John Michael MacDonald, GMAT, GRE, and EA Tutor
John Michael is one of the world’s most versatile teachers, with more than two decades of experience teaching standardized test prep, history, literature, and theater, among other topics. John Michael is also an accomplished actor, with more than 25 professional credits over the course of his career.
John Michael’s teaching career began in 2001, when he developed and taught geometry and history courses at an elite high school. Since then, John Michael has taught a wide range of topics on four continents, including more than a decade as an instructor for GRE, GMAT, SAT, and ACT courses. Though John Michael currently resides in London, he has taught classes in Qatar, Spain, Switzerland, Nigeria, and the United States.
John Michael has always had an unconventional streak, and he left Yale University after one year to attend St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which is one of the world’s few remaining Great Books schools. He received the only diploma that St. John’s offers: a BA in Liberal Arts, which is something like a double major in Philosophy and Comparative Literature with a minor in History of Mathematics.
During his time at St. Johns’s, John Michael developed a lifelong addiction to theater, and he eventually moved to the U.K. to study at the London International School of Performing Arts. If you want to sound fancy, you could say that he studied Lecoq-based actor-created theater; if you don’t want to sound fancy, you could say that he attended clown school.
Though John Michael rarely wears clown shoes these days, he remains active as a stage actor, producer, and voice-over actor, and he has accumulated more than 25 professional acting credits over the course of his career. He has also taught Shakespeare from Florida to Alaska, and most places in between.
When he isn’t busy tutoring or entertaining theatergoers, John Michael loves reading Ellen Raskin novels, dazzling his coworkers with his encyclopedic knowledge of silent films, cooking Italian meals, and concocting rye-based cocktails.