About us

DIANE SPEED has been a home educator for more than twenty years. Using an academic, college-prep program of her own design, she tutored two children from pre-school through high school and through college admissions:

• In 2013 her son completed high school and was awarded a full academic scholarship — tuition, room, and board — at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, where in 2018 he graduated with a degree in screenwriting. Thanks to his scholarship, he graduated from LMU debt-free.
• In 2018 Diane's daughter, who is a classical guitarist, began studying for a BA in Music Industry in Albany, NY, where the College of Saint Rose awarded her a scholarship amounting to ninety percent of tuition. — At the end of 2022 she, too, graduated debt-free.

In addition to homeschooling her kids, Diane founded The Classical Kids Network, a homeschool support group that Diane led from its inception in 2001. At its peak, Classical Kids served around two hundred families in CT and surrounding states. In 2007 Diane launched the group's website to enhance its services to member families; for many years its free resources were used by homeschoolers around the country.

Prior to being a home-educator, Diane was a management consultant, designing instruction for team-building, sales, and software training. As a homeschooling mom, she used her expertise in instructional design to fashion a program for parents homeschooling through the high school years: Homeschooling the College-Bound Student.

Diane is also an accomplished science teacher; she has a B.S. in Biology from Drexel University, with a minor in Chemistry, and has been teaching science courses to high-school-aged students for more than a decade. She now teaches three online courses of her own design:

• Honors Biology With Lab (2 semesters);
• Honors Chemistry With Lab (2 semesters);
• Geometry (2 semesters — includes an optional honors-level track);

What's more, since the fall of 2020 Diane has been offering a new kind of science program targeted to advanced middleschoolers and new highschoolers: her online Science Intensives are 8-week programs on specific topics like Ecology and Botany.

Finally, the program called "The Blend" was Diane's brainchild. Founded in 2014, The Blend was an innovative approach to rich, challenging high school content: delivered to local families, its courses effectively "blended" on-site classes with online instruction. In the early spring of 2020, with the advent of COVID, Diane and her husband shut down their on-site classes, but as designers of engaging online instruction, they were able to move all their content to delivery online — only now, through HS College-Bound, their courses became accessible to families across the U.S. and Canada.

ROY SPEED is a writing consultant and a homeschooling dad. He has a B.A. in English from Northwestern and a passion for history and for Shakespeare. He is a sometime lecturer on business writing to MBA students at The Wharton School.

In the business world, Roy is an expert on writing in large organizations. For more than thirty years he has created writing training of various kinds, including eLearning programs. One such program has been translated into 17 languages and has since become required training for hundreds of thousands of people in dozens of countries.

Roy writes essays — see, for instance, his essay in City Journal on teaching writing or his essay on Shakespeare in the high school curriculum. He is also the author of a complete grammar text, The Writer's Guide to Grammar (2019), which is available both as a student workbook and as a companion teaching guide & answer key.

In the homeschooling world, Roy has taught Shakespeare and other literature, as well as history, writing, and grammar. His teaching has been hailed by homeschooling parents as "outstanding," and one parent has written:

He turns kids into Shakespeare fans and really teaches his students how to read closely and think deeply.
    His writing classes are equally inspiring! There is no busy work (both of my kids are very turned off by busy work). The assignments in Mr. Speed's writing classes are meaningful and serve a very specific purpose. All assignments are reviewed and lead directly to discussions in class. Students really learn to write — my kids have turned into writers who look forward to writing.

Another parent writes:

DS has taken several composition courses before this, and [Roy Speed's Logical Communication] is the best he's had by far.

What's more, Roy has become something of an expert in the skills involved in close reading of difficult texts. His articles on annotating texts, for instance, have been discovered by high school English teachers around the country — you can see those articles here and here — and are now assigned reading for students in dozens of public high schools.

Among the courses Roy has taught in recent years:

• Shakespeare Intensives:
  — Romeo & Juliet  (10 sessions)
  — Hamlet  (10 sessions)
  — Macbeth  (7 sessions)
  — Twelfth Night  (8 sessions)
• History & Literature of the Ancient World (2 semesters)
• History & Literature of the Middle Ages (2 semesters)
• Logical Communication (2 semesters)
• Essay Writing & Appreciation (2 semesters)
• Novels by Women (2 semesters)