Need some help nudging (or gently pushing) your high schooler to their full potential?
You're not alone! Meet me (Desiree) and learn a bit about why students and parents trust me to help them build confidence, get better grades, and feel better about school.
We all know that being a teenager is genuinely hard. High school is genuinely hard. But parenting teenagers is equally hard!
The thing is—as stressed as we adults can get about these things, teenagers simply don’t have the same skills and coping mechanisms that we do. The pressure can be overwhelming, and sometimes the looming presence of adults just makes things worse.
Especially when it comes to emotionally-charged, expansive concepts like “WRITING,” or high-stress, seemingly make-it-or-break-it performance tasks like standardized exams, high school students understandably have a difficult time coping with the pressure at times. So, they freeze. Or, they fight. Or, they flee.
Cut to: blindsided parents staring at a horrifying report card as they mentally doom-spiral. But…she’s so smart! I thought he loved writing! They told me they felt “pretty good” about the essay last week. Does this mean I’m a bad parent and my kid won’t get into college and my legacy is ashes and I should beg for the heat death of the universe?
Nah. You’re good. I promise.
None of this is new. It’s science. Kids are people, and people freak out about “big, scary things,” especially when the “big, scary things” involve their well-meaning parents not-so-subtly investing their very sense of meaning and purpose for their kids’ and their own lives into those “big, scary things.”
So, what do you do? Of course you don’t mean to be overbearing, and you don’t want to be a cause of stress in an already-stressful time. But, also…why can’t your kid get their sh*t together? I hear you! We are at an impasse here. Your kid’s mental health matters, and high school simply isn’t everything. At the same time, your kid’s ability to experience success in the future matters, too, and high school may not be everything, but having a strong transcript is indisputably crucial in our current educational system and socio-cultural pipeline.
In 2023, our task as parents and educators is not to bully students into submission. It doesn’t work, okay? To any extent that it does work, the so-called “success” is superficial at best—traumatic, vastly counterproductive, and destructive to trust at worst. The answer I’ve found in my years as a teacher and tutor, distilled into a not-so-neat little paragraph is something close to this:
With compassion, dedication, and collaboration, effectively and efficiently address any urgent deficiencies that may exist while (more importantly) drawing out strengths, building confidence, and developing a reliable and customized skillset that the student can rely on for life.
Sounds easy, right? Of course, it isn’t. But it’s not impossible, and that’s what matters.
Before I expand on this, I want to tell you a little about who I am and why I think I can help you.
Why do so many parents and students trust me, anyway?
I have been teaching and tutoring for over ten years.
I began my unlikely* career as an educator when I undertook my graduate degree in History. As I earned my degree, I worked as a graduate student teaching assistant and an analytical writing tutor in the History department. During the summers, I spent time teaching intensive remedial reading and writing programs to K-12 students and adults seeking continuing education. After earning my Master’s, I worked as a curriculum and intervention specialist for students in an intensive tutoring center before I began my traditional teaching career.
Though I dearly loved teaching in the classroom, I sorely missed the incomparable breakthroughs my students and I were able to achieve in one-on-one tutoring (something I believe every student should have access to in some capacity, but that’s another topic for another time). So, I began my little online tutoring business on the side—at the end of 2019.
We all know what 2020 brought us; suffice it to say the special and idiosyncratic but desperately underfunded nonprofit where I had my daytime teaching job soon cut the entire faculty and shut down the school. My little online tutoring business became even more of a lifeline for me and the students with whom I worked.
This is all to tell you a little about myself and show you that I’ve had lots of experience with lots of different students of varying ages, abilities, backgrounds, situations, and goals. But it’s not just a flex, or an advertising tool, or a convenient copy + paste to return to when I need copy for any given project in the future (though I’m not too proud to admit it could be one or more of those things, as well). It’s also the necessary context for this premiere post.
I am launching this space to share a little bit of what I’ve learned over the past decade as I’ve found a special kind of success with my students. I have genuinely learned a lot, and I know I can help a lot of people, because I have already helped a lot of people.
Though I don’t have a certificate or a degree in educational therapy or an EdD or anything horrifying like that, I am satisfied that my practical experience in the field has endowed me with a solid and genuinely profound pedagogical ethos that has translated remarkably well to the work I do with high schoolers, those most notorious of beasts.
As most of what I learn from my tutoring sessions in regards to pedagogy and the jungle of the teenage mind is utterly useless or at least terribly boring and/or obnoxious to my students, I’d like to share that knowledge with someone. Their parents, as well as other education professionals, can use this information. However, there are a few issues here.
(1) For many reasons, it is not quite logistically, emotionally, theoretically, physically, dialectically, medically, psychologically, philosophically, metaphysically, culturally, heuristically, literally, or metaphorically possible to share all of my insights and ideas with the parents of the students I work with.
(2) I can’t tutor every student in the world. Even if I could, see point (1) and multiply it by literally, like, 4.5 billion.
(3) Like many of the kids I work with, I have severe (diagnosed, medicated, fairly well-managed) ADHD and I have struggled since childhood with executive functioning and working memory processes. So, writing a book seems like a long shot for now. Just for now!
So, here we are.
* This is also a story for another time!
teaser: I believe that a great deal of my skill as an educator with teenagers comes from my…difficult experience in high school. More on that later!
What can you expect from this newsletter?
I envision this space not just as a newsletter, but as a community. I know there are a lot of parents out there who feel frustrated, angry, at the end of their ropes—but ultimately, you feel hurt, confused, and worried. You love your kid(s). You know they can do what they’re not doing.
Ultimately, you want solutions. You want answers. You want anything that will help make things better. It’s soothing to know you’re not alone. It’s empowering and galvanizing to learn practical tips that finally do away with outdated and ineffective techniques of manipulating, cajoling, or bullying teenagers into short-term action. It’s efficient to have this information delivered to you online on a regular basis without necessarily having to go through the process of researching, scheduling, and paying for regular tutoring (though, of course, that may be an option if you’re interested!)
A quick preview of just a few of the topics I plan to discuss in the upcoming weeks:
Homework Avoidance as an Emotional Coping Mechanism
The AP US History DBQ Rubric—How to Help Kids Study
Your Field Guide to the ADHD Brain
College Applications 101, 102, and 103
How to Work with a Less-Than-Ideal Teacher
WYD: “Just found out my kid’s been lying all semester about her grades”
Getting Started: How to Deal with Homework Inertia
Executive Functioning: How to Help
How to Fix “Fix It” Culture in Education
Why “Tough Love” Is a Waste of Time
What to expect when you hit subscribe…
For now, it’s free, and I plan to keep a portion of the content free forever! I plan to post at least once a week, likely on Wednesdays.
I will be adding in optional paid content soon, which will include extra posts on Fridays, additional content, downloadable worksheets, customizable materials, and more (additional details to come later).