Geek SAT

“The few, the proud, the geeky.” – Lisa Simpson

Curious about all things intellectual? Like an environment where you don’t need the fact you find thinking fun?

Want to ace your SAT?

I’m an independent test coach and proud nerd. I scored 10 points away from a perfect score on my high school PSAT and SAT, and have refined teaching the test in the years since college. In those years, I’ve been appalled by the slip-shod, dull way the test is usually taught.

It’s commonly said that the SAT measures only one thing: your ability to take the SAT. Operating with this thought, test-prep companies often “teach to the test” apologetically: “Sorry you have to learn the subjunctive mood, but…”

Our class refuses this. Granted, the SAT is in many ways a pointless, stupid test, but acing it requires mastering whole worlds of fascinating material:

Did you know that English has twelve tenses, each necessary for a different situation? Did you know that the secret to reading dense text is spotting prepositional phrases and conjunctive adverbs? Do you know that all algebra problems can be translated to arithmetic, and that doing so can make high-level SAT math problems blindingly simple?

Learning such things is FUN. Our goal will be getting a perfect score – we’re just going to have a fun time getting there.

I’m running classes and one-on-one tutoring throughout the summer and fall for the October 4th SAT and October 14th and 17th PSAT. (Scoring in the top 1% of the PSAT can land you (a National Merit Scholarship), which is worth $2,500 and a full tuition waiver at a number of state universities. It’s useful.)

What makes this class different?
This course is specially-tuned for students who fear the boredom of the typical classroom:

* While mainstream classes preach a “one-size-fits-all” strategy, we’ll explore different strategies, customizing and adopting only those that work for us.
* While mainstream classes hold the SAT to be unrelated to the rest of education, we’ll train in skills that will be directly applicable to AP classes and university life. We’ll cover speed-reading, deep reading, and the perfect combination of the two that will crack open SAT passages. Even while keeping our eyes on the test, we’ll be engaging in serious college-prep.
(Our exploration of Critical Reading will be based on a class I taught at the University of Washington titled “Read Better: Mastering Reading as an Intellectual Discipline.” One Honors senior wrote of the class, “I wish I would have taken this course as a freshman – it would have changed the entire course of my undergraduate career.”)
* While mainstream classes aim for competency, our target is mastery. We’ll zero in on mistakes and learn from them, practicing and re-practicing until we’re confident that we would quickly get a similar problem correct.
* While mainstream classes assume you’ll be too bored to holistically learn about the making of the SAT, we’ll assume your curiosity. You’ll see inside the test, into its arguably racist origins, its questionable meaning, and its effect on social equity in America.

What will we do?
For the Critical Reading section, you’ll be prepared for college-level reading. You’ll learn sentence-, paragraph-, and passage-level comprehension from Mortimer Adler’s classic How to Read a Book. Along the way, you’ll also declare war on the English language (learning and memorizing every new word you run across) and learn to recognize over a hundred Greek and Latin roots.

For the Math section, you’ll learn how to translate complex problems into simple ones. You’ll perfect the basic questions that reoccur again and again, explore and improve your conceptual weaknesses, and learn general problem-solving skills from mathematician G. Polya’s famous How to Solve It. We’ll operate on the conviction that “math is good for the brain,” and that getting really good at it is as fun as all heck.

For the Writing section, you’ll learn some hardcore grammar, becoming proficient at basic sentence diagrams to visually learn how phrases and clauses weave together. As you’ve heard, schools today don’t teach grammar: we’ll fix that in a few sessions. From Gerald Graff’s celebrated They Say / I Say: The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing, you’ll learn how to wow the essay graders by digging deep into the prompt’s ideas. What we cover will help you spit out great essays in college.

Who should apply?
If you’re interested, you’ll want to:

love learning fascinating things,
get a kick out of honing your reasoning skills,
look forward to real intellectual challenge, and
be at least a little excited at the prospect of hacking America’s most feared standardized test.

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