Carly the great!

We're so proud of Carly Kizorek for her recent feature in Nelson's Today as an "International Filmmaker and Tutor"!



Not many math tutors have also produced films about students in Liberia, Ethiopia, and Tanzania. duate from North Central College, Carly has worked in ten countries in the last twelve months. She has also written a book about her adventures, already in print and soon out on the iPad.

Although her day-to-day work is as a private math tutor in the western suburbs of Chicago, she just had to submit her passport to the State Department for them to put in extra pages. “One of the problems,” according to Carly, “is that half the countries I visit have visas that fill up an entire page of the passport, so the pages fill up quickly.”

“To say I have an interesting life is an understatement,” she went on to say. “Two of the last films I produced involved bringing to life the work of two international organizations, IRC and IIRR. For IRC, I went to Ganta, in northern Liberia, to show how the International Rescue Committee uses special teaching techniques that are specific to children whose lives have been disrupted by war or disasters. In southern Ethiopia, I had to travel for 14 hours over fog-shrouded mountains and arid, camel-filled valleys before finally getting to where the schools were located. There, the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction set up programs to follow pastoral (animal herding) families around providing teachers for the children. The curriculum and teaching hours were customized to fit into the work activities of the kids.”

After the trips, Carly comes back to her video production studio in Lisle and works with professional editors, directs the post production, chooses music and voice actors, and creates compelling documentary films.

Carly is not bashful about her observations on the public school system. “Each teacher has between 90 and 150 students every day and even the best teachers aren’t able to spend an hour of one-on-one time with each student. That is what I love about tutoring–I get that hour to find small pieces of missing information that the kid needs to really understand the material.”