Posts Tagged LSAT Teachers
The Talented Mr. Beer
Posted by Cory@manhattanlsat.com in LSAT Fun, Manhattan LSAT Announcements on March 21st, 2011
Tools of the Trade
At Manhattan LSAT we are constantly swelling with pride over the achievements of our instructors. If you’ve ever spoken with us about them, you’ve probably noticed that we fancy them quite a bit! We’re lucky to have so many incredibly intelligent, talented, and downright fascinating individuals on our team.
A recent example of our collective Manhattan LSAT-instructor-coolness takes us deep in to the world of metaphor and rhyme. John Beer, a Manhattan LSAT teacher in Chicago, has recently been given the Norma Farber First Book Award for his book, The Waste Land And Other Poems, The Norma Farber Award is given annually to one exceptional poet who has published their first book of original American poetry. John will be traveling to New York City in April to accept the award.
I’ve been treating myself to a healthy sized sample of these poems for the last week or so and have thoroughly enjoyed the experience.
There is even an entire section toward the end of the book called “Sonnets to Morpheus”. Yep, that’s a Matrix reference!
We’re so incredibly proud of John. I would encourage any of you who are interested in poetry to check out his book, available on Amazon.
Harvard’s Stephen Burt has written a review of The Waste Land And Other Poems for bostonreview.net (scroll down a little ways until you see John’s name in the subheading)
What makes for a good LSAT Teacher?
Posted by noah@manhattanlsat.com in Manhattan LSAT Announcements on November 16th, 2009
One of the most interesting parts of my job is to watch candidates audition. I’ve written previously about our audition process:
first stage – phone interview - knocks out about 30-40%,
second stage – online audition – knocks out about 70% of those who make it there
third stage – in-person audition – knocks out about 90% of those who make it there
In case you’re auditioning or just curious, I’ll tell you the top three reasons we reject teaching candidates:
1. Lectures. Folks who have taught for other test prep companies usually lecture instead of teach. This makes sense since many of them have mostly taught in large lecture halls, where Socratic teaching isn’t necessarily practical. But, with our small classes, we need folks who know how to teach through questions and discussion. We have a bunch of reasons why we think lectures are not effective for mastering the LSAT; for one, students don’t have to do a lot of work during a lecture. More on this later . . .
2. Fake questions. Because I often tell candidates that we’re looking for something other than lectures, many make a strong effort in this direction. However, we see a lot of what I’ll call “fake Socratic questioning.” Candidates will ask questions, but they won’t actually listen to the answer or, if they do listen, do anything different with the lesson based on what they have heard.
3. Low energy. It’s not easy to keep a class engaged for 3 hours. Many people don’t know how to keep things lively (how to switch up the format of the class). There’s a whole host of techniques for this, and then there’s some natural pizzaz.
4. The score. Obviously, we think that people need to be able to get the score in order to teach people to get the score. However, many people think that the score is enough — far from it. There are a lot of really smart people who couldn’t teach their way out of a shoe. (And that is officially a new saying, by the way.)
5. The teaching X factor. Undefined and very important.
