A-Game Academic Coaching and Tutoring is a start-up business that's owned by me, Victoria, a stay-at-home mom of two little boys. The company is small now, but I have big dreams for it!
Let me tell you how I started the business...
It all started one day when my younger brother came to me and asked me to help him study for his 11th grade final exams.
At that time, I was a stay-at-home mother of a toddler and a preschooler, living in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. The choice for me to stay at home with our young children meant that financially things were tight. My husband's income from his manufacturing job was just enough to keep us afloat.
Anyways...that week, my brother and I decided that he would come over and I would help him study at the dining room table. The day he came over, I asked him to pull out all of the materials that he had to study from. He only pulled out his textbook.
So, I got a little more specific with him. I asked him to pull out his class notes from the semester, old homework assignments, and graded quizzes and tests. He handed me a mostly empty binder that had a few sheets of paper, an old test, and some random, illegible notes in it. He told me that that was all he had.
So, I asked him what was going to be on the exams. He said, "I don't know. Everything, I guess." That's when I knew that I was dealing with a student that had terrible study skills!
That's when I knew that I needed to teach him everything I knew about how to be a good student.
That's when I became his academic coach.
After working with my brother for a while, word got around that I could help students become better students. Moms started asking me to help their high school students like I helped my brother.
At that point, I realized that there were other kids who were also struggling, because they didn't know how to play the game of school.
Yes, I said "game." School/academia is a game and a culture. Some kids know how to play it and some don't. Some kids fit in with the academic culture and some don't. I was great at the game of school and I knew the culture very well.
For that reason, I was confident that I could coach students through this game and teach them the skills they would need in order to finish strong.
That was when I started A-Game Academic Coaching & Tutoring.
I started working with other high school students at our apartment, using one of the bedrooms as an office and a study room.
When that got too cramped, we moved to the local library. But then that got to be difficult to manage. So, my husband and I decided that I needed an office.
We found a house that was perfect for our family and had a room that could be used as a home office.
Now, I work out of my home comfortably and I have plenty of space to meet with clients.
For now, A-Game is small, but my dream is to be able to reach students all across the country to show them that school is just A-Game that they, too, can learn how to play.
Let me tell you how I started the business...
It all started one day when my younger brother came to me and asked me to help him study for his 11th grade final exams.
At that time, I was a stay-at-home mother of a toddler and a preschooler, living in a cramped two-bedroom apartment. The choice for me to stay at home with our young children meant that financially things were tight. My husband's income from his manufacturing job was just enough to keep us afloat.
Anyways...that week, my brother and I decided that he would come over and I would help him study at the dining room table. The day he came over, I asked him to pull out all of the materials that he had to study from. He only pulled out his textbook.
So, I got a little more specific with him. I asked him to pull out his class notes from the semester, old homework assignments, and graded quizzes and tests. He handed me a mostly empty binder that had a few sheets of paper, an old test, and some random, illegible notes in it. He told me that that was all he had.
So, I asked him what was going to be on the exams. He said, "I don't know. Everything, I guess." That's when I knew that I was dealing with a student that had terrible study skills!
That's when I knew that I needed to teach him everything I knew about how to be a good student.
That's when I became his academic coach.
After working with my brother for a while, word got around that I could help students become better students. Moms started asking me to help their high school students like I helped my brother.
At that point, I realized that there were other kids who were also struggling, because they didn't know how to play the game of school.
Yes, I said "game." School/academia is a game and a culture. Some kids know how to play it and some don't. Some kids fit in with the academic culture and some don't. I was great at the game of school and I knew the culture very well.
For that reason, I was confident that I could coach students through this game and teach them the skills they would need in order to finish strong.
That was when I started A-Game Academic Coaching & Tutoring.
I started working with other high school students at our apartment, using one of the bedrooms as an office and a study room.
When that got too cramped, we moved to the local library. But then that got to be difficult to manage. So, my husband and I decided that I needed an office.
We found a house that was perfect for our family and had a room that could be used as a home office.
Now, I work out of my home comfortably and I have plenty of space to meet with clients.
For now, A-Game is small, but my dream is to be able to reach students all across the country to show them that school is just A-Game that they, too, can learn how to play.