We are proud to announce that next year, we will be offering our first ever Study Hut ACT Group Course.

With the growing popularity of the ACT, we are now offering a course to get your student ready for the test coming next Spring on June 9th. Here are the details:

The course runs April 30th through June 6th.

It meets Monday and Wednesday nights from 7-9 pm (24 hours total)

It includes two full-length practice tests, and assignments catered to your student’s weaknesses.

This course is very similar in structure to our popular small group SAT course, which has been showing excellent improvement in student’s scores across the board. This is NOT a huge classroom or an overwhelming environment. Our SAT and ACT group courses are conducted in a small office, with a maximum of 10 students. Our instructors are young, fresh, smart, and witty, and we all have one thing in common: we know how to dominate both the SAT and the ACT.

Please email rob@studyhut.com or call us at the Hut – (310)-546-2408 to sign up or get any questions answered.

I remember when I was a Mira Costa high School student, summer just starting, tried to forget about school as much as I could.  This behavior is quite common among high school student.  This ultimately would result with most of my friends and I spending the last weeks of summer reading non-stop all of our assigned summer reading books.  As my family usually chooses to go on our family summer vacation during those weeks, my memory of those vacations is marred with memories of: If Beagle Street Could Talk, The Crucible, An Affair to Remember, One Flew Over the Cookoo’s Nest, and the other books our teachers said we needed to read.

Looking back I wished I started reading those books earlier in the summer.  There was no real need to wait so long.  I have heard kids make the excuse that if they start reading early in the summer they won’t remember the details and promptly fail the “rigorous” summer reading tests.  While that line of reasoning seems quite logical, it’s also been accounted for by the Mira Costa English teachers.  The summer reading tests are very simple short multiple choice exams, asking easy basic plot questions; the point is to just make sure that the taker simply had read the book.   Over the first few weeks class time is spent reviewing the summer reading books preparing the students for a more involved analytical essay.   So there is no advantage of cramming all the reading in the last weeks of summer.  Instead, start those books right now.  Read when you can.  Find your-self with a spare hour or two at home with no plans?  Spend some of that time on your summer reading.  By reading a few hours at a time throughout the whole summer you can easily avoid cramming them all at the end.  And in my case, I could have enjoyed my summer vacations much more.

Well-roundedness—it seems like a harmless enough idea on paper, but the drive to become a “well-rounded” student is pushing today’s students to the limit.

Grades alone are no longer enough, so our kids are spreading themselves thin trying to be the combination of athlete, artist, musician and scholar that will catch a college’s attention. This is in addition to coping with being a teenager, which comes with its own slurry of issues.

Films like, “Race to Nowhere”, are bringing to light a problem that many parents and educators have been aware of for a while—our students have too many academic and extra-curricular responsibilities and not enough time for themselves. They spend so much time trying to be what colleges want that many don’t figure out what their own passions are, which leaves them vastly, and ironically, unprepared for college and the real world.

The Study Hut tutors, many not too far from our own high school experiences, understand the pressures that our students deal with inside and outside of the classroom. We know that our work is more than teaching academics and study skills. We take advantage of our positions as role models to help guide healthy emotional and social development, so when our students do decide where they want to go, they are able to get there.