Question

Dear Mitch,

This is sort of a local question, but it's also for a friend of mine who lives in another state (New Jersey).  I'm in high school right now, and I live in the same town that you do, East Hampton, New York, and you tutored my cousin a few years ago for the SAT's and then you went over her application essay with her and showed her how to edit it and even showed her ways to answer the short questions that she said she never would have thought of, but now I've discovered that you have an unlisted phone number and unlisted address, so I was just wondering if you are still tutoring or just write articles on it for other tutors?

Also, if you are tutoring, do you still offer the money-back guarantee that you used to?

Please write back as soon as you can because my friend from New Jersey is going to be spending the summer with us and we both wanted to start getting tutored as soon as possible.

Thank you,

Sharon F.

Answer

Dear Sharon F.,

I do still tutor, and I do still offer a money-back guarantee. The reason for my "unpublished" telephone number is that my number constantly changes; I seem to be less skillful at 'multi-tasking' than I envision myself to be, and there have been so many times I've been on the telephone while answering emails and reviewing solutions of math problems sent to me by my interns or people I've never met, and/or while making rough sketches for new develpments on inventions or coming up with new methods of teaching old concepts that, over the years, I've ended up dropping so many phones into bowls of soup, or dropping them out a window I'm opening, or seeing them fall into my dog's water bowl, that I end up having to get a whole new phone every couple of months -- each one, of course, with a new number. (Like most people, I've tried 'hands-free' versions, as well as various forms of speaker phones, but somehow, finding the piece attached to my ear either annoying or auditorily imperfect, and the speaker versions annoying or distracting to people passing through my office, I almost always end up going back to a relatively old-fashioned hand-held-cell-phone).

And the reason it did not seem important to me to have my private email addresses listed anywhere is the same reason that this website welcomes the "competitors" to advertise, as you can see by going through a couple of the website's pages and perusing the advertisements along the margin. The reason behind this approach is that 'word-of-mouth' has always been the way my clients have selected me out of the hundreds of tutors in my area.  This summer, in fact, I've made the decision to reach out to a new and unconnected group of students, and you've now given me the perfect opportunity by asking for my personal contact details directly.  So, thank you!

My private email is this:  adler.mitch@gmail.com

(In the interest of 'full-disclosure', or total honesty, I do have more than one private email address, but, to simplify things, the one given above is the one devoted almost exclusively to tutoring clients, potential tutoring clients, and their families).

Finally, the community in which you and I make our home (East Hampton, New York) has been so good to me for so long that I have decided to 'give back', by finding a way to tutor people who normally would not be able to afford it.  It also benefits me, because one of my goals for next winter is to write a book about tutoring, and in order to write a book that is complete and well-rounded, I want to make sure I get a chance to work with students from the entire economic and academic spectrum.  So I've substantially reduced my rates for the summer and early autumn, making them far less than average for this summer resort town.

I hope I've answered your question,

Mitch