We’re looking forward to introducing you to Philip Watt. Check out our conversation below.
Philip, it’s always a pleasure to learn from you and your journey. Let’s start with a bit of a warmup: What do the first 90 minutes of your day look like?
I wake up extra early while it is still dark, brew a French press and dedicate the freshest moments of the day to God. I begin with reading Scripture. Right now I am memorizing Psalm 5, which is a morning psalm: “My voice shalt Thou hear in the morning, O Lord; in the morning will I direct my prayer unto Thee, and will look up”. Then I’ll pray and read more Scripture. I’ve heard it said that the morning is for the Lord, the day is for man, and the evening is for family. If I can wait upon the Lord throughout the day because I have trusted that He hears my voice in the morning, then every thought will be captive to His will. I’m currently reading Disciplines of a Godly Man by R. Kent Hughes as well as Providence by John Piper. Having excellent commentary and analysis (or as they call it exigesis) of Scripture is key, but I’ll finish morning devotions by just reading ahead in the Bible, and I am currently in 2 Kings.
Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’ve been an independent educator for 15 years. In this period of time, I have helped students win over 60 Scholastic Awards, have been named in the Best of San Francisco Awards (Private English tutor, 2017), have helped hundreds of students get into their dream schools, have published hundreds of pieces of student work, and have developed a curriculum so deep that a 4th grader can come aboard, and I’ll have enough original curriculum to see him or her through high school. I am a Scholastic Awards National Gold Key teacher (meaning my students have won gold nationally, with the annual party held at Carnegie Hall). I studied teaching and English at Bard College back in the oughties and taught in NYC public schools for a few years before forming Mr. Watt’s. It was in Connecticut, in 2009 that I began tutoring, commuting from the city. I’ve had the privilege to teach many extremely bright kids who are affectionately known as ABCs: American-born Chinese. Do you remember that book Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother? While I didn’t meet the author, Amy Chua, several of the original “Tiger Mothers” who passed my name around knew her. I filled a niche. Highly attentive instruction to highly attentive kids who had extra support and expertise in STEM coming from mom and dad – where mom and dad could model excellence in STEM, they could perhaps appreciate but not model advanced English literature instruction.
Great, so let’s dive into your journey a bit more. What part of you has served its purpose and must now be released?
I am done building Mr. Watt’s Literary Services as a trove of published work, and I am done with developing the original curriculum, and when I “release” that, I hope to be in a position to simply reap the benefits: a wait list to study with me, recommendations and word of mouth that are constantly blowing up my inbox with requests. It’s hard to replicate what I offer, but with the advent of clones, maybe we’ll order up a duplicate Mr. Watt. He’ll have to double-download all student work though. All kidding aside, this is an interesting question, because I’m blessed with the simple fact that the originating impulse from MWLS’ formation is still the same: high-level original English instruction, one student at a time. With the trove of student work I’ve published, and being the only one who knows all that is contained in this trove, MWLS by its nature relies entirely on me for use of intellectual property. For example, I have a 10th grader right now named Timper who is reading Roald Dahl’s memoir from WWII, Going Solo. Tim read Dahl’s kids books when a kid, but the memories need brushing up. So before the unit gets underway, I’ll send him a 7th grader’s essay on George’s Marvelous Medicine, The Witches, The Twits, and Matilda. He recalls instantly, and in writing student feedback for the 7th grader, engages again with the material. Of course he’s surprised that Dahl was a flying ace for the Royal Air Force, and we jump excitedly into the unit. After I publish his essay on Going Solo, (https://mrwattsliteraryservices.com/timper-xu/) I’ll assign Tim to read a survey of the works of Stephen Crane by a different current student (https://mrwattsliteraryservices.com/taylen-li-7/). What’s the connection? Let’s thread this needle: Crane’s “The Open Boat” is called his finest short story. That’s saying a LOT because Crane is one of the form’s masters. “The Open Boat” is based on a real event: the sinking of the USS Commodore off the coast of Florida in January, 1897. Seven crew members drowned, but Crane and three others survived. Four days after the event, “Stephen Crane’s own Story” was published in The New York Press. But it took him another 6 months to complete his masterpiece “The Open Boat”. Why is it so time consuming to write literature? Similarly, Roald Dahl’s short story “Katina”, published in Ladies Home Journal in 1944, is the finest war fiction one can read. Elegiac, complex, perfect. How does this stand against his memoir? Timper will consider all of these nuances as he writes Taylen student feedback. Naturally, Taylen (now a junior) will review Timper’s essay. If you followed that, congratulations! Perhaps you just thought of a 7th grader you know who would love to study with me! But to get back to the original question, doing interviews like this profile for Voyager is part of marketing, but word-of-mouth has been the best supplier of students. Running MWLS is an ongoing engagement. Writing follow-up emails to parents, sending newsletters, keeping students connected through student feedback, even printing out collections of student work – it’s all part of running this business. If I wasn’t hungry for more students, I may not be as diligent about the above. That being said, the primary purpose of forming MWLS was to tutor English literature. So the long answer to “what part of me has served its purpose and can now be released”? Nothing. MWLS is a going concern, with all gears engaged, all the time.
Is there something you miss that no one else knows about?
I miss Skype. Skype was my go-to for 14 years. Always free, always reliable, I’d simply call a student up and it would ring that Skype-ring. I’d share the screen and we’d be off to the races. Now I’m on Zoom. I pay every month, and the service requires that I send the student an invite. Then I have to let them into the meeting. Not only that, but the chat also has a word limit, and there is no memory of previous chats. So yeah, I miss Skype a lot. I could have been teaching a 5th grader for a year and could scroll back and see exactly what we’d covered six months ago. If I was teaching that kid Basic Grammar, then I could find out in a few minutes whether we did the Action Verb Workout or not. Skype, can you please come back into my life?
