Remote Learning Support & Navigating COVID-19

Many parents, myself included, are looking for ways to make this time out of school as manageable as possible and, hopefully, constructive. I know that the journey ahead is a long one. With that in mind, I want to let our community know how Intelligentsia can help during these uncertain and unscheduled times.

In addition to moving our regular tutoring to remote services, we’re introducing two online seminars focused on the college application process; offering meaningful discounts on daytime remote learning support; and announcing a partnership with Test Innovators, a fantastic online test prep platform.

As a company, we have always incorporated distance learning and video sessions into our standard work with students and feel confident that we can help make time spent learning online more efficient and more impactful.

Read on for a full suite of remote learning services offered and take care of your families during this time.

– Hilda Seidman, LP, Founder & President

I. College Application Seminars

For students…

Writing Yourself: The Personal Essay and Why it Matters // $350 for five weeks, beginning July 7, 2020 at 11 a.m. ET.

Geared towards high schoolers, this seminar will introduce students to the fundamentals of writing a personal essay. The ultimate goal of this course is to have students think about themselves and their experiences in terms of narrative, and reflect deeply on the best way to render those narratives on the page. The skills garnered during this seminar will be examined in the broader context of the College Application and we will pay close attention to how a keen grasp of writing fundamentals puts you at a significant advantage when applying to schools.

Meets once a week for two hours and will include assignments.

::: SIGN UP HERE :::

For families…

College Application Crash Course // $400 for four weeks, beginning July 29, 2020 at 6:30 p.m. ET.

Join Intelligentsia’s head college process strategist, Colin Garretson, as he breaks down the college application process into its four main categories: 

1. Search & Selection: crafting thoughtful school lists & how to visit colleges remotely 

2. Tests, Recommendations & Transcripts 

3. Essays, Activities & Portfolios

4. Navigating the Common App & Submitting Your Application 

A great survey course for any family interested in learning more about the application process as a whole, particularly amid the COVID-19 crisis.

Meets once a week for 90 minutes.

::: SIGN UP HERE :::

II. Test Prep

Intelligentsia is fortunate to have recently partnered with Test Innovators, an online test prep platform that gives our tutors the ability to administer full-length mock tests for the SSAT, ISEE, PSAT, SAT & ACT remotely, in addition to providing: 

• Core reports with highly accurate stanines and percentiles, placing them in the context of target schools.

• Diagnostic tools categorizing questions by subject type and difficulty to quickly identify areas for improvement.

• Practice monitoring and strengthening test-taking skills, such as time management.

• Personalized Prep Plans, recommending the best next steps as you prepare for test day and targeted practice based on your actual test results.

Intelligentsia clients who sign up for test prep utilizing Test Innovators will receive a 20% discount on their Test Innovators membership.

Additionally, Intelligentsia is offering 20% off all Test Prep tutoring bundles for a limited time, whether using Test Innovators or not. Contact us to learn more or to sign up!

III. Remote Learning Support 

Intelligentsia is offering support to help structure or supplement your home learning environment. With this new learning environment, we’re offering special rates throughout the shutdown on a variety of services:

• Assistance keeping learning on track and schedules regulated 

  • Setting up and monitoring home school schedules

  • Designing custom curricula

  • Consulting on best practices for effective home learning environments 

  • Remote cultural enrichment 

• Academic subject tutoring & homework help

  • Focus on executive functioning 

  • One-on-one lesson explication

• Extracurricular Expansion & Enrichment

  • Virtual music instruction  

  • Instruction in coding, graphic design, physical fitness, and more

Special rates will apply during “school hours,” 9 AM to 3 PM, Monday through Friday, and we are offering the first hour of consultation and assessment at no cost. Contact us for more information on specific offerings and pricing.

Why We Write

In a 1974 issue of the New York Review of Books, Joan Didion authored a short essay about writing entitled, simply enough, “Why I Write.” Didion’s choice of title bore more than passing resemblance to an essay by George Orwell written some 28 years earlier, a fact she was in no way attempting to conceal.“Why I Write,” she claims, is “stolen” from Orwell — thieved because, as she puts it, she liked the way the words sounded. Here’s Didion:

you have three short unambiguous words that share a sound, and the sound they share is this: 

I 

I 

I 

In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. 

For Didion, writing is an intensely personal act — it’s about the individual writer and their effort to convince the reader of their line on things. In this way, she echoes Orwell, who suggested that writing had more than a little to do with ego. 

It’s more than this, though. 

For Orwell writing is political too— a way of staking one’s place in history, of arguing for what’s right and decent. And for Didion it’s a way of processing those rare, strange moments that jump out from the banalities of day-to-day life. For both, writing has to do with figuring out problems: it is a way of understanding oneself in relation to the world.

Put far more simply: writing helps us think.

In fact, it might be said, not at all unreasonably, that writing and thinking are mirror processes, and that they are two of our most trying intellectual tasks. But however closely linked writing and thinking appear, they differ considerably in form. 

While I was writing the second chapter of my dissertation, for a good six months I struggled to write a certain paragraph. There was research and synthesis to be done, compacting a broad field of study into a series of pithy and legible declarations. I did it, but it took a good deal of time and not a small amount of my sanity. As I revised the chapter, though, it turned out that this long-labored-over paragraph would in fact be a footnote, a mere way-station en route to a different, more important argument.

I was upset. I called my advisor: “Six months! Six! For a footnote!” He replied calmly, almost cheerful: “yeah, man, talking about ideas is fun, but thinking is hard.”

It’s true, thinking is hard. And it turns out writing may even be harder. Language is a Rube Goldberg machine: it fails us, breaking down over even the most simple idea. The written word is ill-fit to experience, and everyone since the Greeks knows this.

But this is also why writing is useful. Writing, I want to propose, is an experience of our intellectual limits. To struggle with writing is to struggle with thought itself. To be able to write something down to satisfaction — clearly and with confidence — is no mean feat. It signals that that thought has become legible, well-formed, crisp. It means that you have, if only for a moment, really understood something.

I suspect this is why the personal essay looms so large in college admissions: because the essay is an imprint of one’s agility as a thinker. And more than anything, intellectual agility is what makes a great college student. A written work— carefully tuned and expertly turned — is the expression of one’s most ambitious thinking self. 

Thinking is hard. That’s why we write.

— Bob Ryan

Join Bob for his online seminar Writing Yourself: The Personal Essay And Why It Matters in which he will introduce students to the fundamentals of writing a personal essay with an eye toward the college application.

Bob Ryan is a humanities tutor and college essay expert living in NY. He has recently joined Intelligentsia and we are thrilled to have him on board.