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 Joh Howard - Founder, Co-president, Mentor.After graduating valedictorian of a large public school in California, Joh completed his undergraduate work at UW in Finance Economics. He was originally trained in SAT/ACT tutoring by the Princeton Review before moving on to Kristin Leeson tutoring in Madison Park, for whom he developed a unique reading program. He tutored for three years in standardized test prep before starting his own model of developmental mentoring three years ago. His evolving educational theory and model is rooted in theories of psychology and anthropology, and he has begun to prepare graduate work in the field of educational psychology. Joh teaches across all major subject areas. Kate Chapman - Co-president, Mentor.Kate attended Bush middle school and Lakeside upper school, moving on to Bard and UW before settling at Reed, where she completed her work in Russian Studies and General Linguistics. Having written her undergraduate thesis using play as a model for the work of Soviet author Daniil Kharms, Kate is especially interested in current theories surrounding the contribution of unstructured play to emotional and cognitive development. Kate's intellectual nature is augmented by her liberal arts education, and she is able to work across all subject areas. She is an equal partner in the company and contributes significantly to its theories and models of education through her linguistics and philosophy background. Justin Tittelfitz - Math Specialist.Justin attended a small private high school in Utah, a large public one in Oregon, and then spent the next few years working with adults with autism. After this, he enrolled at a community college, where he was romanced by calculus. He transferred to the University of Oregon, and graduated summa cum laude in Mathematics, with minors in Physics and Computer Science. Currently, he is pursuing a PhD in Mathematics at the UW, and was awarded a Masters en route. While at the University, he been a T.A. for numerous calculus courses, and is also given the opportunity to teach his own courses on occasion. He has worked as a tutor for over seven years; his first position was with the drop-in center at the community college mentioned earlier. At the center of his approach to teaching is a belief that success in math comes in equal parts from good technique, strong conceptual understanding, self-confidence and developing motivations beyond requirement. Jeff Ridenour - Test-prep Specialist, Mentor.Jeff graduated salutatorian from a large public school in Texas and went on to attend the University of Texas at Austin where he studied linguistics, Spanish, and biology. During that time he took a year off from his studies and taught 5th & 6th grade science and language arts at a bilingual school in Honduras. After graduating from UT with high honors, he lived with a nomadic people for two years in the Himalayas studying their culture and language. There he became very interested in the oral transmission of knowledge using stories, proverbs, and songs. Afterwards, he received his Masters in linguistics at the UW where he taught Spanish and linguistics. His thesis concerned syntactic variation tested on the ACT & SAT. He has coached students on various standardized tests for three years with the Princeton Review and currently teaches Spanish part-time at Hillside Student Community. Talia Henze - French Specialist.Talia attended public high school in a small town in Eastern Washington before finishing a Bachelors of Arts in French and a Bachelors of Science in Geophysics at Western Washington University. She lived in France for three and a half years (in the Loire River Valley, Normandy and Paris), first as a student and then teaching English, during which time she gained bilingual fluency in French. She taught for a year in a high school and then for a year and a half as a TEFL-certified teacher in a business language school for adults. After coming back from France, she completed a Masters of Urban Planning at the University of Washington and now works full time as a planning consultant. She has enjoyed a variety of other opportunities to instruct in addition to her English teaching experience: as ski instructor at the age of 17, as a T.A. for field geology and meteorology classes at Western, and as a T.A. for an introductory statistics class at UW. Talia is particularly interested in helping students improve their French conversation, listening, speaking, and grammar skills. Michael Shilling - Writing Specialist.Michael Shilling went to a public school outside of New York City before earning a B.A. in English at NYU. He also received an M.F.A. in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, after which he spent three years as a Lecturer in the English Department and the Sweetland Center for Writers, a nationally-known composition and rhetoric center. While at Michigan, he was also a Writer In Residence at Longfellow Middle School in Detroit, teaching poetry and fiction, and he is on the faculty of The Writer's Workshop, a Seattle-based online writing school. Rock Bottom, his debut novel, was published in 2009 by Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, and his short fiction and arts criticism have appeared in The Sun, Fugue, Other Voices, and The Stranger, as well as on MSN Music. Michael is especially interested in helping young writers learn how to express themselves on the page in complex, well-organized prose that develops their critical thinking and creativity, while focusing on matters of audience and purpose. |