Readabee FAQ
Every two weeks, I pick interesting articles that I’ve read and compile them for my GP students free-of-charge. I’ve done this for three years and this year, I’ve decided to make it freely available online for all who are interested. You can view the full list of Readabee articles here.
The articles in Readabee articles are meant to enrich my students’ understanding of the world, to provoke their imagination, and to serve as the basis for our discussions. They may also be chosen for any number of additional reasons: keen insights, novel ideas, exemplary writing, sound logical flow and so on. A few may be included simply because they are fun to read. The goal is to expose my students’ to good writing and to inspire them to think about the many issues that are already a part of your lives.
Readabee isn’t meant to be a replacement for the excellent notes that many Junior Colleges provide and it most certainly isn’t meant to be printed out and memorised the day before the GP exam (there are actually too many articles to print anyway). These articles are meant to be experienced and enjoyed; and if it helps my students improve their GP grades, all the better.
Readabee also isn’t meant to be a replacement for the personal guidance that can only be provided through in-person interaction with a qualified tutor. Not everyone needs extra lessons outside of their normal curriculum but if you do, please don’t hesitate to ask before it is too late. You can find out more about our GP classes here.
Readabee may seem like a heavy diet, but all students need to do is nibble a little a day. There is no doubt what students might achieve if they only try. The most driven of mine made it from the bottom of his school cohort to the very top in just one and a half years, then scored an A for GP in the A-Level exams. He tells me that Readabee played a vital role.
The wonderful thing about articles is the bite-sized chunks they usually come in. Most of them can be read in one sitting. Although they may lack the depth that good books go into, articles are a great way to expose students to new ideas without demanding too much of their time. In fact, students don’t have to read all the articles (which could, combined, be as long as a book). All they have to do is read the ones that interest them while making it a point to explore topics that they might be unfamiliar with. Their effort will pay off, if not in A Levels, then in University or in their future careers.
A word of warning. Many of these articles are not model GP essays in a strict sense and they will often adopt different styles and tones that are only suitable for their medium of publication. This means students shouldn’t mimic everything they read in Readabee if they are writing a GP essay. But if you are writing in some other context, then feel free to abandon the conventional GP structure. Above all, know your audience!
Most of the articles come from newspapers and magazines.
These are the ones I read regularly:
- Newspapers: Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, BBC, Bloomberg, The Diplomat
- Magazines: The Economist, Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, The Atlantic, New Yorker, Nautilus
- Digital Publications: Aeon, The Baffler, Undark, Quillette, n+1, ProPublica, The Conversation
- Think Tanks: CATO Institute, Brookings Institute
There are also some excellent sites that pick articles.
- Other article aggregators: Arts and Letters Daily and The Browser
Some of these sites have pay-walls (or extremely distracting advertisements). My students will receive a PDF version of Readabee every two weeks.
Some articles may be locked behind paywalls. If you are a student using this purely for educational purposes and you wish to receive the PDF version with the full text of all the articles, send me an email at [email protected].
For students with the PDF verison, Readabee can be read on the phone without an internet connection and without any distractions from flashy advertisements or click-bait.