Graduate with Associates in Business and 10 years in various industries teaches business, accounting, finance, and tax topics for secondary and college level students via Zoom

Find out more about Chel

• When did you develop an interest in your chosen field and in private tutoring?

  I first became absorbed in these topics when I entered highschool, back in 2009. I joined the Marketing Club the day that school starts in Freshman year! Part of our club activities involved competing at regional, state, and international business events. It was during these events where I discovered my knack for business and logic. I consistently placed on the podium at state level and competed internationally in 2011 and 2012! It was also in highschool that I fell in love with logic puzzles. I had a maths teacher who used them for extra credit after assignments were finished. Learning this type of logical thinking has helped me to be a faster and more accurate problem-solver! I am also faster at learning other topics! As for mathematics, I feel they are what combines my other favorite topics. Business deals in very real-world terms, such as products produced or customers served. Logic exists in an abstract part of our brains and is key in our ability to understand unobserved phenomenon! Maths are how we understand the real world using logic. You can see how connected these subjects are!

• Tell us more about the subject you teach, the topics you like to discuss with students (and possibly those you like a little less).

  My favorite thing to teach is Tax, although for Business I teach Accounting, Economics, and Finance as well. My second favorite thing to teach is Logic! I find that having the ability to use logic to make sense of complex or unclear situations has greatly helped me personally to solve problems faster and more effectively. If there is one subject that I struggle to teach (and personally would prefer not to deal with at all), it would be Advanced Chemistry. There is just too much to memorize! I prefer to solve problems presented to me using critical thinking skills, rather than trying to perfectly recall the atomic weight of all the elements, number of protons, or explain electron valences, etc.. It is too much!

• Did you have any role models; a teacher that inspired you?

  In order to teach others, we must first learn ourselves. I love that when I teach I am passing on the knowledge and skills that have been imparted to me by my instructors. Although I have been very fortunate in my life to have excellent teachers, there are two in particular that I would say are my inspiration for how I teach. The first was my very first accounting teacher, Mrs. Kathy Hewitt in Junior College. With patience and a focus on guiding students toward understanding, she made accounting and the study of business fun for me! Positive reinforcement for understanding and patience when I didn't, made it a non-stressful learning experience. The second I wish to recognize is Mrs. Jane Picknell who I met at Southern Oregon University. Her approach to building relationships with students inspires me to get to know my students. When I know what is going on in the lives of my students, I fell that I can approach lessons with a tailored focus on the individual.

• What do you think are the qualities required to be a good tutor?

  My two incredible teachers have modeled for me that being an effective teacher requires patience and compassion for each student. Getting stuck in a rut doesn't help my students on their journey, so learning to switch up styles for each student has helped me be a much better teacher!

• Provide a valuable anecdote related to your subject or your days at school.

  When I first attended college classes, I had already chosen Business as my focus. I knew I had a knack for it and wanted to see if I could train myself to put my understanding of concepts into practice. At the time, I was struggling to balance work and school at the expense of a social life. I found that not taking care of myself took a heavy toll on my health. I excelled at school and made the President's List honor roll, but ended up getting sick and having to take a year off to focus on getting better and building up enough savings to work less while in school. Young Chel did not have the capacity to learn when stress was overwhelming. In that regard, I am much the same today. I have developed skills that help me to de-stress, learned to take breaks, and discovered how my interests align with the subjects I am learning. When I focused on my health first, I found I could more quickly grasp subjects and connect them to my life experience. The lesson I would pass on is to remember that school is a momentary thing, but your health will be with you the rest of your life.

• What were the difficulties or challenges you faced or still facing in your subject?

  When I began studying business, I struggled the most with Economics. Unlike accounting, economics was not intuitive for me. In accounting, the end results must balance. In economics, the large number of equations and factors that interact to attempt to understand an amorphous and intangible market made my head spin. I failed my first Microeconomics course in Junior College. No amount of forcing myself through homework helped me to grasp the concepts. When I was finally ready, I took another economics class. I approached it differently that time. Instead of focusing on only understanding the factors and equations, I used graphs and drawings to illustrate the concepts for myself. I was finally able to understand the effects of market factors on supply, demand, and price. Today, Econ is still one of my harder subjects to teach, simply because it is so complex of a topic.

• Do you have a particular passion? Is it teaching in general or an element of the subject or something completely different?

  I would say that one thing that has helped me stick with studying Business has been my passion for teaching finance and accounting. Every individual in the United States has to pay tax on the money they make. Whether that tax is refunded or more is owed can be the hardest part of the year. Growing up I had the opportunity to learn how to manage money from an early age. While it was second nature to me by the time I became an adult, I realized that most people my age did not know how to budget or plan for their future. Likewise, my family members who started small businesses were rapidly acquiring debt without realizing a profit or planning their expenses. Since graduating highschool, I have tried to be an advocate and teacher for the finance-illiterate in my life. Not understanding finance has caused my family to be heavily impacted with ever increasing debt and financial struggle to make ends meet. If I can help someone get out of debt or avoid it in the first place, I feel my life has more meaning.

• What makes you a Superprof (besides answering this interview questions :-P)?

  My hope for the lessons I teach on this platform is that I am able to help people better succeed in our cruel and hostile world through imparting a greater understanding of how our financial system can work for them, how to use budgeting to stay out of debt, and how to succeed at running a business. The American Dream is to make a better life for the next generation than you had, and have a better life than your parents had. Boiled down, my dream is to improve the lives of my students through education. It is also wonderful that many of my students also become friends.