American History

Did your son or daughter get the football coach? Are they struggling in a social studies class? Do they struggle to understand relationships between events, take useful notes in lectures, write compelling essays, or even make sense of their textbook? Do they find class dull? Are you worried that this portends badly for their performance in college?

I love to help students excel at history. I’m a professional SAT/WASL tutor, and would love to help your student improve their performance in their history class.

Some of my methods include:

- Constructing simple timelines with students so they can see how events relate to each other. Then, when students learn new information, they can add to it on the timeline. Having a visual layout helps many students get their bearings.

- Teaching intelligent note-taking and review. Students who know how to combine their knowledge from lectures and textbooks and review it effectively waltz through chapter and year-end tests (like the AP and SAT Subject Tests).

- Editing class essays before the teacher sees them. I admit to being particularly good at this. A few years ago I was thanked by an ‘A’ student at Arizona’s most prestigious girls school (the same John McCain sent his daughter to) for carefully pouring over her writing and giving extensive suggestions. She told me she had never had a teacher do that before.

- Interpreting primary sources. I show students how approach texts from with the “hermeneutic diamond”, understanding the four factors of Author, Audience, Ideological context, and Social context when making sense of any document.

- Enchanting students with the complex, tendentious, and ultimately challenging scope of U.S. history. I avoid one-sided summaries (both "America is the world's last, best hope" and "America is a stinking hole of oppression") in favor of forcing students to forge their own balanced interpretations.

- Teaching advanced reading skills. I’ve adapted this from a class I teach at the University of Washington. We’ll turn passive reading into conversation by asking questions of the text, use a textbook’s headings and boldfaced words to crack open the meaning of a section, and decode especially difficult sentences. Students are trained to find the main subject and verb of difficult sentences.

For example, here’s the opening of the U.S. Constitution, which many have memorized but few have understood:

“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Students have a difficult time with this misreading the sentence to say “We… establish justice.” But it’s not – after simply crossing off participle phrases, we find:

“We... establish this Constitution.”

Now students can see that those long phrases in the middle are reasons why the Constitution is being established. I also teach speed-reading.

I'm a summa cum laude graduate of the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State, a published writer and professional editor, and a philosophy teacher for gifted students. This fall, I’m applying to graduate programs in the history of education.

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