"My name is Bill H. I served as English teacher, athletic director, basketball, cross country, and golf coach for twelve years at Southwestern Academy until the school, racked with low enrollment and COVID concerns, shut down in 2020. I loved the school and every aspect of my position there.

At Southwestern our classes were always small. Several times I taught classes 1-on-1, so I have plenty of tutoring experience. As an English teacher, perhaps the best thing I can do for my students is to inspire them to read as much as they can. To help this happen, I developed a system of incentive and reward, where students could elevate their grades by reading outside of class. Students were responsible for taking notes per page, which included vocabulary words with clear contexts and enough information from which detailed page-summaries and analyses could be delivered on demand. The system worked beautifully. Reading rates doubled, tripled, and even quadrupled or more while comprehension, in every case, improved dramatically. The best thing was that some fell in love with reading. One young lady from China, disinterested at first, left my class declaring she wanted to write books!" less...