The concept of flow might be the most single important element of style since cavemen picked up the chisel. I generally advise that your reader is like a dim-witted five year-old with a short attention span and little interest in...

“If a student is unmotivated, you might as well not even teach them, because dead cats aren’t good learners.” -Probably Mark Twain Diagnosing a student’s motivation can be difficult, and yet any teacher will tell you without an understanding of...

I often see a shortcoming in the instruction involved in integrating evidence in analytical essay in high school teaching. There is this notion that you have to have a complete sentence followed by a colon to introduce text. This understanding...

We have three kids that are all in different orbits. The girl is almost eight: so think multiplication tables, maps of Africa, and Harry Potter. The boy is just four and is learning the alphabet and how to count to...

At a fundamental level, it’s really simple. Your topic sentence, or first sentence of every body paragraph, should serve three basic roles: Explain concisely and clearly everything that happens in the paragraph that follows. On some level it is an...

In the midst of the coronavirus crisis, who knows when the college board will resume testing. They’ve cancelled SAT tests for the spring, and the fall is anyone’s guess. But one thing is certain: they will eventually. While it may...

I’ve never had so much time, or so little. Social distancing has eliminated a lot of typical time draws: commuting, dropping kids off at school, running errands, shopping. It would seem a good time for mental accounting, and yet the...

Helpful Tip: While I’ve experimented with Kaplan, College Board, Princeton Review, etc, the guidebook I’ve settled on is the Peterson’s. It has a diagnostic test that divides up questions by type and then provides the content and sample questions that...

Be sure to secure the area you will be tutoring in from outside distractions: children, pets, acts of God. While it’s customary to have the occasional distraction, it will signal to the student that they can take the same liberties...

Directly after the session, be sure to write down a quick summary of the session in the log that you’re using, or even just for your own records. It doesn’t necessarily have to be involved, even just a sentence or...