In-Home Tutoring For Academic Success younger About The Company

		Passaic Valley Tutoring is an affordable alternative to expensive corporate learning centers. We are four professional tutors, all with masters degrees, who have taught at schools, as graduate assistants, and at tutoring agencies like Princeton Review, Sylvan and Chyten. We got tired of the standardized materials the agencies used which did not allow us to modify our instruction to students' individual needs. We tutor language arts, reading, writing, history, social studies, SAT prep, and most math and science courses.
In addition to particular subjects, we focus on developing the academic skills needed for success, not only in students' present courses but for their entire academic careers. Our goal is for students to improve their performance by becoming active learners, who use the tutor to help guide their own instruction as they learn to participants in their own education. With parents input, we set clear goals about the skills and content that the students will master, but the process by which we reach those goals is more flexible than in traditional classroom learning. To this end we focus on building core academic skills such as:

reading comprehension (and the ability to separate out relevant information from that which is superfluous with the applied context).

creative problem solving (for the inevitable instances when the application of previous formulas and ways of doing things no longer yields a satifactory result).

critical thinking (so that new informational is examined from different perspectives, and so underlying assumptions and conventional conceptions do not go unexamined or unquestioned).

writing and research (demonstrating organized thought, with the capacity to research relevant information, cite it correctly, and apply it properly with accepted academic practices).

What We Tutor

We tutor the standard material and skills needed for grade school and high school: language arts, reading, writing, history, social studies, algebra, geometry, some sciences, SAT prep, and all standardized tests that determine academic placement in New Jersey*. As opposed to taking teacher certification majors we all have Masters Degrees in academic subjects, so we also tutor college economics, psychology, political science, international affairs, sociology, criminology, biology, and history.

How We Tutor

We believe that the main difference between private tutoring and classroom learning is that in private tutoring student and tutor are free to ask whatever questions they need. No child wants to ask a question, no matter how insightful, that sounds geeky or appears as if they are the teacher's pet, nor do they wish to ask anything that appears unintelligent. Most students will not even ask the spelling of a word they don't know.

Classroom subject teachers are trying to fulfill course content requirements, and home room teachers nowadays gear their instruction towards performance testing. In addition to this they must hold the attention of twenty students, all of whom have different abilities. What happens is the material is taught to the middle 80% of the class. Questions from teachers elicit short-answer responses, and those that go out on a tangent or cross disciplines get cursory answers rather than further extrapolation and reflection.

Working one on one, we can walk each of our students through a problem step by step. When students have to explain their work, misconceptions in core areas are quickly revealed, and we can focus on the exact nature of the difficulty rather than simply teaching a dumbed down version of the same material.

What We Don't Tutor

We tutor reading comprehension and help younger reader pronounce words but we don't teach phonics. We do ESL, reading, and writing, but not English Literature. We don't make sure that students do their homework unless we meet with them every day and we don't teach study skills.

In our experience students who do "do not test well" lack either core content concepts or the ability to write at grade level (which we do tutor). Our priority is to address the problems that brought your child to us in the first place. Without the time constraints of the classroom we can focus on areas that students find either particularly difficult or particularly interesting. We often do our own research and bring supplemental material. For more information read Tutoring Benefits and Reading, Writing, and Arithmatic.

Passaic Valley Tutoring. We've Got A Lot To Learn.

For information on our policies read the FAQs then contact us at 862-221-6621

Some of the locations we commonly serve are

Belleville, Bloomfield, Bogota, Caldwell, Cedar Grove, Clifton, Elmwood Park, Essex Fells, Fair Lawn, Fairfield, Franklin Lakes, Garfield, Glen Ridge, Hackensack, Haledon, Hawthorne, Lincoln Park, Little Falls, Livingston, Lodi, Maplewood, Millburn, Montclair, North Caldwell, Nutley, Oradell, Parsippany, Paramus, Roseland, Ridgefiled Park, Saddle River, Teaneck, Towaco, Totowa, Verona, Wayne, West Caldwell, West Orange, West Paterson, Woodland Park, and Wyckoff

Since we travel to meet students we can make arrangements to meet in Union, Westfield, Chatham, Clark, Summit, Bayonne, Ramey, Hoboken, Upper Saddle River, Morristown, Montvale, Bergenfield, Paramus, Ridgefield, Tenafly, Cranford, Bayonne, Park Ridge, Hillsdale, Wanque, Westfield, Jersey City, Pine Brook, Union City, North Bergen, Seacaucus, Hoboken, Seacaucus, Elizabeth, Newark, and Fort Lee

Besides the SAT I test we also teach

*SAT II subject tests in European History, Human Geography, Macroeconomics, Microeconomics, Music Theory, Psychology, U.S. Government and Politics, U.S. History, and World History. We also prepare students for the ISEE (Independent School Entrance Exam, the SSAT, the HSPT (High School Placement Test), the PSAT, GED, GRE and ASVAB tests.

For SAT prep we serve Essex, Passaic, Bergen, Hudson, Morris, Sussex, & Union Counties