Seattle SAT Coaching

Introduction: Hardly anyone prepares for the SAT intelligently. That's a strong statement; let me support it. Practically no one begins by diagnosing the precise skills they need to attain. They wander through prep books trying to memorize everything. When in the midst of study, hardly anyone follows the proven principles of deliberate practice. They throw themselves into work that's too easy or too hard. After they finish, practically nobody realizes that they'll forget 80% of what they've just learned in one month, and 95% in two months. They allow their labor to dissolve into nothingness. In general, test-prep classes are not set up to help you navigate these realities. Following the traditional American classroom model, classes often graduate students with thrown-together knowledge about a hundred different things. It's not surprising when students then fail to apply their understanding on the test. As a professional SAT coach, I'd like to suggest a better way. Using the fruit of cognitive science, I can ground you on how to study as efficiently as possible. You'll have a structure in which to identify the holes in your math, reading and writing skills. You'll be pitted against the hardest problems the SAT can dish out. At every stage, you'll be in control of yourself, actively building your academic abilities. You'll learn to hack into your memory, adding much vocabulary in a little time and never forgetting it. You'll learn the fundamental moves of reading: rhetorical, syntactical and morphological (aka 'paragraph-level', 'sentence-level', and 'word-level'). You'll learn why focused memorization is a must for SAT math. You'll learn to spot grammar errors at a glance. You'll learn what performance psychologists call "deliberate practice," and how to apply it to any task you want to master. Most people treat test-prep as a brief, casual affair. We treat it as physical training. You'll leave the class better prepared for college reading, writing and reasoning. But most importantly, this is fun! I couldn't do this job if I weren't excited to teach the joys of close reading, the beautiful basics of math, and the awesome sociology of grammar. I delight in helping students pick apart words, dissect formulas, and diagram sentences. The life of the mind is wonderful, and it's my pleasure to help students enter it. My name is Brandon Hendrickson, and I'm a summa cum laude graduate of the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University, with B.A.s in Religious Studies and History. I'm also a recipient of the National Merit Scholarship, a published writer, and a humanities and social science teacher at the Attic, a local alternative school. I got a 1590 out of 1600 on my own SAT, 10 points away from a perfect, and am a graduate student in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Education program at the University of Washington, where I study educational history and philosophy. It's my joy to be reinventing test prep as high-level academic training. If you're looking for a test-prep coaching experience that's simultaneously much more serious and much more enjoyable than that of the big name test prep companies, please visit me on my website.