. Eventually I discovered LTLS through some teachers at UPrep. I really felt like the people at Liddane and I shared a philosophy of tutoring. Tutors are the people who are not your parents, your teachers, or your coaches; they’re nobody who has any authority over you, but they’re totally in your corner. It’s super important to me to start out my relationship treating the students as though they are already adults: a relationship of equals and mutual respect. The students are as much the drivers of this as I am. My job is not to impose a structure on them, it's to help them find a structure that works for them.
What’s your favorite thing about working at Liddane Tutoring?
How do I pick just one? It’s so easy to just say all the people, but the truth is that it’s all the people. There is not any one person at Liddane that I don’t like. And Andrea is a phenomenal boss. Because of her, she’s built this amazing team. She’s really brilliant at managing the business and keeping all the moving parts clear. LTLS is serving the kids, the parents, the tutors, and the schools. All those entities have different needs, and Andrea is really good at actively serving all those different communities. The reason she’s done that so well is because this is a calling for her, it’s not just a job. It’s important to her that all the people are taken care of in order to serve the students. Her fundamental priority is to serve the kids, but she knows all those other pieces need to be treated just as well to do that effectively.
What have you learned through your work in education that you feel is most important to share?
Tests are not tigers. Our brains were designed to keep us safe from things that could kill us. As a consequence, in the modern day our brains respond to stress that we’re under as if the thing that we’re scared of could kill us. That’s how we evolved: the brain is trying to keep us safe. It's really important to be able to say to the brain, “I’ve got this. It's just a test, it's not a tiger — just sit down in the backseat and take a nap,” because if you’re in that stress space the only three options you have are fight, flight, and freeze. None of those options are learn. You can’t learn when you’re in a stressed out or scared space. You have to be in a place of calm, relaxed, joyful curiosity in order to learn. Liddane does a phenomenal job of making a place for students to feel relaxed and safe so they can learn.
What’s something we don’t know about you?
I raised a two-toed sloth. I grew up and lived in Costa Rica, and this was during that time. Her name was Tilly, and she loved hibiscus flowers, so on my way to work I would stop by this house that had a huge hibiscus bush, and I would pick a bunch of hibiscus flowers and I would feed them to her all day. She’d hold them from the base and eat them like an ice cream cone.
When I had her I was working at a gift shop, and baby sloths hang off of their mothers all the time. So I had her with me in a little sling while I was at work and she would hang off of me. And at home she would sleep in the bed with me. I had her with me for most of two years. Sloths do everything slowly, so it took her a long time to grow up and go back to the wild, but she did eventually leave me for good for a home in the trees.
