A coach, not a teacher. No AI shortcuts. No nightly fights. No "I read it" lies. Just one Tuesday morning a week where required reading actually gets done, by the kid, in their own brain.
You already know how this plays out. The summer reading list comes home in June. It sits. June becomes July. July becomes August. Two weeks before school starts, the panic begins. Then comes the AI summary, the SparkNotes pull, the "I read it" lie. The fall starts with the kid pretending. The teacher sees it. The kid feels it. Reading dies a little more.
Most kids will not finish their assigned summer reading. National data shows reading stamina has collapsed. 83% of teachers say their students have lost stamina since 2019. Only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. Add in ChatGPT and you have a generation that has stopped reading without anyone noticing it on paper.
The school assigned the book. The school will not fix the fact that your kid won't open it. That is the gap. That is what we built this for.
Eleven Tuesday mornings offered between June 16 and August 25. Your family commits to any 6 sessions for $400. Add more at $60 each, paid upfront. Your kid brings whatever their school assigned for the summer. We get them through it, page by page, using a method built for the kid who has stopped reading. No quizzes, no comprehension worksheets, no AI workarounds, no nightly fights at home.
Real, sustained, actual-eyes-on-the-page reading happens inside the room every Tuesday. The kid who hasn't opened the book all week still leaves having spent real minutes inside it.
The session ends with a personal reaction the kid can only have produced from actually reading. No SparkNotes shape. No ChatGPT summary. No fake response paper in September.
Friday a 60-second prompt from Kevin. Kids reply with what stuck. Keeps the book alive between Tuesdays. Builds the relationship that makes them want to come back.
Your kid walks into school the first week with the summer reading actually done, in their own words, in their own brain. That single fact resets the year.
TuesdaysJune 16, 23, 30 • July 7, 14, 21, 28 • August 4, 11, 18, 25 • 11 sessions offered
9:00 – 10:30 AMYounger group (grades 5–8)
10:45 – 12:15 PMOlder group (grades 9–12)
Birmingham, MichiganSpecific location confirmed at enrollment
8 to 10 kids per cohortSmaller than school. On purpose.
$400 base / 6 sessionsPick the 6 dates that fit your summer • add additional sessions at $60 each, paid upfront • sibling discount available
Their school's assigned summer readingPlus a notebook and pencil. That's it.
Some kids walk out of the Summer Reading Lab with their school book actually done. And they want more. They got back something they thought they'd lost: the muscle, the patience, the little jolt at the end of a chapter. We built a second program for that kid.
The Reading Club is smaller, slower, and free of school's required list. The group curates a slate of high-interest books, votes on the next one, and reads it together using the same approach. Less workshop, more book club. Launching late fall 2026.
Tell us you're interested → and you'll hear first when registration opens.
Most reading help assumes the kid just needs to focus harder. The actual neuroscience tells a different story. Six things drive deep attention, intrinsic motivation, and lasting retention. The Reading Lab is built around all six. The Lab is the application layer of three decades of research on how brains actually learn.
Self-determination theory shows that when students have real autonomy, intrinsic motivation rises and engagement deepens. Forty years of replicated findings across age groups, countries, and subjects.
▶ How the Lab does itKids choose how to respond to the book. Drawing, voice notes, acting it out, writing, building a map of the characters. Not the teacher's preferred format. Theirs.
Csikszentmihalyi's work on flow shows that students in flow states demonstrate 30 percent higher persistence and deeper learning. Flow happens when challenge and skill are matched and feedback is immediate.
▶ How the Lab does itKevin coaches one-on-one inside the session, calibrating difficulty in real time so each kid stays in the zone. Too easy, they check out. Too hard, they shut down. He's reading them the whole time.
Meta-analyses consistently find that the strength of the teacher-student relationship is one of the largest single predictors of academic engagement. Bigger than method. Bigger than content.
▶ How the Lab does itTwenty years of relationship-first coaching. Mid-week voice notes. No grades, no quizzes, no assignments. Kevin is not the gatekeeper. He is in the kid's corner.
Brain imaging shows humor lights up the same dopamine pathways as money and food. Kids who laugh in a session retain more, stress less, and stay open to new material.
▶ How the Lab does itKevin's coaching style is naturally funny, not performatively funny. He's a memoirist whose books read like comedy on the page. Kids leave the room having laughed at least once. Often more.
Storytelling activates oxytocin (connection), cortisol (attention), and dopamine (reward) all at once. The brain remembers stories far longer than facts. This is why human cultures evolved around them.
