|
|
Marcus Wilker
Marcus Wilker has been teaching at Don Valley Academy and tutoring at Math Masters since 2002. As a third generation teacher, he has teaching in his blood: his mother was a biology teacher, his father was a math professor, and his two grandfathers were a school inspector and an engineering professor.
|
|
Marcus graduated from Cedarbrae Collegiate Institute in Scarborough with the top combined average in physics, chemistry, and biology in his graduating class, a certificate of bilingualism from his late French immersion
programme, and an MVP award from the Cedarbrae Dolphins swim team. After high school, he attended the University of
Guelph, where he completed an honours B.Sc. with a double major in Mathematics and Philosophy. During his university studies, he wrote the Putnam Undergraduate Mathematics Contest and placed in the top 500 contestants in North America. Marcus also completed one year of an M.A. at Trent University (where he was a seminar leader for the Philosophy 100 course) before taking his first high-school teaching position in 2002.
With a broad background in both arts and science, Marcus enjoys teaching at Don Valley Academy, where he has the opportunity to work individually with his students, and to teach a variety of subjects. He particularly enjoys teaching science, mathematics, and writing; and he is pleased that philosophy is now taught as a high-school subject. Marcus is a strong believer in individualized teaching. “Students often need to reorganize and synthesize material so that it makes sense in terms of their own previous knowledge, or works with their own learning style. It’s impossible to do that for everyone in a large class. And real learning is usually impossible without a strong student-teacher relationship, which also does not happen for everyone in a large classroom. Students need to feel comfortable, and they need support to develop confidence in themselves as learners.”
When he is not teaching, Marcus enjoys playing chess, reading philosophy, keeping up his French and riding his bicycle. |
