Writer and Educator

John Canaday works with students from first grade through graduate school and beyond. Over the course of more than twenty-five years as a Boston area tutor, John has built an unsurpassed reputation and an unmatched resume.

John does not work as part of a large, impersonal tutoring company, and he does not front for a group of less experienced tutors. He gives each student his personal and undivided attention, and he gets to know them as whole people—and often their families as well—so that he can focus his efforts where they will be most productive and shape their work together in ways that play to each student’s strengths, allowing them to build confidence in themselves, master their work, and achieve real and lasting success.

John works with students on a wide variety of subjects as well as secondary, college, and graduate school admissions. He has extensive experience working with students from a wide variety of backgrounds and with a broad range of learning styles.

[ See more. ]

Many of John's students come to him thinking they need what is often called "remedial instruction" but which always turns out to be a combination of filling in gaps (from a variety of causes) and finding ways of mediating between their own cognitive strengths and their teachers’ pedagogical approaches.

Other students face the opposite challenge: maintaining interest in curricula that seem to move too slowly or hew too narrowly to a predetermined focus. For these students, John offers enrichment, exploring topics in greater depth, providing a wider context, making connections among disciplines, and pursuing subjects outside or beyond the limits of conventional classrooms.

Motivation, mastery, pleasure, spark. We thrive when we experience a connection to our work, a feeling of purpose, a sense of flexing our intellectual muscles, and that indescribable moment when the light bulb goes off and we look at the world with fresh understanding and delight. These are things John strives to share with his students—and that he so often receives from them in return.

[ Hide. ]