AGES 8-16
ELITE ACADEMICS!
Taught by The Knight School founder Dr. Brooks, B.A., B.A., M.Ed., M.A., Ph.D., The Day School is a global celebration of the human intellect at full capacity. The class is all ZOOM, 4:30-5:30 Tuesdays and Fridays, but TDS is a unique brand of super-interactive ZOOM that works to bond our students for life, even though they live all over the globe! Targeted at the ambitious, kind-hearted, and creative sixth, seventh, and eighth graders of our planet, The Day School students graduate from TDS during the summer of their ninth-grade year once they complete the five requirements:
1) a fun six-week ZOOM TDS Shakespearean Dramaturg Internship anytime during their freshman year, teaching their choice of Shakespearean plays they learned earlier in TDS,
2) then in the summer after their freshman year completing the final semester exam drawing freehand a map of the world they learned earlier in TDS,
3) in the summer after their freshman year completing the final semester exam writing an essay tracing everything that ever happened in world history, which they learned earlier in TDS,
4) in the summer after their freshman year submitting their final formal paper, the lion's share of which they wrote earlier in TDS,
5) and finally in the summer after their freshman year completing a one-week Summer Chess Coaching internship with TKS, either via ZOOM or at a LIVE chess camp.
This timing means that while all the challenging academics of TDS are completed in seventh and eighth grades in order to not interfere with high school, graduation from TDS occurs during high school, making all the amazing academic work of The Day School fully pertinent to college admissions committees who only look at work done while in high school.
Moreover, the ability to write a spectacular formal paper, to trace all of world history in their minds, to draw freehand a map of the entire world labelling all countries, to crush everyone at chess, and to be conversational with twelve different Shakespearean plays comes into play every day of high school and will position our students as monolithic academic leaders in the minds of their classmates, their teachers, and themselves.
Our hyper-academic offering is now enrolling! This coming fall 2022 the class will move to ONLY Tuesdays and Fridays from 4:30-5:30 PM CT, and will span two years of Tuesday and Friday academic plus the freshman year requirements listed above. We teach Honors Geography, Honors World History, Honors Formal Composition, Honors Tactical Chess, and Honors Shakespearean Drama. This class is amazingly social, engaging, and innovative, complete with clickable calendar with all assignments and videos of all previous classes, “Cool Kids Club” after that where kids hang out and decompress after class, and many more unprecedented features.
The Day School is the arm of The Knight School afterschool chess program that expands beyond chess into other important academic pursuits. The idea behind The Day School is to offer an online academic course that captures the social magic and compelling teaching techniques of The Knight School chess kids’ academy and applies them to the academic subjects which are the most important. And, eureka! We did it! The TDS secret is the social interaction and mandatory no-muting, mandatory video-on, and constant questioning by the teacher on the subject of the day. Kids are fully engaged for the entirety of the class period. Furthermore, the same types of kid-friendly gags and videos and silliness and quirky gimmicks and fun chess tournaments for kids that have made The Knight School so popular for decades are applied in just the same manner. Another very fun element is that enrollment in The Day School includes our chess classes for kids, so that chess is always a part of our fun.
For the 2022-2023 academic year The Day School tuition will be $195 per month for 5 months or $975 per semester, and will still include intensive study of all the aspects of college admission techniques in our Tuesday teaching. Preparing for college is really the core, unifying element of The Day School, and Dr. Brooks spends substantial time identifying the qualities that propelled his two kids to their admission to Georgetown University.
The new streamlined format that begins fall 2022 will mean that The Day School will become a three-year course, capping at 25 students per semester, meeting 4:30-5:30, Tuesdays and Fridays only.
The Day School curriculum will rotate by semester, and on each Tuesday teach:
Advanced Formal Composition on the 18 Tuesdays of Fall, Year One
Advanced World History the 18 Tuesdays of Spring of Year One
Advanced Tactical Chess the 18 Tuesdays of Fall of Year Two
Advanced World Geography the 18 Tuesdays of Spring of Year Two
On Fridays, TDS will teach twelve Shakespearean Plays during the two-year course, and TDS Fridays will be breakout-group preparations for the presentation of each Shakespearean play.
In The Day School our Shakespearean plays are taught by Dr. Brooks on week one, then over the next four weeks they are broken down by the kids so our TDS students really internalize the importance, humor, poetry, plot, and power of Shakespeare’s genius. Then cleverly and delicately, TDS kids reassemble the play in their own script they each write portions of themselves, with more modern, accessible language so our week-six audience understands the plot and the power of the play. True analysis, comprehension, and synthesis is a high plateau of learning, and when these kids pull it off it is a cathartic mountaintop experience. Genuine social bonding is practically inevitable in such an art-revering environment. These scripts are written and practiced by the kids in their breakout groups weeks 2-5, and presented on week 6 to their parents and their fellow TDS students and to Dr. Brooks, who interferes very minimally as the kids produce, write, script, and enact their Shakespeare in a very independent, very social online group each Friday during class. TDS play scripts are written by the students, analyzing/breaking down the original Shakespearean language, then, act by act and scene by scene, synthesizing into a perfectly comprehensible and hilarious Shakespearean play that captures the power of Shakespeare’s language, message, and brilliance. Below are scenes from an impromptu all-musical production of Les Miserables that we decided to do and then performed two weeks later. These kids have talent!
After they complete the four semesters required—English, Chess, Geography and History— plus the 5 graduation requirements, TDS graduates will receive
1) a $100 gift card from Amazon,
2) a LIVE/ZOOM May pool party together,
3) one letter of recommendation when college applications come around senior year,
4) General college advising during high school via email,
4) One review of the all-important freshman-year course selection form typically completed during spring of the eight-grade year, and
5) One review before it is submitted of the college application to the dream school of the TDS graduate.
EVERYTHING about The Day School--our timing to work in middle school and graduate during high school, the courses we teach, the subjects of our major papers, the strategies and techniques we discuss in class, and the likeminded friends that we make along the way--is designed to maximize our graduates' chances of admission to an elite college. In fact, Dr. Brooks maintains a blog on admission to elite colleges, an exhaustive compendium of everything relating to the college admissions process. The multiple entries on the various steps toward acceptance by your dream school will be regular topics during Tuesday Teaching.
After class each day, TDS students are invited to hang out in our optional “Cool Kids’ Club” and decompress and visit. Our excellent kids understand that this hangout is recorded and reviewed, so the content stays wholesome even though the kids can be themselves generally unsupervised. This has been a very popular feature! With the introduction of The Day School, afterschool elementary chess has taken a very social and a very academic turn!
We will cap at 25 enrollees since all Shakespearean plays have five acts and the perfect skit group size is five, plus any freshman-year Dramaturg Interns who join in.
One final cool feature of The Day School is that students can begin in sixth or seventh grade, at any point/semester, and hop off at any point/semester, but it takes four different semesters of academics in any order and the 5 freshman requirements to graduate. Email Dr. Brooks at dbrooksphd@theknightschool.com if you are interested in applying for one of the 25 spots for the upcoming semester!
