Prices

ONE-ON-ONE COACHING

Lessons are $90 each, and last 90 minutes.  I’m committed to custom-fitting my instruction to work around your schedule.

I recommend, though, 8 weekly lessons, and will give a discount for that: 8 lessons for $630. Payments can be made ahead of time, or at each lesson.

(If you need to cancel a lesson, please do so at least 24 hours in advance.  Cancellations made later than that pay a $45 fee; no-shows are asked to pay the price of the lesson.)

Where do you meet?

We’ll meet at the Roy Street Coffee and Tea house, in Capitol Hill, Seattle: a pleasant environment with free parking.

Interested?  Have questions?  Contact me for a free consultation, where I can lay out the course in person.

SMALL-GROUP COACHING

The 8-lesson course costs $450.  Lessons are 2 hours long, and are in the meeting room of Roy Street Coffee and Tea house, in Capitol Hill, Seattle: a pleasant environment with free parking.  Groups are limited to 4 students.

Are discounts available?

If you enter the group with a study-buddy (an acquaintance who you meet with once a week to review), I’ll give you a $50 discount.

Interested?  Have questions?  Contact me for a free consultation, where I can lay out the course in person.

Why This Class?

Students are not taught to read.

After teaching simple decoding skills in 1st-4th grade, schools cease to formally teach comprehension.  Students are expected to further build skill on their own.  Some, those who enjoy reading and constantly seek out challenging texts, do.  Others, the great majority, don’t.  Their mastery remains slipshod, and they struggle in high school, on standardized tests, and in college.

But reading is a skill, like anything else: an especially complex skill, but one that can be built by focused practice.

The class pushes students to the limits of their comprehension ability, because it’s at the edge of ability that talent is developed.  The class also provides coaching: a dedicated instructor who moves from student to student, diagnosing troubles and recommending solutions.

Schools don’t provide it, and college requires it.  I’m proud to teach reading at the highest level.

My Story

This course comes directly from my own struggles as a reader.

One problem I had was the sheer amount of text my classes gave me each week.  I’ll show you how to beat this with speed-reading: you’ll whisk through text to soak up the major ideas.  For many class assignments, this browsing will be enough; for others, it will prepare you to go back and zoom in on the details.

Another problem was convoluted grammar: I read, and re-read, but still couldn’t figure out what was being said.  One typical sentence ran –

In working toward an expansion of the conceptual envelope in which our studies take place, one can, of course, move in a great number of directions, and perhaps the most important initial problem is to avoid setting out, like Stephen Leacock’s mounted policeman, in all of them at once.

I returned to class utterly defeated.  Since then, I’ve hacked English grammar, and will train you to read for sentence structure. You’ll naturally see such sentences in their simplified forms, such as –

In working toward an expansion of the conceptual envelope in which our studies take place, One can, of course, move in a great number of directions. and perhaps The most important initial problem is to avoid setting out, like Stephen Leacock’s mounted policeman, in all of them at once.

A third problem was dense webs of ideas. I routinely became lost in my class books, losing the author’s thread of reasoning, and mistaking examples for arguments.  One semester, I came to class every week only to discover that I had fully misinterpreted the reading.  Infuriating!

I’ll train you to dissect books, breaking them down and chunking them up to see the overall pattern of an author’s ideas.

A final problem was memory: I didn’t carry what I learned from one class to another.  Like many people, my education ended up being largely disconnected and short-lasting.  I’ll train you to keep a system of reading, distilling, and reviewing that will make it easy to complete your readings, read them well, and remember them forever (or at least ’til you die).

I squirmed, I struggled, I ended up pulling a summa cum laude in two bachelor’s degrees.  My overwhelming interest in my studies pulled me through.  But I was confused, and irritated, that I had experienced such a hard time.

I can help you make it easier.

What You’ll be able to do…

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.