Northwest Educational Services

08/18/2026

What’s more valuable: tutoring or parent coaching?
(2-minute read)

What’s more valuable: tutoring or parent coaching? Meeting once or twice a week with an excellent tutor can be wonderfully beneficial for a child. Tutors are skilled at meeting students’ specific academic needs, encouraging their progress, and growing their confidence. Plus, many students (teena...

07/20/2026

Is your child skipping a year in math this summer? (The most common move is to take Algebra 1 in 8th grade.) This often leads to problems down the road, so here's a 3-minute guide to doing it right.

Long-time readers will know that I generally advise against skipping a year in math. For many reasons, it’s usually a bad idea. Nonetheless, many students continue to make this choice, so let’s talk about how to do it right. Most people just figure that the school said they were smart enough to ...

06/08/2026

What Will You Learn This Summer?
I'm not talking about studying academics. I'm talking about learning from life.
Hobbies. Work. Play. Exploration.
Summer is your chance to choose your own adventure, and the biggest mistake you could make is not choosing one at all.
(2-minute read)

05/11/2026

Life is full of asymptotes: mastery, knowledge, love, wisdom. Understanding this math concept will make you a better human.
(3-minute read)

Contents hide Mastery Knowledge Perfection Health and Fitness Love and Kindness Wisdom There’s a math concept that I keep seeing in real life. It’s a weird one: the asymptote. An asymptote is a line that a graph curves towards but never reaches. The graph gets closer and closer, but it can never...

04/27/2026

"But when are we going to use this math in real life?"
The correct answer is:
“Probably never. But also, ALWAYS.”
Because it's not about the math. It's about the brain training.

Contents hide Brain Muscles Logic Problem-Solving Flexibility It’s Never Been About the Math Most people don’t use math in their careers. Most people rarely use anything other than basic math in their daily lives. So, for most people, learning math is a waste of time, right? Nope. Nearly all of ...