The year 2012 brings many changes to the local Study Huts in your neighborhood. The high demands of students have made us expand not only in location but, hours as well. In the effort to provide quality one on one tutoring Study Hut is now open 7 days a week. This new radical change has taken over two years to come into effect. Before January 2012, students had the chance to come receive tutoring only Sunday Through Thursday. The small window of tutoring hours started to become inconvenient for our athletes, honor and extracurricular activity students. “Some kids with APs and sports can’t do weekdays and if they have band, theatre, or newspaper, then it’s super tough too”, informs our owner Robert Stone. These students have demanding schedules and sometimes could not squeeze in tutoring hours. As previous high school and middle school students the hut staff understand how demanding and exhausting this could be mentally and physically for the students. The changes are Friday and Saturday available days of tutoring and test preparation classes. “These are also the quietest days at the Hut, so there are advantages in the noise department as well”, states owner Sean Patrick. During the week it can become incredibly loud and for many students, the noise level is an extreme interruption of concentration.
The Study Hut has also become a huge asset in test taking preparation classes and has branched out in so many administered tests preparation of the nation. Included in the national tests, is our well known ACT and SAT preparation classes. In concurrence with weekends being open for tutoring, Fridays and Saturdays are also open for these test preparation classes. These classes give our students a huge advantage to learn the materials needed while tackling down their weekly courses as well. Nothing makes us happier here at your local hut than our students’ success in their classes. We pride ourselves in their academic goals and strive to make sure they meet their goals. So if we must stay open 7 days a week, so be it.
Adding an extra year to the original high school requirements is unnecessary for students. Although education is important to succeed in life, forcing students to attend an extra year of school does not guarantee that it will be beneficial. Instead of pushing for students to spend more time in school, they should be preparing for what they are going to be doing in their future. In other countries, students already know what they are going to pursue as a career when going into their fourth year of school. They spend the majority of the year preparing and getting accustomed to what they will be doing in the future. If these students had to attend another year of school, it would delay plans that they already have, and keep them from achieving what they want. Some students already know that going to college will not be an option for them. In Wisconsin, many teens will be taking over their parent’s farms or businesses. Attending an extra year of school is not necessary for the profession they will be going into, therefore it would just be a waste of time. I personally feel that attending another year of school would not be helpful, because students would not be motivated to attend or pay attention while they are in class. High school initially feels like it goes on forever, with an extra year of classes to attend, students could lose interest and not take academics as seriously as they did the first four years. If this results in a drop of a student’s GPA it could ruin their chances of getting into a college they could have originally attended. I believe that making high school five years, instead of the initial four, is unnecessary. Going to another year of school in retrospect might sound like a good idea at first, but in reality it is not beneficial for all students.
Hello! My name is Tori and I have been working at Study Hut for about two months now. I absolutely love it!! The environment and people here are so friendly and welcoming. I graduated from Mira Costa High School in 2007 and since then got my BA at San Diego State University and I am currently getting my teaching credential at CSU Long Beach. I love working with kids and this job is not only great practice for my future, but it is so rewarding. I now have about six students that I see on a regular basis, once or twice a week. I look forward to seeing them each week and helping them grow as a student. My students range from elementary to high school age and I have already learned so much from each and every one of them. Most often I help them study for a test. The first thing we do is gather all the material needed to study for the test. I ask them how they feel about the test and what material they know and what material they need to study more. From there we review all the material so that I can truly see what they do and do not know and we then start studying! I find flashcards to be the most helpful for any type of learner so I have my students make flashcards for the material they do not know. Depending on what kind of learner they are I either have them write down facts, draw pictures, or make acronyms in order to learn the material in a way they are most comfortable with. I then give my students anywhere from five to fifteen minutes to study the flashcards while I make a practice test for them. Once they are done studying I verbally quiz them on the material and then have them take a practice test towards the end of the session to see how much they have progressed; I usually see great improvement! I leave my students with words of encouragement, sometimes a to do list to finish studying, and another practice test for them to take closer to the time of the test. Well I am off to tutor now!
Ah, the SAT. No matter where you live, where you go to school, or what kind of grades you get, the SAT is an experience that bonds American students of all ages. It’s changed over the years, but the idea is the same: find a way to accurately gauge a student’s level of education through completely standardized means. Now, whether it’s an effective gauge is another debate entirely. What matters to you is how well you do on the test. And that’s what we’re here to help with.
