By Greg Kulander, owner of 4 Huntington Learning Centers in CA, UT and OR
Huntington is the nation’s leading tutor and test prep provider. Over the past four plus decades, Huntington Learning Center has helped over a million students see positive academic results. Our mission is to give every student the best education possible! We do this through individualized high-dosage tutoring, the gold standard for achieving strong academic gains.
Huntington Learning Center is known nationwide as a vital resource for students who need extra study time and attention. Huntington is the only fully accredited supplementary education company in the country. We offer tutoring from beginning phonics to advanced Calculus as well as prep for high stakes exams like the SAT and ACT! The teachers are credentialed and experienced. Each student has a customized program built to meet their specific needs and most tutoring is 1:1 teacher to student. We offer both in-person and online services.
It is no secret that kids today are stressed and anxious. We provide a safe environment for them to not only improve their academic skills, but also to safely build relationships with other caring adults.
The learning loss caused by the pandemic was nothing short of catastrophic. Fortunately, an emerging consensus among educational researchers has identified one clear solution: Tutoring. A recent meta-analysis of 100 studies in literacy and mathematics, found that tutoring programs consistently produced larger improvements in learning outcomes than any other intervention. Huntington offers both online and in-person tutoring.
To be the best in this field requires a clear mission, capable and caring staff and teachers, and a laser focus on providing each student with the best education possible. Huntington has been in business for 47 years, so we know a thing or two about how students learn! We tailor our curriculum and teaching to each individual student so that we maximize the efficacy of our time with them. And the results show: our students improve an average of two grade levels in just a few months.
The best way for parents to invest in their kids’ future success is to encourage them to engage with the world! Children are born curious, so we just need to nurture that natural desire to learn things. I remember being at a parent-teacher conference long ago, where I literally told the teacher that I really didn’t care what my daughter was learning in school, as long as the teacher was fostering her innate desire to learn about and understand the world around her. At Huntington, we believe that student self-confidence is critical. Building academic skills yields increased confidence, which in turn, generates more motivation. It is a virtuous circle, and one that parents can facilitate too.
Huntington earns the trust of kids by being present and focused on them and their needs. By demonstrating to them that hard work and persistence lead to results. This even works with the older (high school age) students. For example, spending a couple of months working hard to prep for the SAT and then achieving your goal score not only gives the student a huge feeling of satisfaction, it also demonstrates to them that they are capable of more than they think, that diligence in fact does pay off, which is a tremendous self-confidence builder.
Parents can best support their kids during these changing times by spending time with them! Involve them in your lives. I spent several years working in the nonprofit world, creating “experiential learning” opportunities like job shadows and internships for students because I sensed that our children were more and more disconnected from the world outside of school, and that they did not understand the connection between what they were learning in school to their future. As a society, we need to do a better job of connecting those dots, and it starts at home, where parents can talk to their kids about their jobs, or even connect their children with other adults who work in areas that the child has expressed interest. It will go a long way towards improving student motivation in school if they understand why they need to learn — for example — geometry (try being a carpenter without it!).
Today, I am especially grateful that through my wonderful staff and teachers, I get to make a difference in a child’s life every single day!
