Evan Carlisle

Hello everyone, my name is Evan Carlisle. I'm a tutor currently living in Taipei, Taiwan with over 4 years of experience teaching test preparation, mainly focusing on ACT. After graduating from The University of Florida with a Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) in Linguistics and minors in Chinese and Teaching English as a Second Language, I decided to continue down the path of learning Chinese and move to Taipei. I started work with The Princeton Review Taiwan in 2015, and I was trained to teach the SAT, ACT, and TOEFL. Since then I have had the opportunity to be trained on the Kaplan platform as well. Through these experiences, I have been able to draw insight from two of the leading names in the test prep industry. I've also used a great deal of other materials and have developed an awareness of what sort of materials are available, how to best utilize them, and what to avoid.

I know that upon first glance, there seems to be so many different things to worry about when preparing for a test like the ACT. I never thought I would be helping students prepare for the ACT for as long as I have been. I do not like this test. However, I have the desire to help students get through the experience of preparing for and taking this test as fast as possible, and I've been doing this for long enough that I'm confident that I can provide that guidance. I want to keep students from having to take the test multiple times and spending months agonizing over their score. There are so many more important things for high school students to be spending their time on, and I hope to help them make sure that ACT detracts as little as possible from their time.

I've worked with students from many different backgrounds, from non-native English speakers with limited explicit knowledge of English grammar to American students who were raised speaking English and can read a sentence and tell me they know there is a grammatical error because "it just sounds weird." In each case, my fundamental approach to helping students succeed on this test is to set them on the course to doing informed practice and rigorous critical review. When approaching the ACT for the firs time, understanding what it is testing is incredibly important. Once a student is familiar with what is being tested, he or she can practice and will have the tools needed to critically review each mistake that was made with the ability to discern which concept(s) was/were being tested. 

As an instructor I try to build a relaxed atmosphere where questions are welcome and encouraged. Woven throughout my lessons are constant reminders of the opportunities students are creating from themselves by preparing for and taking the ACT, but I try and keep things very laid back because I think students need to take a calm approach to taking this test.