meet bowtie.school

Welcome to bowtie.school. Our team of highly experienced, professional graduates have made teaching their full time career. At bowtie.school, students work with a primary teacher who then collaborates with our whole team in order to offer the best, curated educational experience. Every class is tailored to our students’ unique needs and interests. With over 30 years of combined tutoring and teaching experience, our students thrive with the support of our team’s shared skills and complementary expertise.

Thomas Antonio Theriault Martinez de Saavedra, BSc

Tom has been teaching students across the globe for a number of year while traveling the world himself. He’s lived on the west coast, in Cádiz, in the Canadian prairies, in the Canary Islands, and now resides in Montréal, Quebec. He hopes to continue traveling and to share unique local knowledge from every corner of the globe with his students. Outside of the classroom, Tom enjoys perfecting recipes, practicing guitar, befriending cats, and haunting the local second-hand bookstores. Tom is perfectly bilingual in Spanish and English, and he’s working hard to master Japanese and French. Tom has a Bachelor of Science, but his favourite subjects to teach are secondary mathematics and music.

Emil A. West, BA

Emil has been working with students since they graduated from highschool themselves over a decade ago. A generalist with a keen interest in all subject areas, Emil struggled to find the right niche in university. They studied a little chemistry, biology, and French before finally settling into English creative writing, which they graduated from with distinction. Emil particularly enjoys helping students to apply English language arts (ELA) analysis skills to thinking about forms of media (like video games) that are generally left out of traditional classrooms. Outside of class, Emil loves drawing, camping, and engaging with narratives of all kinds. Emil grew up in Alberta, has lived abroad in France, but has been living in Montreal, QC for the last 10 years. Emil’s first language is English, and they are fluent in French. They are currently studying Spanish while continuing to master French. Emil has studied education and learning at the Master’s level at McGill University. Their research has focused on delivering culturally relevant pedagogy to students who are underserved by traditional curriculum practices. Their favourite subjects to teach are bowtie.basics (English and math), secondary ELA, and chemistry.

Travis J. West, BFA, MA

Travis has been teaching for years, both privately and in the classroom at McGill University. Travis started as a musician, but after earning a Jazz performance degree on piano and a Bachelor of Fine Arts in music composition, he pivoted hard into computer science. Travis has been working as a researcher, teacher, developer, and programmer for the past five years. Travis prefers project-based learning, and he takes on programming students with clear artistic or technological goals who need help building their skills to fully realize their objectives. He frequently works with adult artists with grants from Canada or Quebec who need to implement technology in their project. Even outside of the classroom, Travis is an avid researcher who is constantly finding something new to learn. He also enjoys playing videogames and jamming on melodica, trombone, ukulele, and more. Like Tom and Emil, Travis grew up in western Canada, has lived in Europe, and is now settled in Montreal, QC. Travis is fluently bilingual in English and French, and he’s currently learning Mandarin. Travis has a Master of Arts degree in music technology, and is nearing completion of his a Philosophical Doctorate in computer science and music. Travis’s favourite subjects to teach are calculus, creating coding, and electronics.