INSTITUTE
What We Are
We are a unique school designed to provide all the necessary requirements of general public education. We are organized around the idea of individualized, student-directed learning, assisted in their pursuit by trained coaches and mentors.
We accept students of primary, secondary, middle, high school, collegiate, and post-collegiate ages.
What We Do
Everyone is born with wonder and curiosity, but it is often beat or conditioned out of us. Often the most gifted among us feel completely ostracized and out of place. This is often the result when so-called schools impose arbitrary or out-of-context learning on students without regard for the unique motivations, preoccupations, or interests of the individual. We are uniquely designed to do just this by addressing directly the desires and interests of these students.
Here at the Thirdofeight Institute, we have a culture that promotes the ideals of individual choice, motivated learning, personal responsibility, creativity, and real-world context and practical application.
We see our role as helping students develop from where they are into the best people they can become. We help our students safely and carefully open their hearts and connect to those purposes that engage them. By doing so, we help awaken, cultivate, and harness their inherent gifts and abilities with the goal of assisting them to reach their ultimate potential.
How We Do It
Efficiency and effectiveness in education relies on seven interrelated factors:
1. Awaken natural curiosity and imagination in students through exposure to specialized immersive play.
2. Help identify the defining narrative focus of each student and the related consequential subjects that resonate with his or her strong extant motivations.
3. Facilitate and cultivate opportunities for engagement with these areas and subjects.
4. As students gain comprehension and grow in their abilities, we help them work towards any goals they awaken and define. We stay abreast with the growing needs of students by helping maintain access to necessary expertise, resources, and truth in order to answer students' growing abilities and interest.
5. Help promote, design, and orchestrate opportunities for students to connect with relevant peers in their specific fields.
6. Provide ample opportunities for students to harness their new knowledge through relevant applicable market-based experiences. Invite family, friends, and potential new students to come participate and give feedback to these students.
7. Maintain adequate and thorough records and awareness of student progress over time.
We take our responsibility over our students' educations quite seriously, and consider what we do as augmentation of the parent-child relationship, rather than a replacement for it. Therefore, our process requires a high degree of parent/guardian involvement.
When possible, parents are strongly encouraged to participate at every level of the learning process. This includes encouraging parents to enroll as students themselves whenever possible in order to cultivate a home environment that supports and sustains the principles students are learning at school.
What It Looks Like
Once we help students orient to the ideas, subjects, activities, instruments, ensembles, and jobs of their liking, we help connect them to the relevant resources in order to help them accomplish their goals.
There are five general areas under which student engagement falls: projects, subjects, activities, ensembles, and jobs. None is required, but are actively fostered through immersive play and voluntary exploration.
PROJECTS
A student project is defined entirely by what the student wants to accomplish, rather than a list of arbitrary parameters. They usually are described by some type of movement or large goal that has awakened within the student. It typically is tied with doing something that in time will help people find more happiness or fulfillment, and is intended to act outside upon others for their good.
It could be anything from advocating conversation with a specific audience, to building and selling something to another audience.
It is always defined by ones personal identity, ones audience, a medium of conveyance, and a driving purpose.
ACTIVITIES
Activities are organized around physical engagement and/or working with ones hands. Again, no student is required, but if a student finds an activity that awakens their energies, we do all we can to facilitate it for them.
It could be anything from martial arts like jiu jitsu, karate, or kendo, to outdoor experiences like swimming, rock climbing, canyoneering, or simple hiking and running. It could include pick-up soccer games, organized individual or partner dancing, yoga, fencing, english longsword fighting, gardening, or any number of physically engaging ideas. These activities usually have a repeating pattern or habit or continued engagement over time.
Other activities include crafts like blacksmithing, broom making, soap making, writing a book, or filming a story. It also incorporates performing on stage, making food, or constructing or manufacturing products to sell.
SUBJECTS
Students are encouraged to consider and pursue any number of interesting subjects that they find along the way.
These are defined as theoretical ideas or lines of reasoning that preoccupies the student's mind, and which they are interested in and motivated to learn about. They are typically embodied in group of discussions, a book that the student has picked up and is reading, or a recurring conversation with a mentor or friend. The subject might be embodied in the learning of a language, classroom gatherings covering a scientific subject like electricity or physics or philosophy or the general scientific method, one-on-one discussions with a counselor dedicated to improving ones mental health, or some other intellectual pursuit.
ENSEMBLES
Thirdofeight Institute prioritizes music teaching through individualized instrumental learning. We also advocate and encourage engagement with both new and school-sponsored musical ensembles.
Students have the option of pursuing just about any instrument they fancy, and have a selection of a gradient of skilled ensembles which are always seeking for additional instrumentalists to join their ranks. The school also provides individual students opportunities to perform publically on a regular basis.
JOBS
Rather than charging enrollment fees, students enrolled in the school are encouraged to be enlisted in a job working for the school directly. This ensures a connection of cause and effect, and helps the student to appreciate the relationship between their labor and the benefits.
While parents or guardians are welcome to pay the enrollment fee directly, the school encourages parents or guardians to consider the benefits of requiring their student to participate in at least partial responsibility in paying for their education through formal engagement in a oncampus job.
This kind of engagement helps students to never lose sight of the fact of life that the work that they do is tied to their survival. It also helps the students to grow in respect for the resources they are using in their learning.
How To Enroll
GET INTERVIEWED
Enrollment at the Thirdofeight Institute begins with an interview. One of our counselors will ask you and your parent or guardian a variety of questions that identify personality, preferences, as well as assess preparedness, fitness, and commitment to our program. It is imperative that we get a strong sense of what drives you, what and where your gifts might be, and what you'd like within yourself to become.
Once you complete your interview, we will assess your answers. Once we do this, we will then let you know whether you've been accepted and where we go from here.
SIGN UP FOR AN INTERVIEW
In order to get an interview, please fill out this short application here.
INTERVIEW PREPARATION
Upon receiving the afore mentioned application, a counselor will contact you directly to schedule an assessment with the student and his or her parents or guardians. Before the interview, it is recommended that the student, if at least eleven years old, and under the direction of his or her parent or guardian, take a Myers-Briggs personality test to provide us with a basic awareness of his or her personality. The results of this will help the counselor to assess the needs of the student more quickly.
