In short:

  • exam guide passionate about learning

  • scientist at heart

  • lifelong language nerd

  • at home in northern Germany after a long round trip

Hi, I am Angela!

I offer tutoring and exam preparation in and around Halstenbek as well as online. Together we will untangle your mental knots and fill in those knowledge gaps for more joyful learning and more confidence.

What I believe in:

  • Our education system leaves teachers with too little time to actually meet the needs of their students. When I still worked as a school teacher, the limiting instructions and targets meant I could hardly use all the inspiring concepts and methods I had learned during teacher training. This sets us up for a lot of wasted potential on all sides.
  • There are no wrong or even “stupid“ questions. Sometimes a student just needs an explanation from a new perspective or a reminder. I have the patience and make the time to answer these question for as long as necessary. In the end this saves time. Often I am told: “I have learned more during this one hour than in the last four weeks of maths classes in school”
  • A lot of what we learn in maths class will never be used again for the rest of our lives. Obviously, this is also true for other subjects, but in this case the gap between applicability and perceived difficulty in understanding is especially wide. Our brains need a certain level of logic training and a well rounded general knowledge is a good thing. Still it is time to thoroughly revise our maths curriculum.
  • At the same time the current crises show how critical it is to be able to assess probabilities, understand exponential growth and have a solid basic knowledge in biology and chemisty. My goal is to give as much of this to as many people as is possible.

In my blog, you can find out more about my ideas of meaningful transfer of knowledge, especially in maths.

Bring your joy in learning back to life!

To live is to learn and learning should be fun!

All my life I felt most alive when I could find out something new. I was one of those children who enjoy school, even though I was super shy.

In 2022 the third time starting Danish was the charm for me. Back in 1991 a very dry text book prevented me from reading further than the second chapter. In the 2010s I looked into youtube videos and while they were more entertaining, I was concinced I would never be able to pronounce the “soft d” and gave up in frustration.

Duolingo perfectly accomodates my joy of playing and my sense of humour. It makes me translate sentences about sharks who eat the dolphins because of the lack of space in the pool. And so I accumulate points in the hope of winning the league at the end of the week. It was this combination of fun and challenge that had been missing. Now I listen to a couple of podcasts in Danish and understand most of what is said.

With litte children you can observe the fascination of trying new things and the joy of obtaining new insights. Every eureka moment makes their faces light up. If I manage to teach this joy in learning to just a few people, I am reminded why I work at exactly this place within the system. And then I find joy in teaching and end my day with a big grin on my face.

In my blog, I will talk more about my ideas of meaningful transfer of knowledge, especially in maths.

Fun Facts about me

Plants

When it comes to indoor plants, I have the blackest thumbs of all times. There is only one aloe in our house which I stay well away from. After even spider plants had died on me, I finally got the message. My garden plants are a different story, however.

Round trip

I was born in Elmshorn but got to spend just two years there. After a long journey through villages and big cities in East Westphalia, Oldenburg in Lower Saxony, Sutton Bonington, London, Potsdam, Brunsbüttel and Reinbek, I am now the only member of my core family back in the district of Pinneberg. In the next fifty years I do not see myself moving another single time.

Genetic coolness

Temperatures have to be really low for me to feel cold. Frequently, strangers on the street ask me if my clothes are not too thin. Maybe this is all due to deeply buried scandinavian genes. On the other hand, I am out of my comfort zone in summer at anything above 25°C.

Space

From early childhood I have been a sci-fi fan. I watched and read what I could get my hands on, from “Mindy and Mork” and “Tripods” to anything Star Trek. For a very short while I wondered if I would be an astronaut as a grown-up. But then the idea of actually floating around in empty space gave me the creeps and I had to make new career plans.

Winter metal

I love the winter solctice just as much as I love metal. The combination of both is the icing on my December cake. Every year I look forward to getting my Christmas-Metal-CDs out.

Humour

As a child I collected joke books and in 1st and 2nd grade made the teacher roll his eyes because every single topic reminded me of a joke which I begged him to let me tell.

Crafting

I love knitting. Among other things I make socks, hats and shawls. It is such a meditative activity and I like to create things with my own hands in general. Unfortunately, there are very few times during the year when it is cold enough for me to require even fluffy socks. So my best bet is to find other people I can supply with knit-ware.

Handwriting

I enjoy writing with fountain pens and currently I have five of them in use, filled with five differently coloured inks, none of them blue. There is no guarantee that I am not going to get more fountain pens with more variety in ink colours. The black ink is also perfect for drawing Zentangles, another very meditative hobby.

The stations on my way to guiding students to knowledge and through exams

  • 1992 to 1998 – studying chemistry at the Carl-von-Ossietzky-University of Oldenburg und University of Nottingham (Sutton Bonington Campus): When I graduated from school, someone at the jobcenter advised me to choose chemistry. My long term goal was to “do something about the environmental problems”. My Diplom thesis was about heavy metals in soils. Back then, I met my former chemistry school teacher and gave him my promise that I would never, ever become a teacher 😉
  • 1998 to 2002 – graduate studies, King's College, London: Researching hydrates and wax crystals that form in natural gas and crude oil pipelines, I fell futher in love with England. The language, the culture, the people.
  • 2002 to 2004 – post-doc at the University of Potsdam: While I worked on sensors for measuring protein C in blood, I realised that the expectations within the academic system were for me to spout buzzwords and make noise to rake in grant money. This was completely add odds with my personality and I soon left this job.
  • 2004 to 2005 – remote studies of “applied environmental sciences” at the University of Koblenz, cut short when I saw an ad by the Schleswig-Holstein ministry of education for lateral entrants into teaching at schools here.
  • 2005 to 2007 – Teacher training in Glinde, working at schools in Dithmarschen: Contrary to what I had promised, teaching was exactly my thing as was the extra training as a reading coach. The bureacracy and all the limitatins were not. Time for another reorientation.
  • 2012 to 2014 – training in systemic coaching with Conzendo: This course was transformative. For the first time in my life, I failed an exam at the first try. At the same time I experienced the joy of accompanying people through tricky processes.
  • Currently, I am close to finishing the Danish course and enjoy brushing up my French on Duolingo. I am looking forward to all the new knowledge and expertise I am going to pick up in the coming years.

 

Instagram Grid 2022

Interested?

Contact me and let's find out together how we can untangle your mental knots and get you ready for that exam. I am looking forward to hearing from you!

This way!

Interested in reading more? In my blog I write about learning, the subjects I teach, about selfcare and my general view on the world around me.

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