▶ How the Lab does itKevin is a published novelist and memoirist. He speaks in stories. Every session has at least one. The book the kid is reading becomes another story to think with, not just decode.
Today's kids show attention profiles across the entire generation that used to be rare. Studies on fidgeting, cycling, and gentle motion during cognitive tasks consistently show that movement keeps the brain regulated and engaged. Forcing kids to sit perfectly still actually makes focus harder, not easier.
▶ How the Lab does itThe room has stationary bikes, under-desk pedalers, wobble cushions, and standing options. Kids choose what helps them stay in the book. Movement is the rule, not the exception.
The Reading Lab has stationary bikes and under-desk pedalers in the room. Some kids read while gently cycling. Some kids read sitting still. Either is right. The kid picks.
The research is unambiguous. All brains focus better with movement, not in spite of it. Today's kids have grown up in a screen environment that has compressed attention spans across the entire population. By the time they're asked to sit through a chapter, every kid is showing the focus profile we used to associate only with attention disorders. The label matters less than the fix.
Movement during cognitive tasks measurably improves sustained attention, recall, and executive function. Stationary cycling specifically works because it doesn't compete with reading for the same brain real estate. Cycling uses the motor and proprioceptive systems. Reading uses vision and language. The two run on different circuits. The result is a kid who reads longer, retains more, and doesn't burn out at the 20-minute mark.
"Read and Ride" programs operate in schools across 30 states. The Lab brings that science into a small-group setting built for the modern kid. The one who hasn't been able to sit still through a chapter at home all summer.
This is not nostalgia. This is the largest documented decline in adolescent reading in modern American history. It is not happening to kids in some other place. It is happening fast to the kids living in your house.
Kids resist reading help for the same reason they resisted reading in third grade. The school-shape sneaks in even when adults try to make it fun. Comprehension prompts. Round-the-circle questions. The quiet ranking of who finished first. The Reading Lab is built in the opposite direction, on purpose.
Ninety minutes that look nothing like English class. Each kid is working through their own school's summer reading. The group meets in the same room, at the same hour, and Kevin runs the rhythm.
Each kid shares one thing that stayed in their head from this week's reading. The kid who read three pages has just as much to say as the kid who read fifty. No "did you finish" interrogation.
Real sustained reading happens inside the session. Some silent, some read-aloud passages where the book demands it. The kid who couldn't get through the chapter at home gets to be inside the book in real time.
Kevin moves around the room one-on-one. Decoding hard passages. Getting the kid past the part where the book lost them. Answering questions a teacher would never get asked because the class is too big.
Each kid shares where they are. Different books, but the conversation surfaces shared ideas: how a character changes, how a writer builds tension, why a chapter hits. Kids end up curious about each other's books too.
Kids choose how to react: drawing, voice memo, a one-line poem, a scene acted out, a map of where the characters are emotionally. Not every brain processes through writing.
Friday morning, a 60-second prompt from Kevin. Not "did you do the homework." More like "what did the chapter make you think about this week?" That note keeps the book alive between Tuesdays.
Most people running a "reading help" program are well-meaning English teachers, librarians, or parent volunteers. None of that is Kevin's resume. Here is what he brings instead.
No grades. No quizzes. No assignments. Twenty years of being the adult who is in the kid's corner against the system, not the one enforcing it.
Kevin published Cyber Junkie in 2010 and Get Off That Game Now right after. He documented the screen-attention collapse before most parents could see it. The reading crisis is the downstream of what he predicted.
Disordered launched in 2025. My First Hundred Jobs arrives this spring. Kids feel the difference between someone who teaches a book and someone who builds one.
Two decades coaching ADHD, dyslexic, twice-exceptional, anxious, and gifted-but-checked-out kids. The session structure is built so the kid who was told they were lazy in third grade actually thrives. That design works for every kid.
Twenty years of academic coaching with families across Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, and Troy. Word-of-mouth referrals fill cohorts before the page is even shared.
The premise: kids who don't fit the mold are running on a different operating system. The Reading Lab sits inside a thesis about how those kids can still thrive in a world being rewritten by AI. Joining this room means joining the larger thing.
AI can summarize. It can pattern-match. It cannot tell you what stuck for you. The kids who can still sustain a 300-page novel, hold a complex narrative in working memory, and let a story change them are protected from a homogenization the rest of their generation is sliding into. This is not a literacy program. It is preparation for the world they are about to inherit.The Reading Lab thesis
The first cohort fills from families who already know me. If summer reading is something you've been quietly worried about for a while, this is the room. Reach out and we'll talk.