Middle School

For students who need extra help mastering middle school, the Study Hut is an ideal solution. Teachers are often too busy to help, with their attention diffused across several classes and hundreds of students. Parents want to help, but for many of them middle school is now too remote — they may not even remember how they learned their subjects, much less how to teach them. At the Study Hut, our entire routine revolves around education, and all of our sessions are one-on-one, so neither attention nor intimacy with material is a problem.

We sport a staff of recent college graduates who bring to their work fully rounded and developed educations, and thus a sheer love of learning mixed with a worldly pragmatism. That is to say: they come to work enthusiastic about what they teach, yet they have reached that vantage point at which they can see all of middle school education within the “big picture.” In short, they know which points to emphasize. Also, because they are young-at-heart, our tutors have an easy time identifying with and gaining trust from adolescent students — they tend to see us as versions of themselves just a bit further down the road, more as friends eager to help than as estranged adults trying to force-feed them an education. On the fronts of liveliness and maturity — fresh instruction and intellectual maturity — we like to say that we have it both ways.

We also commit ourselves to encouraging the values on which a good and lasting education depends: enthusiasm and discipline. Many students come to us with bright minds but disparately bad grades. What accounts for this? A lack of these values. Even the finest car in the world will not last long if the owner hasn’t the will to manage and maintain it. So we incorporate a routine of discipline in our tutoring, requiring not only that students do their work well, but also that they keep their studies organized and time well-budgeted. This is a crucial skill often learned, or at least honed, in middle school. In elementary school, students have a scaffolding of support, and while that scaffolding is still present in middle school, it’s much lighter. And they need to perfect organization and budgeting before high school.

Students who come to us should expect to be held accountable for the conditions of their planners and backpacks. And we find that enthusiasm usually follows — when students can harness and organize their academic lives, the chaos evaporates and they can get down to actually having fun with their material. Whatever a student’s problems are — whether with material or the management of it, or both — the Study Hut is here to help.