category: High School

Yoni Israel

Yoni Israel is a pre-med student taking a gap year in New York City while applying to medical school. During this year, he is working as a medical scribe for Mount Sinai Cardiology, as well as teaching students as a private tutor.

Yoni Israel graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brandeis University with a major in Biology, and minors in Chemistry and Music. He worked as a teaching assistant for 2 introductory Biology classes, and held weekly review sessions for over 30 students, designing ways to effectively teach the class material. He led larger review sessions before exams for the 250+ person classes, and held regular office hours for students struggling in the course. He scored in the 98th percentile on his MCAT, demonstrating proficiency in Chemistry, Physics, Biology, Biochemistry, Psychology, and Sociology. He is also fluent in Hebrew and speaks introductory level Spanish.

In addition to his academics, Yoni enjoyed participating and taking leadership roles in many extra-curriculars at Brandeis, including a capella, Ultimate Frisbee, intramural sports leagues, and the school’s Jewish community.

Yoni has extensive experience working with children of all ages. In high school, he worked for 4 summers as a camp counselor in both day and sleepaway camps. In the summer after his Freshman year at Brandeis University, he worked as a division head at Camp Nesher sleepaway, supervising 20 counselors (ages 16-19), and was responsible for over 200 campers (ages 10 – 13). In his Senior year at Brandeis he worked at Temple Shalom in Newton, privately tutoring 5^th graders in Hebrew, leading a children’s choir every Sunday, and teaching 6^th and 7^th graders about “Communal Responsibility” through an immersive, semester-long project. Simultaneously, he privately tutored six students weekly online through the JCC Manhattan, and one student privately at home in Hebrew language, Bible study, and prayer fluency.

Yoni Israel is a kind, patient and understanding teacher, who seeks to help students reach their full potentials. He is eager to work tirelessly to help people achieve their goals, as well as give them the skills, motivation, and the confidence to succeed on their own. Yoni also works with students’ parents to help find the best learning strategies for their children. He is interested in and capable of tutoring in the sciences, mathematics, English, and other subjects. He looks forward to helping students of all different speeds and interests, and is eager to help in every way that he can.

Chloe Lizotte

Chloe Lizotte is a private tutor and writing coach who lives in New York City. She loves helping people develop their voices through language, and she believes that with a little perseverance, everyone can tap into a passion that will guide them through their writing.

In 2016, Chloe Lizotte graduated from Yale University with a B.A. in Film & Media Studies. Since then, she has written on film and music for several publications, including Lincoln Center’s Film Comment, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the Museum of the Moving Image’s Reverse Shot. In addition, she edited the print program for the New York Film Festival and contributed copywriting as an assistant programmer for the Tribeca Film Festival. While editing, she particularly enjoys workshopping pieces in-person, and she tried to do so as much as possible as an arts editor for the Yale Herald. When sitting down with students, she encourages an exploratory spirit, pointing to writing as a way of sparking emotionally engaging conversations.

Language has always appealed to Chloe: in high school, she won departmental awards in French and Latin, and also served as a Latin I TA. In college, she spent a summer in Paris studying French language and cinema. She has also conducted graduate-level translations of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. Across these languages, she’s learned to break down grammatical concepts to make them easily approachable, and she is enthusiastic about the real-world applications that can bring these topics to life.

Chloe also has experience in creative writing. Her original screenplay Prism placed in the top 20 percent of all Academy Nicholl Fellowship submissions, and she brings an open mind and positive spirit to collaborations with other artists. She sees analytical writing as a creative process, as well, and strives to instill tutees with the desire to invent and discover.

In her spare time, Chloe enjoys playing guitar, taking photos, writing fiction, and attending repertory film screenings. She also loves baking, and has been known to make some delicious snickerdoodle cookies.

Ali Stoner

A graduate of both the University of Virginia and Harvard University, Ali Stoner is passionate about providing rigorous, entertaining education. As a private tutor she specializes in standardized test preparation and has helped over 100 high schoolers reach their score goals, coaching multiple students to perfect ACT scores or 98^th percentile scores on the SAT.

In her sessions, Ali guides students through timing strategies and test-specific techniques, and then takes great care to ensure that students have mastered a test’s fundamental content areas. She tailors her lessons to each student’s individual needs, whether working with high-achieving, self-motivated learners to create independent study plans, or taking a more hands-on approach to assist those who may have fallen behind in particular subjects. For students struggling with test anxiety, Ali teaches a range of mindfulness and breathing exercises to help manage stress and improve focus; her relaxed, positive attitude puts otherwise discouraged students at ease and helps them to address the pressures of academic performance. She has tutored many teenagers with learning disabilities and has assisted parents in navigating almost every possible testing accommodation for both the SAT and ACT. Ultimately, she uses test preparation as an excuse to teach students to become more organized, more curious, and more confident lifelong learners.

Extremely interested in mathematics and inspired by arts-focused extracurricular activities, Ali Stoner graduated with honors from UVa, where she created her own interdisciplinary course of study with concentrations in theatre, arts business, and non-profit management. In her fourth year, her academic performance and service to the university community earned her a prestigious room on the UVa Lawn, and she was one of ten students from her 3700-person class to be highlighted as an “Amazing Grad of 2013.” While pursuing work in the entertainment industry, Ali began teaching SAT, ACT, SSAT, and ISEE classes for a nationally ranked test-prep company. She took a two-and-a-half year hiatus to complete her MFA in Acting from Harvard, and began work as a private tutor and educational consultant upon her return to New York City.

In addition to test preparation, many of Ali’s students choose to continue on with her as their college advisor, where she guides applicants through the process of crafting competitive personal statements and supplemental essays. Ali also draws upon her voice and speech training at Harvard to assist ESL students and professionals alike with English pronunciation. She is the author of ELK Academy’s accent reduction curriculum, currently trains the school’s pronunciation coaches, and is developing ELK’s online course in English Pronunciation for native speakers of Slavic languages.