Next, maybe we can discuss some of your foundational philosophies and views? How do you differentiate between fads and real foundational shifts?
Excellent writing, or literature, by definition, has passed the test of time. Does that mean that books with the ink still drying are not worthy for middle schoolers and high schoolers? Well, if I was a department head, I would shy away from assigning contemporary works. Real foundational shifts in a young person’s life occur when reading the best literature, for the short stories, say of Guy de Maupassant or of the great Eudora Welty are so revelatory both about their subject matter and of the writer themselves that the young person won’t be the same after reading. Then, when they go back to their Rick Riordan or Sandra Cisneros they’ll appreciate these writers even more. “Read the best books first, or you may not have a chance to read them at all” said Thoreau. Just yesterday, two juniors, one from Connecticut (yes downstream from my original group of Tiger Mothers) and another from San Francisco complained to me about the fiction assigned from their AP Lang and Comp teachers. My first question was: why are you reading fiction in AP Lang and Comp? It’s supposed to be taught using nonfiction. What did they complain about? In both cases it was the sexually explicit material and the political agendas in the books! And neither book’s ink was dry – both recent works. Try this experiment if you are a parent. Look up A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (2010). It’s a short story cycle. Get a sense of it – would you want your junior reading it? Or here’s another one: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (2017). The student reported to me about Exit West that the sex wasn’t “overly graphic but felt disjointed and useless in the context of the story”. And what is the plot of this novel, or what are the politics? Hamid has stated that he wants to reach readers because he wants them to be “progressive” in their ideas for solutions to current events. He wants them to consider the possibility of a “global migration” and “borderless world”, which essentially is the plot of Exit West. “In Hamid’s view, the present wish of humanity to go back towards past greatness poses a grave danger to the imagining of a progressive future. His novel therefore presents a radical future of global migration imagined through the magical portals that allow instant access to destinations around the world, challenging border divisions” (Shazia Sadaf, Carleton University). Using the classroom to explore political trends may be useful in a social studies or poly/sci class. But any fiction dealing with adultery, fornication, drinking, drugs, etc, for kids? No way. There’s so much great stuff to focus on. Why choose this? What’s your agenda? I don’t agree with teaching middle schoolers The Outsiders – save it for sophomores. A Catcher in the Rye? Seniors, spring semester. With my Christian students, too, I always finish discussions by relating it to the revealed Word of God. And I have two Course Catalogues: the second is only different in that it is for Christian familes, and each unit is fortified with Scripture.
Before we go, we’d love to hear your thoughts on some longer-run, legacy type questions. If you retired tomorrow, what would your customers miss most?
If I retired tomorrow, my 20 current students would have a hard time finding a replacement. Let’s face it: the classroom has become a political arena. The battle for hearts and minds is taking place at the secondary school level. Over the past 5 years, and increasingly, students need me to help them recover from grooming, both political and sexual. Here in California, where, in 2021, Governor Newsom instituted a class called Ethnic Studies for 9th grade (basic Marxist theory, with Critical Race Theory and anti-racism chief subjects). That’s right, instead of AP Human Geography or AP World History, all freshmen must sit through Ethnic Studies. Not only that, they must take “Growth, Development and Sexual Health”. Sounds wholesome right? It isn’t; it is graphic, and even depicts and explains fetishes and LGBT sex. This is not right. Kids know something is making them deeply uncomfortable, and sometimes they need me to help make better sense of it all. I am against Critical Race Theory, and against Open Society programming of all types. I teach the Declaration of Independence and have a Christian worldview. Few educators outside the Christian school enclave are bold enough to speak against these predatory and corrupting attacks. A 9th grader shouldn’t have to state his pronoun: that’s grooming, for it is forcing a young person to clarify what needs no clarification. It forces that young person to go along with a lie. One’s gender is fixed, given by God, male or female. To force a young person to participate in affirming gender dysphoria is wrong. To inflict Critical Race Theory on freshman is the same as putting poison into a well. To expose children to deviant sex practices is evil. Leave them alone and teach the best books first! If I retired tomorrow, my students wouldn’t have their weekly slot to disappear into literature, nor have an opportunity to tell me about the woke insanity they are suffering through, knowing that they’ll get a firm counter-spin to any pronoun drama, any neo-Marxist race theory. If I retired tomorrow, my students wouldn’t have the unique opportunity to build a writing portfolio of essays, short stories, author students, poetry portfolios, and more. And if I retired tomorrow, long-term students wouldn’t have the joy of studying through years with one caring tutor who values them and inspires them to literary excellence. Modern American classrooms are the frontlines for a foundational shift: the minds and hearts of young people are being fought over by two strong opposing factions. On one hand, what I learned at Bard is inclusivity and intersectionality. On the other is our collective culture, what we call Americana. While at Bard, I didn’t see that the seeds were being planted by my professors to make us teachers-in-training tow the line. In other words, the educational culture coming from the Bard Master in the Arts of Teaching program, while extremely vigorous and discerning in the disciplines of English, history, math, biology and Spanish, is a culture of Wokeness. In fact the nexus of Woke, George Soros’ Open Society, donated $100 million to Bard in 2020 for their Open Society University Network.
Thank you for your interesting questions and for allowing me to share my philosophies and praxis with your readers!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.mrwattsliteraryservices.com
- Instagram: @mrwattsliterary
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/philip-watt-1a541555
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/philip.a.watt/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@philipwatt6222
- Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/bazjak
- Other: Archive: www.philipwattcasting.com
