JumpStart! Classes
AP Chemistry
Summers
2 days per week, 1.5 hours per day
$1800/student for 12 weeks
4-6 students
AP Calculus
Summers
2 days per week, 1.5 hours per day
$1800/student for 12 weeks
4-6 students
Hot tip: Have a group of friends who wants to get ahead of the game over the summer? With a group of four, you can claim a private class!
High school asks juniors and seniors to do it all: AP courses, college entrance exams, extracurriculars, and college applications. Fitting it all in can seem impossible. My "JumpStart!" courses help students get a head start in some of the more notorious AP courses they'll face during the school year. With advanced preparation from an expert instructor, students will discover that these classes bark much louder than they bite.
By encountering this material over the summer, when they have the time and energy to dedicate to it, students are able to do better with less work during the school year. In a happy domino effect, not only do grades go up in these classes, but students then have more time to spend on their other academic obligations — decreasing stress and bringing up performance across the board!
FAQs
How many students do you accept per JumpStart! class?
JumpStart! class sizes can be 4-6 students. This small group-size allows students to form bonds and tackle the course as a team, while allowing plenty of instructor time and focus for each student individually.
How much time are students expected to spend outside of class?
Practice and self-study are critical to the learning process. Developing disciplined study habits now will make all the difference as students head to college and become increasingly responsible for their own learning! I ask my students to plan to spend about 4 hours per week studying outside of class.
How do you decide what material to cover?
The College Board (designers of the AP curriculum and exams) publishes well-defined content and standards for what students are expected to know upon completion of the course. Any individual school may approach these topics in a somewhat different order, but there are certain foundational concepts that any course must cover early-on (e.g. stoichiometry in chemistry or limits in calculus). I begin with these foundational topics and then build onto them with what I've found, over a decade of instruction, to be the most common first-semester topics. We generally make it through about 1/3 of a year's worth of material over the summer.
Students who want to maintain and advance their head start are invited to continue with 90 minute weekly meetings offered during the school year. In the first half of each session, we go over questions students have from their coursework. (This is much like the "office hours" offered by college professors, when students can meet with an instructor to go over material they've found confusing). In the the second half of each session, we continue with new instruction so that students can continue to have seen most material in our time together before they encounter it in class.