High School
If you are of high school age, you are no doubt used to acronyms by now. Keep your GPA high, they say. Bulk up your transcript with some APs. Study hard for the SAT — and maybe the ACT, too — and you just might make it to UCLA. And while you’re at it, try to earn your freedom from the DMV. This is the first (but certainly not the last) barrage of acronyms that life will throw at you, deceptive in the way they make things sound quick and painless when they are anything but. You may have realized by now that high school is when all adolescent pressure reaches its climax. Your parents urge you to meet your potential. Teachers hand back your essays with red ink crowding the margins. Your college counselor presents you with a fresh copy of your transcript, like a lawyer showing you the evidence in your case, the verdict to be decided by a panel of judges whose courtroom you are not allowed to enter. Of course, if you are a student with that certain “it thing” — that ability to pull off an effortless 4.0 — then none of this is a problem, and you can stop reading. But if you’re like the rest of us, you have to struggle to succeed, and you worry that you can’t do it alone.
That’s fine. In fact, it’s more than fine. It’s human. We can do good things by ourselves, but never great things unless we depend on the help of friends and, occasionally, the kindness of strangers. School is no exception to this rule. If you’re not performing academically at the level you want for yourself, don’t fret. Congratulate yourself on having high standards, be assured that there are, indeed, people who want to help you, and then go looking for it. As you’re reading this, you have probably already reached this step. Congratulations!
At the Study Hut, we make it our job to help you in whatever capacity we can. Whatever your struggle may be — organizing your work, outlining essays, dissecting novels, conquering multiple choice tests, graphing logarithmic functions — our tutors are committed to seeing you through the work and trying to help you have fun as you do it. School can be so bewildering and frustrating that at some point we all find ourselves asking, “What is the point of all this?” As students who have been through college and emerged on the other side, our tutors know that there is a point to it all, but also that every student must discover what that is on his or her own terms.
Tutoring at the Study Hut, therefore, aims at the individual (if the group model of classroom teaching were fully effective, you wouldn’t need our help). All our sessions are one-on-one, and we take great care to pair each student with the tutor that he or she is best suited to, with whom he or she has a rapport strong enough to make even the toughest schoolwork easier to swallow. What we offer, and which a classroom cannot, is coaching tailored to match the way you study best, attuned to your personality. There is also, of course, the fact that we’re all recent college graduates, and almost all of us grew up in the South Bay. There’s a good chance that you’ll be matched with a tutor who went to the same high school you attend. We’re far enough along in our education to understand your subjects solidly, but young enough to remember what it felt like to be in your position.
There is a persistent and cruel belief that asking for help is shameful, when it is just the opposite. If you’ve reached the point at which you can envision yourself doing better but cannot find your way there alone, come to us, and we’ll help you along to the next stage.
