Chemistry tutoring for students who want it to make sense

Who this is for

Chemistry punishes students who try to memorise it. There's a lot to hold in your head — nomenclature, polyatomic ions, reaction types — but every one of those details sits on top of a small number of ideas about particles, energy and proportion. Students who understand those ideas find the memorising manageable. Students who don't end up drowning in flashcards.

We work with high school students taking chemistry for the first time, students retaking a course they didn't pass, and university students in general chemistry who need to keep up with lab work and lectures at the same time.

What we cover

• Matter, atomic structure and periodic trends
• Nomenclature and writing balanced chemical equations
• The mole concept, stoichiometry and limiting reagents
• Solutions, concentration, dilution and solubility
• Bonding, molecular geometry and intermolecular forces
• Gases and the gas laws
• Thermochemistry and energy changes
• Equilibrium, acids and bases, pH and titration
• Oxidation-reduction and electrochemistry
• Course specifics: Chemistry 11, Chemistry 12, AP Chemistry and first-year general chemistry
• Also covered: organic chemistry and electrochemistry

Where students commonly struggle

Stoichiometry is the great filter. It isn't conceptually deep, but it requires students to move fluently between mass, moles and particles while keeping units straight, and any weakness in ratio reasoning shows up immediately. We slow this down and build a method the student can repeat under pressure.

Equilibrium is the second wall. Students can recite Le Châtelier's principle and still not predict what a system will do, because they're pattern-matching rather than reasoning about what the particles are doing. The third is the invisibility problem: chemistry happens at a scale nobody can see, so we lean on diagrams, analogies and particle-level sketches until the abstraction feels concrete.

How sessions work

Every session is one-on-one and planned around the student's current unit and next assessment. We alternate between explanation and practice, because chemistry is learned by doing problems, not by watching someone else do them. We check working line by line so that unit and sign errors are caught as habits form, and we build cumulative review into the weeks before a final, since chemistry exams are almost always comprehensive.

In person and online

In-person sessions are available across Metro Vancouver. Online sessions run worldwide over Zoom with a shared whiteboard — well suited to chemistry, where most of the work is diagrams, equations and worked calculations that the student keeps afterwards. Scheduling is flexible across time zones.

Many chemistry students also work with us on math or physics. Outside Metro Vancouver? See online tutoring worldwide.

We also work with students who have ADHD or other learning challenges, breaking work into manageable steps and keeping sessions structured and calm.

Course-specific help

We have dedicated pages for the senior chemistry courses:

• Chemistry 11 tutoring
• Chemistry 12 tutoring