Help your teen overcome the overwhelm of analytical reading and writing. 

Last year, your student loved reading, didn't mind writing, and almost always knew what to write about. Best of all, they loved talking about what they were reading in school.

But now they're starting high school and seem to be struggling.

When you ask what's wrong, they say: 
           "English is too hard"
           "The stories are confusing"
           "I have no idea what's going on"
          "I don't know what to write"      
As a parent, you know your child is capable, but you don't know how to help them.

And worse? When you read the story and review the instructions, you feel just as discouraged. You know it'll take real time to work through it yourself before you can help
— and you can tell your teen doesn't have the patience to wait.

Whether you're a homeschool parent or a parent of a student in a traditional classroom, Page and Pen Academy can help.

Close Reading. Critical Thinking. Focused Writing.

At Page and Pen Academy, reading and writing aren't separate subjects.
They're two halves of one skill:
  • close, careful reading gives students something worth saying, 
  • disciplined writing requires them to clarify what they actually think and support their claims with relevant evidence.
But that partnership only works once a student can actually understand the sentence in front of them.

If a sentence's structure is hard to untangle, or an unfamiliar word stops a reader cold, there's no meaning yet to interpret — and nothing to write about. For many students, that groundwork has to come first: learning to break down challenging sentence structures to make meaning clear.



This is the goal of our 6-week intensive course: Making Sense of Complicated Sentences.

Once that foundation is solid, students are ready for the real work.

Our literature courses are built on the idea that students don't grow their own intuitive understanding of the world through worksheets. They need to interact with a text, explore their ideas and assumptions, and learn how to ask good questions. It takes time — and the patience of adults who know how to guide the struggle, not remove it.

Students build genuine critical thinking: the ability to interpret and question what they read and defend their own point of view. These are the human skills they'll need in college and the world beyond. They'll learn to recognize the flaws in what they read—including the confident, fluent, and often subtly wrong text that AI now produces.

Students who ask tough questions, support their answers with evidence, and struggle with the difficult grey areas of literature are better prepared to face the difficult questions of real life. Ours is a community of learners from diverse backgrounds and perspectives, where students develop empathy, strength, and a broader understanding of the world we all share.

Core Beliefs 

Reading literature builds empathy

Authors write fiction because they see some truth in the world they want to expose, examine, and evaluate. They want to share their view of the world with others. Each piece of literature we choose at Page and Pen Academy helps students learn to question the world they live in and make judgments about how they would respond in similar circumstances. They begin to understand that the world is not simple, and it doesn't fit neatly into the boxes their own lives have created for them. Sharing these novels as a family provides an excellent opening to discussions about values.

Literature cannot be read in isolation

Every artistic work, including literature and nonfiction, reflects the author's experiences, historical moment, and culture. To truly understand the author's message, students need to understand the circumstances that shaped the author's perspective—their "truth." But students' life experiences often differ significantly, and they sometimes struggle to understand. Our courses include videos designed to help students understand the relevant historical and cultural context before they begin reading, along with relevant information about the author's life.

Students learn best in collaboration with others

Learning happens best when students can talk with both experts and peers learning alongside them. Explaining a claim out loud, or hearing a classmate's perspectives, encourages students to sharpen their own thinking in ways a worksheet never can. Every course includes a discussion board where students engage with each other. Select literature courses also meet weekly for live Socratic discussion, testing their understanding against their classmates'. Foundations students also meet live each week to parse sentences and build complex-sentence skills together.

Meet your Guide 

I spent 27 years teaching high school literature and writing in a traditional classroom — and met many  smart, capable teenagers who had convinced themselves they just weren't "good at English."

I know this is never true. Usually, they're struggling with is something specific: sentence structures they couldn't untangle, too many unknown words that stopped them cold, sufficient practice in close reading, or frameworks that cared more about the "right" answers than their own thinking. MY goal has always been to help students become confident in their ability to understand complex reading tasks and communicate their understanding through writing and discussion.  

I've also watched my own teens struggle through much of the same literature I now teach — so I know what this looks like at the kitchen table, not just in front of a classroom.

Wherever your student is learning, I built Page and Pen Academy to be the guide I wish more of us had.
Pilot reviews coming soon!
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