First Agape Institute of Thinking Higher (FAITH) presents …
A FREE MASTERCLASS
Internationally honored educator and world-award-winning novelist Dr. George Guthridge (“Dr. G.”) shares GWS, his revolutionary method of learning writing and creative/critical thinking.
Named as one of the top 78 teachers in America.
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All funds go towards training teachers in rural Thailand.
Using his methods:
- In 1984 (see below) his Eskimo students from a tiny Bering Sea high school stunned American education.
- He has taught over 20,000 students, most from rural Alaska. They went on to graduate from almost every major university in America including Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame, Berkeley, Stanford, West Point, and Annapolis.
- Scores skyrocketed where his method has been employed.
- His beginning fiction-writing students won state, national, and international awards.
The Arctic Educational Miracle
They called themselves “The Kids from Nowhere.” They were from a 41-student high school in an Eskimo village on a blizzard-swept island off the coast of Siberia.
They spoke Siberian Yupik as a first language and had little world knowledge. They had low reading/writing scores. They had no computers and few books. Previous educators had written them off as “unteachable.”
The school was threatened with closure for its violence: teachers had been beaten, shot at, and their housing set afire – with the teachers in it.
For complex reasons, the district (on the Alaska mainland) entered them in what at the time was considered the most difficult academic competition for young people.
Seventy-eight percent of the students at the national finals were from schools or programs for the gifted. To make matters more difficult, the Eskimo students had to compete on subjects, such as genetic engineering and nuclear waste, they had never heard of before!
They studied while hauling water (the houses had no running water), while scraping seal and walrus skins, and once while in skinboats, hunting whales. They overcame enormous academic deficits, personal tragedy, fire, and educators who, believing that “studying hard is not good for Native students,” tried to stop them.
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Using the Guthridge Writing System (GWS), they stunned American education.
They became the only team of Native Americans ever to win a national academic competition.
And they did it twice.