Summer 2023 | Course Offerings

My summer courses are designed to excite and challenge high school and college students, while helping them to develop  the necessary critical skills for academic success and continued academic progress. Below, please find a list of my course offerings for summer 2023, together with a brief description.

I adjust each course to accommodate students’ interests, abilities, and ages. Summer courses can be scheduled between June 1 and August 31. If you have questions or would like to  book a course, please contact me [nate@graphywritingsupport.com] for an initial consultation or complete this inquiry form. I look forward to learning more about your academic interests and the ways that I can support them. 

Writing Through Reading

Learning to read texts carefully, closely, and analytically makes you a better writer. Moreover, reading college-level texts and responding competently to these forms of writing is a surprisingly difficult task for undergraduate students. These skills form the foundation of most undergraduate courses. This course teaches and deepens good reading and writing habits—and remedies the bad ones—by working through a range of different kinds of texts (incl. literary, scholarly, and popular selections). It will be of interest to both confident and reluctant student writers. Together, we carefully read selected short academic texts, analyze them, and then use them as models for a sequence of short writing assignments that build on one another. This work is both incremental and comparative. At the end of the course, students will not only have mastered basic college-level essay writing, they will also be able to write in different modes and for different audiences. Equally important, students will command a critical toolkit for analyzing both their own writing and that of others. Instruction is one-on-one; 10-20 hours of instruction is recommended (completed over 6-8 weeks).        

Mind and World  

This course provides a guided tour through some of the strangest and most controversial thought experiments in contemporary western philosophy. It will be of interest to students who enjoy reading science fiction, asking big questions, and winning arguments. Students will learn to identify, reconstruct, and evaluate philosophical claims and arguments by working critically through a range of canonical philosophical texts, both historical and contemporary. Special attention will be devoted to questions in metaphysics and epistemology. These will include, but are not limited to, the following: What is the nature of ultimate reality? Could we be systematically deceived about this? Do you really know that you have hands? Would you survive teletransportation or a brain transplant as the same person? Do we have free will? What is the nature of time? Is time travel possible? Instruction is one-on-one or in groups of up to 5 students for a total of 20 hours (completed over 6-8 weeks).            .

Socrates, Plato, & Aristotle

This course explores some of the main ideas and questions debated in Greek and Roman philosophy in its first 500 years, with special focus on the arguments of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. It will be of interest to students who want to know more about history, classical literature, and what makes a life worth living. Through close readings of primary texts, class discussions, and short writing assignments, students will develop a broad understanding of the foundations of Western philosophical thought. Topics to be covered include Socrates’ life and method of inquiry; Plato’s epistemology, theory of forms, and defense of justice; and Aristotle’s natural philosophy and ethical theory. Instruction is one-on-one or in groups of up to 5 students for a total of 20 hours (completed over 6-8 weeks). 

The Tools of Logic

This course introduces students to methods for analyzing both formal and informal patterns of reasoning and will be of interest to students who enjoy math, puzzles, and programming. Topics will include general critical reasoning, informal fallacies, and intuitive evaluations of validity. In our work on formal methods, we will learn to use truth tables, truth trees and other formal proof methods and apply them in the context of propositional and predicate logic, as well as systems of modal and deontic logic. Throughout the course, we will shuttle between these analytic methods and the construction and evaluation of natural language arguments that can be found in everyday contexts. We will also reflect critically on whether, and the extent to which, logic actually matters. Instruction is one-on-one or in groups of up to 5 students for a total of 20 hours (completed over 6-8 weeks).