|
|
 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 is currently pursuing his PhD in Mathematics at the University of Washington. His full bio is forthcoming. 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. |