Dear visitor,
Thank you for your interest in tutoring! I’m a former math and English teacher from Poly Prep Country Day, in New York City. For the past 20 years, I’ve had the privilege of tutoring the best and brightest students from a wide range of schools: Xavier, Xaverian, Regis, Poly Prep, Notre Dame, Staten Island Tech, Staten Island Academy, Packer Collegiate, St. Ann’s, LaGuardia, Phillips Exeter, Trinity, Collegiate, Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech, Fontbonne, and dozens of other schools.
In high school I won the National Merit Scholarship, an award given to 1,800 students out of 1.2 million seniors nationwide. My SAT score was equivalent to today’s perfect score of 1,600. I also graduated with honors from Harvard. My strongest assets as a teacher, however, are my creativity, compassion, patience, and sense of humor.
In the past 20 years:
· 94 of my students have qualified as National Merit Scholarship Students.
· My students have increased their scores an average of 6 points on the ACT & 225 points on the SAT. [i]
· My students have been accepted to Georgetown, Harvard, Boston College, Villanova, Yale, Princeton, U Penn, CUNY Honors, and many others.
· I’ve developed innovative calculator strategies that help students solve some of the hardest math problems in, literally, seconds. I have created a video in which I demonstrate how to use my calculator programs. If you or your child would like to watch this video, please email me, and I will send you a link to this video online.
· I’ve written my own textbook: almost 500 pages of curriculum, including an Honors curriculum for sophomores who are one year ahead in math.
I offer private (one-on-one) tutoring; tutoring in pairs; and tutoring in small groups of 3 to 7 students. I am comfortable teaching students at all levels, from Fundamentals classes to Honors classes to students who get extended-time.
I’m also a published writer. A while back, one of my stories was selected by Princeton Professor Joyce Carol Oates to appear in Best New American Voices: Fiction by Today’s Most Innovative New Writers.[ii] (Harcourt), and in my twenties I co-edited an anthology of literature; the 25th-year-anniversary edition of the anthology will be available in 2023. As a writer and editor, I love advising students on their college essays. I also provide college admissions counseling. I used to work as an interviewer for Harvard, and I enjoy conducting mock interviews for my students. I find it extremely rewarding to help students, and parents, feel more at ease with the college admissions process.
When should your child begin tutoring? I recommend the winter or spring of 10th grade. Sophomore year is significantly less stressful than junior year, so starting sophomore year will make the student’s junior year—and the entire test-taking process—significantly less stressful. The reason is that the vast majority of students who start tutoring early will finish tutoring by junior year. Students who start tutoring late almost always need to wait until their senior before achieving their desired score. However, if your child’s 10th-grade PSAT/PACT scores are high, it would be fine to start tutoring the summer before junior year or during junior year.
Which students will find it very beneficial to start tutoring during sophomore year? Any student who meets one or more of the following:
· has skipped a year in math
· needs to brush up on the fundamentals of math, reading, and/or grammar
· will be a recruited athlete, for whom offers of admission are often given early
· is aiming to win the National Merit Scholarship
· wants to apply for highly selective internships or enrichment programs for the summer after junior year. (The most selective programs ask for the applicant's scores from the PSAT or a recnt SAT, and—because the application dealines for these programs are January/February of junior year—that means an SAT from October, November, or December of junior year.)
Thank you for reading, and I hope you will consider me as your child’s (or your) teacher.
Sincerely,
Khoi Luu
President, Merit Scholars Tutoring (DBA Luu Tutoring, Inc)
khoiluu@post.harvard.edu
(646) 522-0857
[i] The top 20% of my students have increased their scores 450+ on the SAT, and 8+ points on the ACT.
[ii] “Best New American Voices” is an annual fiction competition for young writers across the America and Canada. Twelve winners are chosen from more than 50,000 entries. In this anthology I publish under my pen name Dylan Tai Nguyen.