The Straight-A Conspiracy: A Student's Secret Guide to Ending the Stress of High School and Totally Ruling the World
Hunter Maats, Katie O'Brien, 2012
CreativeSpace
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9781456477141
Summary
What if the only reason you aren’t doing well in school is that you’ve been lied to about your own brain?
For centuries, students worldwide have been tricked into making school more difficult, more stressful, and less successful than it needs to be. In reality, you already have the ability to make anything that you do in school easy. From writing essays to mastering any math concept to acing even your most difficult final exam, The Straight-A Conspiracy takes you through the simple, stress-free ways to conquer any class in school.
The truth about straight-A’s has been kept from you. It’s time you knew about The Straight-A Conspiracy. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Katie O’Brien
A native New Englander, Katie graduated first in her class from Pinkerton Academy, a New Hampshire regional public school of 3200 students, nestled in the most Norman Rockwell-y part of small-town America that you can imagine. She arrived at Harvard College in the fall of 2000 and majored in English and American Literature and Language, ultimately graduating magna cum laude.
At Harvard, she also co-directed CityStep—a program that integrates arts education into the Cambridge public middle schools—and after graduating and moving to New York, she continued that work with high schoolers in NYC, Oxford, London, and Edinburgh. During this time, Katie also teamed up with Hunter and two other Harvard classmates to form Overqualified Tutoring, a NYC- and LA-based educational services company. She has spent thousands of hours tutoring and home-schooling students of all ages, and in all subject areas. Katie currently resides in Los Angeles…but still roots for the Red Sox from afar.
• Hunter Maats
Hunter isn’t really a native of anywhere. Born in Saudi Arabia, he’d lived in Brazil, Greece and New York before his family moved to England when he was eight years old. There he attended Eton College, England’s most stodgy and prestigious all-boys boarding school. After high school, he pursued his love of science by spending a year doing tumor virus research at Cold Spring Harbor laboratory, where he lived in the basement of the home of James Watson, Nobel Laureate and co-discoverer of the double helical structure of DNA.
It was a no-brainer for Hunter to major in Biochemistry when he enrolled at Harvard College in the fall of 2000. While at Harvard, Hunter devoted his spare time and his electives to a mixture of pranks and foreign languages. Occasionally, he mixed the two. After graduating, Hunter moved to Los Angeles and helped to found Overqualified Tutoring. A current owner of comically overstuffed bookshelves, Hunter has enjoyed tackling the one aspect of science that he has always found unsettling: the gap between the research that exists and the public’s knowledge.
Today, Hunter spends his time finding more and more ways to bring those two together. When he’s away from the aforementioned bookshelves, Hunter can be found at cross-fit, eating Nicole’s food, or dreaming of Kansas City. (From the authors' website.)
Book Reviews
[Katie O'Brien and Hunter Maats] destroy the notion that you have to be born smart to understand complex concepts and get good grades.
GeekDad - Wired.com
Discussion Questions
1. When you were in school, did you feel like you were naturally bad at a certain subject? Do you still feel that way today?
2. Are there areas in which you feel that you are naturally better or more talented than most people? Has that belief made you confident or complacent?
3. Who was the person in your school that always seemed to “get it” right away?
4. When you read Part 3 of this book, did you find any study techniques that you used...or definitely didn’t use? How did your approach to work go?
5. Are there any skills that you still view as “beyond you?” Are there skills that you believe are mostly the product of natural talent, such as drawing, writing, or even being good with computers?
6. What, other than bad feelings, have you gotten from harboring these beliefs about your brain and its potential?
7. What do you do best? It can be anything from telling stories to baking to competing in your fantasy football league. What do you believe about yourself in that area? How does your approach in that area compare to your approach in the areas in which you do less well?
(Questions courtesy of the authors.)