Admission into The Aristotle Tutorial:

The Aristotle Tutorial functions as a success only implementation. That is, the student accomplishes, day-by-day, and with increasing precision, high yield tutorial exercises, intellectually demanding homework assignments, and strategic in-class and after school learning protocols leading to subject mastery. A typical two to three hour afternoon in The Aristotle Tutorial surfaces and steadily nurtures a heightened capacity for sustained focus (for text, lecture, and thesis generation), one of the most important facilities of top performing students excelling in most competitive undergraduate schools.

One of the chief measures by which The Aristotle Tutorial assures success is the admission of candidates who can demonstrate consignment to academic rigor and industry before formal commencement of mentorship proceedings. Additionally, admission candidates, along with their parents, affirm drive and enterprise by signing a contractual agreement stipulating that all parties must continue to demonstrate a consistent commitment to academic rigor for as long as the student is enrolled in the mentorship.

Matriculation (The Admissions Process):

1. Contact: Usually on referral, parties reach the mentor via:

a. phone: (617) 450-9810
b. email: Hal@unfoldinguniverse.com

2. First meeting for (a.) Initial Assessment and (b.) Interview:

Initial Assessment:

All candidates complete an assessment of minute-to-minute, real world, intellectual and scholastic function. While paraphrasing class notes, transposing humanities and science text (line-by-line), and illustrating math problem solving skills, the applicant directly engages the rarefied dynamics of the mentorship.

Exclusive employment of this schoolwork-based assessment, emphasizing close observation, query, and a sequence of varying summary and inference exercises, all in the context of homework text reading, notation, and composition assignments, is predicated on many thousands of hours of highly effective one-to-one instruction and award winning academic skills remediation. Standardized Tests, which necessarily forfeit direct observation of a student's interaction with presently assigned homework, are considerably less effective in surfacing directly the fundamental indicators of scholastic and intellectual function and potential.

In turn, the student gets a first hand view of the instructor's likely pathways of inquiry, evaluation, illustration, and rehearsal, all of which begin to seat in the applicant's frame of reference (the latter, a key development in the early realization of learning skills autonomy). All parties gain a clear view of primary and secondary indicators for current sustained focus capacity and consequent facility for comprehension of increasingly sophisticated lecture and text. Most often, key academic behavior patterns affecting the quality of information organization, consolidation, retention, and extrapolation quickly surface during these assessment exercises.

Interview:

Here, all parties (student, parent(s), mentor) identify and discuss common priorities for accomplishing both immediate goals and longer term objectives (given The Aristotle Tutorial's overlying mission to simultaneously cultivate (1.) capacities for heightened intellectual function via the expedited development of sustained focus, and (2.) highest yield academic skills and tactical protocols-all undertaken in the context of on-going homework assignments). In turn, candidates for the tutorial are provided ready opportunity to voice individual issues or patterns perceived to be bolstering or inhibiting scholastic achievement. Accordingly, the mentor fields any questions concerning (a.) the student's demonstrated abilities in the on-going assessment, (b.) general and specific instruction protocols, (c.) precepts of intellectual and scholastic function and individual achievement, (d.) the instructor's professional training, experience, and results-based stewardship.

Typically, this initial encounter provides the mentor with a key first impression of the student's scholastic motivation (or, at least, indicators of a susceptibility to what might be characterized as 'the spark'). Once a student demonstrates an essential intellectual viability (that is, an absence of biologically prohibitive factors-i.e. clinical depression, severe retardation, lesions of the cerebellum), she is then offered the opportunity to complete a three day, trial homework assignment protocol to affirm consignment to rigor and to test out initial academic skills and strategic protocols.

3. Second meeting for final assessment leading to admission decision:

Three days after the first meeting, a student and her parent(s) regroup with the mentor to take stock of academic enterprise and initiative (i.e. review of the applicant's efforts seen in her shoring up, reorganization, augmentation, and recopying of class notes, the clarification, increasing investigation, and annexation of homework assignments, and the reworking, reconstitution, and additional rehearsal of math problems and text notation with subsequent presentation to instructors). A student presenting substantial evidence of labored text notation, class notes augmentation, and auxiliary homework assignment completion (the chief indicators of nascent scholastic enterprise and initiative) during the three day trial period is presented with the contractual agreement and is offered admission into The Aristotle Tutorial.