Time

Time.  Perhaps the most valuable commodity in today’s culture.

That’s why BrainBuilders mentors work with each of their students once a week for all four years of high school.

Young minds develop incrementally in the teen years. They are also highly impressionable and vulnerable to distraction and stress, especially in today’s highly competitive environment.  But the stability and reliability of a BrainBuilder mentor provides an educational anchor year in and year out--a familiar, friendly place to write focused paragraphs as a freshman and discuss String Theory or Existentialism as a senior.  BrainBuilders Mentors are trained with education’s ultimate objective in mind: 

“It’s not what we get FOR the time and effort spent in school, but who we become BY that effort.” 

We challenge young people to put what they learn into perspective, encouraging them to think contextually by placing each new puzzle piece of data into the big picture. And, we continually assess and refine their ever-evolving understanding of themselves and the world.

Because our mentors have the luxury of time (over one hundred hours one-on-one with each student over the span of the 4 year period), they can use a student’s school assignments and papers as “exercise equipment,” nurturing the ability to structure ideas, coaching research skills, and enriching vocabulary while coaching a student through a school assignment.

BB Mentors keep careful records over the four years of service so they can track and optimize a student’s growth as a thinker, a writer, a conversationalist, and a creator.  Mentors lavish conversational time on each student, an essential educational experience that schools cannot provide.   Using the time-honored Socratic teaching technique, we ask students to think about everything.  Why does history matter?  Or does it?  Where does consciousness come from?  Why does an engineer need to know poetry?  What does a lepidopterist do?

It takes time and experience to build a personal mentoring relationship that nurtures an active and vital intellect in preparation for life-long learning.

Truly, there is no more important “place” to spend the commodity of personal time than on the intellectual maturity of tomorrow’s decision-makers.