First of all, you should understand what you’re getting into. The SAT is divided into three sections: Math, Writing, and Critical Reading. The Math section covers nearly everything you’ll learn in the first two years of High School, plus a little bit of Junior year. Basically, expect to be tested on all of Algebra and Geometry. Not to worry, though; nothing from Trig or beyond will be on the test. The Critical Reading section involves two main parts. First is Reading Passages, in which you’ll be given passages to read (duh.) and will have to answer questions based on the content of the reading. Second is the Fill-In-The-Blank section, where you’ll have to school SAT vocabulary words to complete sentences, based on context. Last but not least, there’s the Writing section. This begins with an essay, followed by MORE reading paragraphs (now based more on grammar and sentence structure than content), and correcting sentence errors.
The test runs just under four hours. This involves 6 25 minute sections (two from each subject, including the essay), two 20 minute sections, and one ten minute sections. You’ll receive breaks after each two sections (3 breaks total).
NOW, how do you prepare? This is going to sound weird, but studying the material is NOT the biggest way to prepare (but still important). What we do here in our SAT Prep Courses is teach you STRATEGY. We teach you how to solve any problem, and how to do it in a quick and efficient manner (which, on a timed test, is priority one). We’ll teach you when to skip a question, when to guess, how to mark up a paragraph, and how to write a proper essay that the graders will love. We’ll show you how to raise that grade.
SO, this is how to do it. Come in for a free diagnostic. This let’s us see what level you’re at. Then, sign up for either our group classes, or private SAT tutoring sessions. This is dependent entirely on you, and how you learn best. Either way, we’re gonna work hard to make sure you know what you’re doing when that SAT rolls along.
Last weekend Study Hut held its 2nd free tutoring seminar at West High and Redondo Union High School. For two hours after school last Friday, and for three hours on Saturday, Study Hut was on campus for free group tutoring coordinated with school administrators. Over one hundred students from West and over 50 from Redondo came to receive free tutoring with highly specialized tutors. The students were separated into group by school subjects, ranging the whole high school academic spectrum from geometry to U.S. History; where one to two Study Hut Tutors prepared them for the upcoming finals. Last time was such a success that teachers at West High rewarded students with extra credit for attending both days. The best part of the whole event was the great attitude of all the students who came. They were all eager to receive the help and get the most they could before the all important finals. We at The Hut would like to thank the helpful staff of both West High and RUHS, our great tutors for their effort, and the all students who came down to make this another great experience.
As the school year begins to draw to a close, students are hard-pressed to improve their grades. It’s certainly not too late to do so, but raising a grade significantly at this point is difficult and requires a lot of hard work. If students are committed to bucking down in their classes, dramatic improvement can be made in a short period of time. It’s crucial that students take thorough notes throughout the entire school year in order for them to effectively study for final exams. If notes have not been consistent during the year, a great way to review for finals is to go back through each of the earlier chapters in the textbook, making a brief outline for each one. Students need to balance the learning of new material in the last month or so of school with comprehensive reviews of the prior subjects.
One of the main subjects that poses a problem for students learning at the last minute is precalculus. When broken down into small doses, precalculus is somewhat palatable. A few formulas to memorize here and there don’t seem like too much to wrap your mind around. But when thrown into a cumulative final on all of the year’s work, a comprehensive understanding of the material is more important than rote memorization. At Study Hut, we teach students how to problem solve when presented with different types of exam questions. For example, trigonometric functions often overwhelm students—six trig functions, inverse trig functions, graphing trig functions, properties of trig functions. The list goes on and on… However, all trig functions can be related to the most important two: sine and cosine. By knowing the basic graphs and properties of sine and cosine, every student is capable of deriving all other trigonometric properties and identities.
Think about problem solving at a comprehensive level. By knowing the basics, each student can logically work his or her way through even the toughest of problems. Best of luck!
(310) 540-5888 is the phone number for Study Hut Tutoring and one Redondo Beach tutor, Tamer Makeen. Tamer runs Study Hut Tutoring in South Redondo Beach. Located conveniently at 210 Avenue I, Tamer is booking tutoring appointments at an incredible rate. Redondo Beach High School, Palos Verdes High School, Peninsula High School, Rolling Hills Preparatory and Chadwick students find the instruction at the Hut extremely helpful.
When we asked 9th grader Janelle Darman about the Study Hut in Redondo Beach she was eager to exclaim, “I’m excited to learn with Tamer and the Hut team at least twice a week. His Hut is the coolest place I’ve been to, and my two worst grades in math and biology are now my two best grades thanks to all the affordable one-on-one help I receive each hour.” Read the rest of this entry »
