For as long as I’ve been tutoring students for admissions tests, I’ve been writing materials to use in session. It started innocently enough: I wanted to work with a student on shape geometry during our lesson. I didn’t just want to throw problems at him and walk him through how to do them. I wanted him to remember the problem-solving techniques we used so that he could use those tools on problems in the future. I wrote a three page chapter on triangles, and much of what went into that first Word document lives on, more than a decade later, in our SAT and ACT books.
Why do we write our own materials? The easy answer is that we’re not completely satisfied with the books that are out there. That answer is appropriately snappy, but it’s definitely not the whole truth. The real answer is that we have our own style, our own philosophy about how students learn best. Our crazy idea is that students learn best when they are engaged. Teach people in a way…
• that is relevant to them
• that’s funny
• that shows them why the content is valuable to them
…and the result is that student learn the material so that it becomes central to them. They don’t just memorize; they understand.
That is why we write our own books. Our students deserve it.