While not tutoring, Ali moonlights as an actor and theatre-maker. She has worked with Tony, Obie, Drama Desk, and Grammy winners, and has collaborated on productions/workshops at The American Repertory Theatre, The Moscow Art Theatre, and The Williamstown Theatre Festival, among others. She loves seeing shows, taking dance classes, hiking, cooking desserts, and spending time with her friends and family.

Lois Nesbitt

A passionate lifelong student, teacher, and private tutor, Lois Nesbitt believes that learning is the core of a meaningful life. Much of what we learn comes from reading; discovering what we know comes through writing. Fascinated from an early age by the power of words, she believes that lively and engaging writing is always a joy to read—and to write!

Lois Nesbitt was educated at Sidwell Friends School, in Washington, D.C., and at topnotch public schools in Montgomery County, Maryland. At Sidwell Friends she benefited from learning among academically motivated classmates following a creative yet demanding curriculum. At public schools she experienced teachers accommodating a diverse student population while guiding her through rigorous AP courses. Both proved invaluable in her own teaching within and beyond formal academic settings.

A gifted middle-school professor provided Lois’s first rigorous training in expository writing, skills she has applied and shared with others throughout her life. Journalism courses at Stanford University trained her to hone each story down to its bare bones. She wrote a weekly column for The Stanford Daily and began freelance writing for Archetype, a cutting-edge architectural magazine.

Transferring to Harvard University in her junior year, Lois wrote for The Harvard Crimson and served on the Arts Board of The Harvard Advocate. Lois studied art history, literature, history, philosophy, history of science/epistemology, and social studies, graduating with a B.A., Magna cum laude.

Lois Nesbitt furthered her education at Princeton University. Entering the architecture department, she found herself drawn back to the liberal arts. A series of sympathetic mentors encouraged her to enroll in courses in literature, linguistics, philosophy, classics, and modern languages. The result was a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature. Lois taught expository writing and American literature to Princeton undergraduates, working in small seminars and one-on-one sessions to equip struggling writers with the tools they needed and to expand the skills of more advanced writers. She brings this experience to all students, from middle school through to adults, who want to develop or refine their abilities to write powerfully and effectively.

Lois credits the extraordinarily gifted professors at these universities for modeling how complex ideas can be conveyed in simple terms and clear examples, as well as how to encourage students to think analytically and synthetically across a range of fields and disciplines.

Lois Nesbitt has worked as a freelance writer and editor in New York City. Her literary and book reviews and art/architecture criticism have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Boston Phoenix, Princeton Alumni Weekly, Artforum, Artnews, Elle, and many books, catalogues, and other publications. Lois also edited and revised books for Princeton University Press, MIT Press, Rizzoli International, the Museum of Modern Art, and others. Going over texts line by line honed her ability to spot each writer’s strengths and weaknesses, from overall organization to stylistic grace and grammatical correctness.

For the past 25 years, Lois has met every challenge a teacher and private tutor can face while training countless students in her second love, yoga. Her passion to share what she knows led her to create dozens of yoga teacher-training programs worldwide. These 200-hour intensives require that Lois skillfully keep students awake(!) and engaged. She does so with varied formats, lively presentations, interactive exercises, and a healthy dose of light-hearted humor. Students learn yoga postures, anatomy, history, and philosophy, and the art of teaching itself: how to convey complex ideas through plain language, economical phrasing, precise diction, and classical rhetorical skills. Lois in turn brings these skills to aspiring writers in her tutoring sessions.

Lois’s other passions include art and design. Her artwork has been exhibited internationally. Most recently she has focused on graphic works, limited-edition objects, and custom-designed events for organizations including The Nature Conservancy, Harvard University, The Boston Harbor Association, Hoops for Hope, and The Group for the East End. She spends much of her playtime in, on, or close to her beloved Atlantic Ocean.

Galina Kofman

A certified math specialist and private tutor with an extensive background in classroom and one-on-one settings, Galina Kofman loves math, and she aims to share that love. She is unwavering in her belief that all students can find math success. For Galina, the definition of math success goes beyond facility with numbers and mathematical concepts. It encompasses sophisticated lifelong critical thinking skills. It includes confidence in one’s ability both to perform math and also to use logical thinking to solve problems of all sorts. Through a creative approach that she personalizes to meet each student’s needs, she helps her learners to find positivity in math. She also helps students and families to confront and eliminate math- and testing-related anxiety and avoidance.

Galina Kofman has worked in public and independent school settings in New York and Westchester, teaching students in grades four through college with various levels of facility in math, from remedial to advanced and gifted. She has extensive experience helping students with exceptionalities. For the past three years, she has taught the Art of Problem Solving curriculum at a school for twice-exceptional children, who both are gifted and have a learning disability. Among the standardized tests for which she has helped students achieve math success are the SAT, ACT, PSAT, ISEE, SSAT, and the New York City SHSAT.

Galina is well-versed in the centrality of mathematics in business and technology fields. She holds degrees in mechanical engineering and computer science, and before becoming an educator, she spent two decades as a software engineer in New York, holding positions in software development, project management, and consulting for businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 100 companies, including IBM and Morgan Stanley. A true pioneer of the internet, Galina holds two patents and three technical publications. With her deep subject knowledge, she helps students conceptualize the practical and theoretical applications of math success. In addition to helping others find joy in the field of study that she loves, Galina enjoys practicing tai chi and taking long walks with her dog.

category: High School

Yoni Israel

Chloe Lizotte

Ali Stoner

Lois Nesbitt

Galina Kofman

Company Overview

Private Tutoring

Test Preparation

College Counseling