BC curriculum tutoring for students in Colombia

Who this page is for

Parents in Colombia whose child attends a school certified by British Columbia to deliver the BC curriculum. The courses are BC courses and the diploma at the end is the BC Dogwood Diploma, which means the tutoring your child needs is British Columbia tutoring — which is what we do.

The BC curriculum connection

British Columbia certifies offshore schools in twelve countries, Colombia among them, to deliver its curriculum. Students at those schools are assessed against BC learning standards and graduate with the same certificate as a student finishing Grade 12 in Burnaby.

For a family choosing a tutor, that fact narrows the search usefully. A strong local tutor may know mathematics deeply and still be guessing at how a BC course is sequenced, which topics carry weight later, or what a marker expects to see written down. We start from the course itself, because it's the course we already teach.

The pattern we'd expect to be most useful here is the bilingual one. A student living and thinking in Spanish while studying and being assessed in English can be genuinely strong at the subject and still lose marks in the gap between the two. Physics is the clearest example: the student sets up the problem correctly, does the arithmetic correctly, and then loses marks because the explanation of why isn't there in the form the rubric wants. Biology has the same trap in reverse — the terminology is dense, and a small imprecision in wording reads as a misunderstanding even when it isn't.

None of that is a language problem in the ordinary sense. It's a conventions problem, and it's exactly what one-on-one time is good for. We'll say what a full-mark answer looks like, have the student write one, and then have them write the next one unprompted. Progress here tends to be faster and more visible than content re-teaching, because the underlying understanding was already in place.

Subjects

• Math tutoring — Elementary number sense through calculus and linear algebra.
• English tutoring — Reading, essay structure, analysis and academic writing.
• Chemistry tutoring — Stoichiometry, bonding, equilibrium and thermochemistry.
• Biology tutoring — Cells, genetics, physiology, ecology and evolution.
• Physics tutoring — Kinematics, forces, energy, circuits and modern physics.

How online sessions work

Sessions run over Zoom, where our tutors use an interactive whiteboard. The board — diagrams, derivations, essay skeletons, worked examples — is saved and sent afterwards so nothing has to be reconstructed from memory.

Before the first session we ask for the course outline, recent tests or assignments and a short description of the problem, so we can plan around the school's own unit sequence and assessment dates rather than running a parallel course. Progress is tracked topic by topic and reported to parents in plain language. Technically, a computer with a stable internet connection and a quiet space are all that's required.

We work with families across different time zones and will find a time that suits your student's schedule; times are arranged individually with each family.

Rates

Rates below are in Canadian dollars. Online sessions carry no travel fee.