ShmoopTube

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Hi I’m Dave Siminoff and I’m the founder of Shmoop.

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If you’re kind enough to listen to my droning voice, odds are good that you care a lot about

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education, your students and your community. It’s a fair question to ask – What can

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Shmoop offer teachers? My wife and I started this company with the

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goal of doing things better. As our kids engaged in grammar school and

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beyond, we were stunned that learning tools had barely changed since we were in school.

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Same dull, rote forms of teaching. Serial, linear, uncreative exposition.

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And no love! No love of learning. No love of open-minded discussion.

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And there should be. We loved school. Yes – we were, and are, proud geeks.

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So Shmoop is a different approach to education. We want to remove the friction from learning.

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No $5 words, no pretense, no chest-pounding. We’re all about being relevant, real and

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approachable. More specifically, here at Shmoop we are learning

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guides, test preparations, life lanterns to light the way.

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We are guides to in-depth analysis of literature, history and civics. Our guides are not short-cuts.

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They celebrate and encourage deeper thinking and student engagement.

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We are digital literacy. We recognize that computers are here and they’re here to stay.

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And we want your students to save a few trees while they’re at it.

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We are test prep exams covering everything from the ACT and SAT to nearly every AP on

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Earth. And much of this in Spanish as well.

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Shmoop

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also rewards students with “Shmoints” for acing exams, nailing drills or inviting

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their friends. These Shmoints add a healthy dose of competition

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to the learning process, and they are yours to fiddle with however

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you see fit. There are also links provided in every unit

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that direct students to the Best of the Web so they can continue to research a given subject

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if they don’t feel Shmoop has given them their fill.

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All site content is aligned with Common Core standards.

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We spend our days creating with a grimy group of hundreds of writers who hail from shmancy

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PhD programs from the finest long-haired institutions in the world.

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We have over a thousand guides on our site. We can’t show you everything, but let’s

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whet your appetite with a little taste. Our lit analyses explain why you should care

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about reading these stories and why they are relevant to today’s teens.

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Sometimes we get so excited that our write-ups are longer than the original story.

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We welcome students to Shmoop’s Biology 101 – the virtual home for all things vegetable,

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animal and mineral. In Mythology, we have Facebooked the gods,

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leaked their tweets and email logs, and revealed whether they were jocks, valedictorians or

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beauty queens. You can have a rollicking good time on all

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these pages of Shmoop without spending a dime. But now let’s go to our premium service.

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What is Shmoop College Readiness? We want to get you, your students, your children

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ready for college. What we don’t believe in: snores and ridiculous

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prices. What we do believe: CSI can teach you something

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about the ACT. Batman and the Joker can explain integers

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better than most teachers. We are sure you have people telling you all

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day long why they are the greatest thing since sliced bread for your students.

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We believe we are right up there with this and other world-changing discoveries, because

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we’re fun, we’re funny-looking, we’re affordable to all.

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So that’s it. We hope you got the gist. Ping us. We’re not shampooing our hair Saturday

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night. Yours in Shmoopiness – out.

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