Our History

A radical notion...

After a four-year break from teaching English and composition in the college classroom, Sue Stewart began to mentor the high school daughter of close friends in a unique way. Despite hours of study and test preparation, the student was having trouble making sense of her assignments and classroom experiences. Once she completed the tests and projects, she couldn't recall much of the material or talk intelligently about it. Both she and her parents were frustrated with the ineffectiveness of the system and the apparent meaninglessness of her efforts. Sue wanted to test her theory that students would get more out of their high school academics if they had consistent, long-term, one-on-one academic coaching. This coaching concept approached the problem from two opposite positions. From the "micro" position, the coaching sharpened reading comprehension, critical thinking, and composition by close review and practice of vocabulary, word families, roots, prefixes and suffixes; by weekly building of cultural literacy, and by weekly verbal analysis of texts. The approach from the "macro" position involved discussions which focused on the bigger picture, always asking the student why the material to be learned is necessary and showing how it connects and matters to both the student and to the other dimensions in the student's life. After consistent work over many hour-long sessions, the student's recall and verbal and composition skills were enhanced, but more importantly, she developed a greater appreciation for the content of her learning itself and found herself engaging with the material much more maturely--even passionately. Over this trial period, Sue realized that more students could benefit from a mentoring relationship that dedicated itself to the nurturing of intellectual maturity. And thus, BrainBuilders Gymnasium was born.