Meet Brandon Hendrickson
Brandon’s spent the last decade pursuing educational extremes that, really, don’t seem to fit together.
On the one hand, Brandon teaches high-school Socratic seminars about the questions that matter: happiness, evil, world religions, moral economics, controversies in American history, and the like. Through all of these oddball classes, he makes students more thoughtful, more curious, and more skeptical of simple answers. (This sort of work tends to earn Brandon praise from the “tree-hugging-hippie” wing of American education.)
On the other hand, Brandon runs an evil test-prep tutoring company — seattleSATcoaching.com. When he puts on this hat, he trains students how to read more clearly, write more forcefully, and do math more flexibly. (This sort of work tends to earn Brandon praise from the “standardized testing” wing of American education, and nasty glares from the hippies!)
These two approaches to education — meaning and mastery — are usually set against one another, but it’s Brandon’s quest to combine them. He's pro-mastery: he thinks every student can comprehend perfectly, remember everything, and think new thoughts. And he's pro-meaning: he thinks schools can become launching pads for a purposeful life.
In high school, Brandon got a 1590 out of 1600 on his SAT, and became a National Merit Scholar. This earned him a free ride to the nation's top honors college, where he graduated summa cum laude, double-majoring in Religious Studies and History. He then got a master’s degree in Educational Leadership and Policy Studies from the University of Washington.
He lives outside Seattle, where he and Kristin are raising two squealing, squirrelly children (who will be some of the first students in their Seattle-area school). In addition to running the aforementioned humanities seminars and evil test-prep company, he runs "an epic 4-week quest to make college sane" on the campus of the University of Washington, and is on the board of foundry10, an educational not-for-profit.
Meet Kristin Hendrickson
Kristin's spent the last decade...
Kristin hails from North Dakota, and with a National Merit Scholarship got a free ride to the nation's top honors college, where she graduated summa cum laude, majoring in English and minoring in History. She then got her Montessori teaching certification, interned at one of the oldest and most respected Montessori preschools in the Seattle area, and currently teaches at another old and esteemed Montessori school.
She also homeschools her two kids part-time, teaching them reading, math, science, cooking, and engineering. She's particularly excited about developing the Schools for Humans history curriculum, throwing herself into research to teach about fantastic topics that don't usually get put in the grade school curriculum: world creation myths, the Big Bang, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Moses, the Sumerians, the ancestors of the Mayans, for example.