Paid workshops are three hours long.
Purchase individually or as a package.
Take one workshop for $150 or three for $400.
Reading Comprehension, Ninja Style
If you are a post-secondary student who is taking hours to read, has textbooks that show rainbows of highlighting, or are suffering hand cramps from extensive but seemingly ineffective notetaking, this workshop is for you. Like the ninja, reading comprehension involves strategic, carefully targeted strikes. Learn how to exploit your ability to talk, listen and think conceptually so that you can enter the reading with stealth and cunning. Identify your target and strike. The souvenir of your training will be stronger memory, more effective work habits and better marks. It is the ninja way.
Listening Comprehension, Jiu-jitsu Style
Brazillian Jiu-jitsu holds that smaller, weaker individuals can successfully combat larger, stronger individuals with proper technique. That technique is based on taking the fight to the ground and using joint locks and chokeholds to defeat the larger, stronger enemy.
In the face of lectures that feel large, muscular, complex and intimidating, what is the best chokehold?
Take the lecture to the ground by focusing on and writing the main points. Understand how those main points relate to one another in a meta-structure. Are the main points opposites? Are they a sequence? Are they parts of a system? Are they parts of a story? Forget about writing down the details. You will only overcome this opponent by trusting your ability to retain verbal information and to organize it according to the meta-structure.
The black belt of listening comprehension is within your reach.
Go To Sleep!
Success in school and life pivots on sleep. Research and clinical practice show that if you’re not sleeping you’re suffering to learn, feel motivated, feel happy and work at your best. This workshop helps students identify their sleep hygiene patterns, and to develop strategies to fall asleep faster, better and with more regularity. We will discuss the ways the attentional system works in concert with sleep hygiene, why puzzles could be your best friend and how sleep may be the worst frenemy ever.
Improve Your Motivation
Ah, motivation. Everyone wants to be motivated – to learn to work on tasks they hate and to learn to do stuff they don’t want to do. In this workshop, we take a slightly different approach. Motivation often falls out of the way we set goals and value those goals. It is borne of the ways we establish value and respond to the way value is established for us. When we succeed or fail, the way we interpret that success or failure has important consequences on our subsequent sense of motivation. Take this workshop and gain a fresh perspective on getting where you want to go!
Organize Your Thinking
In the same way as you organize your closet with shoe racks, places to hang things and places to fold things (and places to put those long winter coats that never seem to fit), your thinking can be organized into categories. Learn about conceptual opposition, hierarchies and systems. Learn how to impose structure on information to create patterns that are easier to understand and remember. Conceptual analysis and information storage are critical skills that students often learn implicitly. Learn them explicitly and kick your studying off right!
The Octopus Session
The octopus is one of the most intelligent creatures on earth. Curious, protective, easily tamed, devilishly slippery, amazingly strategic, there are important lessons we can learn from the octopus when we are trying to improve our learning. In this workshop, students learn how curiosity, awkwardness, experimentation and determination are critical in learning and growth. Are you stuck? Bored? Frustrated? Using octopus behavior as a metaphor, learn how to slip and manoeuvre, stretch your tentacles and study your captor to swim your way to a more rewarding path.