Overview:
This one-week intensive class is for students eager to develop the writing skills they’ll need for high school, college and beyond. The course is devoted to teaching students how to parse literary and historical documents, understand the basics of argument structure, and apply these lessons to their own essays. Each session, we’ll discuss a challenging text, focusing both on how to analyze the document itself and how the author’s rhetorical choices affect our reading experience. Each class will also include a 20-30 minute “Zoom break” where students will complete an in-class assignment based off of the day’s reading and discussion. For homework, students will be expected to revise in-class assignments and read an excerpt, essay, poem or story for the following session.
Schedule and Fee:
August 10-14, 10-11:15, $400/student, 3 student minimum
Instructor:
A native New Yorker, Emily recently moved to the Bay Area, where she is slowly adjusting to the phenomenon of pleasant weather. Before coming west, Emily attended Yale University, where she graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, and spent many years tutoring and developing test prep curriculum in New York, helping hundreds of students at elite private schools throughout Manhattan improve their grades and boost their standardized test scores. A published novelist and avowed history geek, Emily particularly enjoys working with students on English, humanities and college essays, where she has the opportunity to share her passion for the written word and the mysteries of the past. Although a wordsmith by trade, Emily also loves the fact that tutoring gives her an excuse to keep her math skills razor sharp: she’s as comfortable explaining the intricacies of polar coordinates and vector multiplication as she is mining the meaning of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Emily tutors the SAT, ACT, SSAT, GRE and SAT Subject Tests in Math, Literature and US and World History as well as a variety of academic subjects including English, history, government and math through Precalculus. She works with students in San Francisco, Palo Alto, Woodside and via Skype.