I’m Dan Johnson, your instructor at Village Tutoring. I hail from the state of Washington, where I grew up reading, skiing, playing basketball, and focusing on academics—which, to me, was always an enjoyable way to keep busy during long stretches of rain (yes, the stories of relentless rainfall in the Pacific Northwest are true). A former high school English teacher, I started Village Tutoring in January 2023 to reconnect with my passion for teaching after changing course to pursue a career in electrical engineering.
Throughout my personal academic and career journey to date, I have had the good fortune of being able to explore a diverse set of interests. As an undergraduate at Stanford University, I took classes in math, physics, economics, and computer science, but my intellectual pursuits at the time mainly revolved around philosophy and literature. I received a B.A. in comparative literature in 2016, then completed an M.A. in education in 2017, earning a state certificate for English curriculum and instruction.
After serving as an English teacher at a public high school in San Jose, California, I set out in a new direction, taking a solo road trip across the country in an effort to find new places to live and work. Boulder and Denver were the highlights of my journey, but, as fate would have it, the first job offer I received came from a healthcare analytics company in the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked there for just under a year before receiving an offer from a Denver-based renewable energy investment firm, at which I spent three years.
During my time in the corporate world, I maintained an abiding interest in math and physics—I generally studied for at least an hour every weeknight, in addition to multiple hours every weekend. My introduction to the renewable energy industry afforded me the opportunity to think about practical applications for my intellectual interests, and eventually I made the call to go back to school to pursue an engineering degree. I am now a student in the electrical and computer engineering program at CU Boulder as well as the operator of Village Tutoring.
Simply put, I teach students the skills they need to succeed in academia and (I hope) in life more generally.
My services include study skills and homework help, SAT/ACT tutoring, college application assistance, and curricular companions (educational modules of my own design for students who need a greater challenge than they're getting in school).
I believe my greatest strengths lie in my approach to education and in the type of learning environment I aim to create for tutees. I follow a more holistic approach to instruction than students are generally able to receive in a classroom setting: instead of encouraging students to spend hours memorizing facts and formulas so that they can recite them on tests, I encourage them to build frameworks for logical analysis, conduct independent research into subjects they care about, and understand the material they are learning in school at a fundamental level. Memorization, test-taking strategies, and sheer work ethic all have their place in academia and test prep, to be sure, but at the end of the day there are no substitutes for thorough understanding and strong critical thinking skills. These are what I aim to help students develop.
For the time being, I work primarily on weekends. I am available between 10 am and 6 pm on Saturday and Sunday. Session lengths are generally 2 hours. If current circumstances prevent you from scheduling tutoring sessions on weekends or if you intend to schedule multiple sessions per week, I may be able to set a routine time to meet on a weekday evening.
If you'd like to schedule sessions in the near future, please start by sending me a note through my contact form!
Generally, I work wherever is most convenient for you and your student. I can meet in-person anywhere within a 10-mile radius of the CU Boulder campus, or online. Conducting house calls ensures that students get to work in a comfortable environment, and it also means you don't have to add another trip to your schedule.
If you are interested in working together, I will arrange a 20-minute video consultation so that we have the chance to get to know each other and determine next steps. After our initial call, I will follow up with you via email to plan a first session.
I intentionally pose the question "Why do I tutor?" in order to distinguish it from the separate but related question, "Why do I teach?" There are plenty of reasons why I teach: because I find teaching both challenging and rewarding, because I enjoy watching students develop increasing competence and confidence, because teaching a subject deepens my own understanding of the material, and because I believe teaching is a beautiful profession, to name a few. But when it comes to tutoring in particular, my favorite philosopher, the great Michel de Montaigne, explains it best:
If, as is our custom, teachers undertake to regulate many minds of such different capacities and forms with the same lesson and a similar measure of guidance, it is no wonder if in a whole generation of children they find barely two or three who reap any proper fruit from their lessons.
In other words, differences between students' current capabilities and preferred learning strategies make it incredibly difficult for instructors to ensure that every student in a classroom with "many minds" remains challenged and engaged throughout the course of a lesson. Tutoring eliminates this problem—when working with just one student, it is possible to meet the tutee where they're at and develop a much stronger sense of what should be done next to solidify their understanding and expand their capabilities. Tutoring thus accelerates the learning process and enables me, as an instructor, to experience the most satisfying parts of teaching more frequently and more fully.
