Philosophy, history, world religions, psychology: building meaning by exploring the awesomeness, awfulness, and weirdness of the world.

I teach you to eat books.

Upon finishing this class, you will read better.  You’ll be a stronger, more flexible, and more intelligent reader.  More specifically, you’ll be able to –

speed-read texts around twice as quickly as you do now
make sense of totally new words, slicing them apart into prefixes, roots, and suffixes
stay awake when you read, turning reading into a conversation with the author
attack a book, quickly grasping its thesis and major arguments
simplify convoluted sentences, turning unwieldy beasts like:”By contrast, the media did everything in its power to build up and sustain the beatific myth of John F. Kennedy, throughout his life and long after his death, until it finally collapsed in ruins under the weight of incontrovertible evidence,” into “The media did every to sustain the myth of JFK, until it collapsed.“
approach every text with a plan, deciding how to fit your reading strategy to your needs

The skills learned here strengthen the reading you do in and out of school, and will improve your scores on standardized tests.

Students routinely fall behind in math because schools let fundamental skills shrivel and die.

Math is complex, but it’s structured:  trigonometry assumes geometry, which assumes algebra, which assumes basic arithmetic.  Picture a pyramid, with the hard math on top, supported by the base skills.

When the bases are secure, students can focus on the higher concepts.  But when those skills are insecure, students must simultaneously re-learn them when learning new material.  It’s confusing, and difficult.

Worse, students are set up to fail: classrooms assume that students will forever retain the basic skills they learn in K-8.  Cognitive science assures us they won’t: the brain is efficient, and dissolves anything it’s not using.  I’ve seen honors students who can’t add fractions or multiply by 10.

This course fixes that.  In eight brief sessions, it trains students to do difficult addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in their heads without stress.

When the topic of the SAT comes up, homeschoolers usually sigh or curse under their breath.  Test prep companies have led us to believe that the secrets to a good score are arcane tricks and byzantine guessing strategies.  They lie. If we approach the test properly, homeschoolers can expertly prepare for the SAT without selling out on our educational values.

Homeschoolers are actually in an exciting position to prepare for the test: a student who is accustomed to taking her education into her own hands can study much better than a schooled kid in a big-name class.  The test actually rewards thoughtfulness, inventiveness, and curiosity – traits homeschoolers have in spades!  Done well, SAT prep can be a meaningful capstone to a homeschooling adventure.

I’m ridiculously excited to show groups of homeschoolers how to do exactly this – to set up structures of expert practice that translate to impressive gains on the SAT.

In a pair of 2½-hour meetings, I can teach you how to –

tie together great test-prep books into a seamless system
identify the information the SAT tests, and assess whether you know it or need to learn it
systematically stretch your mathematical problem-solving abilities
organically grow your vocabulary by leaps & bounds
train yourself to spot grammar errors
limit test-taking stress
fold in practice for SAT reading, math, and writing into all your studies