ACADEMIC TUTORING
Course grades are absurdly important, especially now in the age of test-optional college applications; but being a ______, competent person with common sense and a soul is important too. (Make this dramatically more casual)
Our academic tutoring program builds solid foundations through the whole process of learning – from motivation, to strategy, to comprehension, to execution – cultivating the critical thinking skills essential to success in middle school, high school, college, and beyond.You’ll get better grades, and you’ll do it by finding the genuine value in your coursework.
Thoughtful, curious, discerning, skills to achieve them
OUR PHILOSOPHY
INDIVIDUALIZATION
When you invest in tutoring hours, you’re paying a premium for 1-on-1 time. If the instruction you receive isn’t specifically tailored to your learning style, your interests, and your areas of growth, you might as well be in a 200-person lecture hall.
So our work together will start with a conversation about all those things. Who was the best teacher you’ve ever had? What were they like? What kind of thinking are you best at? What do you want to get better at? When you’ve got a Sunday afternoon completely free of responsibilities, how do you spend your time?
Our sessions will be shaped around you. If you’re a younger client learning how to read, we might provide coloring pages and activities to break up each session, and assign sentences with challenge words to practice between sessions. If you’re a high schooler who needs help with social studies, we might target core research skills, skimming and close reading techniques, or help you craft a detailed study plan leading up to the AP exams.
Regardless of age, we’ll have periodic check-ins with you and your parents to evaluate your changing needs, and to track measurable progress in the form of better grades and deeper engagement.
DEEP LEARNING
Academic tutoring has two core objectives: the short-term aim to improve grades, and the long-term aim to increase self-sufficiency.
Sometimes these aims pull against one another, but more often than not the best way to improve your grades is to bolster your deep learning foundations. Memorizing formulas won’t help your grades much if you’re convinced chem is pointless. Dedication and hard work are wasted if you’ve misunderstood key concepts. Perfectly-completed homework assignments count for nothing if they get lost in the jumble of papers at the bottom of your backpack.
So if you’re zoning out while we’re working through your Bio homework, we won’t just feed you answers for the sake of completing your worksheet. Instead, we’ll pull back and help you appreciate the real-world value of the topic at hand. Your assignments will become less torturous, and in class the next day you might even raise your hand instead of sleeping on it.
If you’re struggling with a math problem, we won’t make any assumptions about your knowledge or innate ability. Instead, we’ll ask you diagnostic questions to pinpoint the concepts you’re missing, strengthen those pillars, then build back up to the original problem from a position of solidity.
OUR SUBJECTS
AP Courses
AP English Literature & Language
AP Comparative Government
AP U.S. Government
AP History (World, European, US) (Zahra only)
AP Human Geography (Zahra only)
AP Microeconomics (Mike only)
AP Psychology
AP Calculus AB (Mike only)
AP Physics 1 (Mike only)
NOn-AP COURSES
All English content without exception
All Social Studies content without exception
Math through AB Calculus (Mike only, after Alg. 2)
All Science content without exceptionCapstone & Senior projects
…plus a number of lessons we’ve developed ourselves introducing students to the most entertaining and important ideas in the Humanities and Social Sciences
We don’t teach: any languages (blame our parents!), any AP courses not listed, programming, computer science, art, music, dance, boogie boarding