History

Tyse Tutoring and Test Prep truly began in 1994, when Blair Tyse founded Minds In Motion SAT Prep in Cupertino, CA. Since then she has offered test prep for over 2,000 high school Juniors and Seniors, servicing a range of students from those teens bound for Ivy League schools to those struggling with learning differences.  

When some of her teens needed extra work in their math and science classes, Blair decided to add academic support to her list of services in 1995. With a BS degree in Physics and a minor in Aerospace Engineering, she is fluent in math levels up through BC calculus and in high school chemistry and physics, and loves sharing her love of math and science with her students.

In 1996, Blair noticed a small percentage of her high school students just couldn't finish the reading portion of the standardized tests they were prepping for. No amount of practice nor fancy strategy was able to help them to improve their test scores and performance. She scoured her resources for professionals who could help support those students for which her techniques proved ineffectual, and began learning about visual processing issues or dyslexia.  

She referred her clients to clinical psychologists who could perform academic testing and evaluations, and to vision therapists and literacy specialists who could help her students improve their reading skills. She learned about research-based literacy intervention that actually helped students improve their reading and achieve at-grade-level reading fluency. 

In 1999, her own children began school at Christa McAuliffe School, where a literacy intervention called the Barton method had been beta tested and used for students as young as 1st graders. As soon as possible she began her Barton Training, impassioned by the fact that if you could help a child with reading issues when they were in 1st grade, rather than wait to intervene in high school, you were avoiding a decade of failure for them.

Now, more than twenty years later, Blair offers a wide-range of services from academic support in math, science and English, literacy intervention with the Barton Method, to test prep for the SAT and ACT tests.

Get in touch

We know that finding the right help for your child is a choice not to be taken lightly. That’s why we offer free consultations to walk you through your child’s needs, the scope of your goals, and your budget.

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