Founded in 2009 by instructors with extensive experience in the field, Goods of the Mind, LLC stands out as an independent provider of education services in the San Francisco Bay Area. From the start, our mission has been to deliver real knowledge and transfer actual problem solving skills to students, without the interference of administrative or financial concerns. Because we are very committed to the progress of each student, we have developed a business structure that ensures quality instruction while drastically minimizing all other costs. We develop new support technology continuously, so that our virtual classroom and all our tools can provide a better experience day after day. We never stop researching resources, worldwide, so as to bring to the classroom the most interesting, most ingeniously designed examples in addition to our no-nonsense approach to theory.

At Goods of the Mind, we take instruction seriously. Our focus is on enlarging and improving the set of skills the student is able to master independently. We have no other concern. Not even PR. We know that parents and students benefit from knowing where they stand, how competitive they are and can become in a landscape of global competition targeted towards professional success. We help people see outside the 'feel good' coccoon of public school and take steps to build real abilities for a real world. Although we do not provide grades and formal assessment, we care for our students, we get to know them through interaction in class and we advise parents when necessary. At Goods of the Mind, students are not numbers. We get to know them more and more through responses during lessons and we are willing to communicate to parents either informal assessments or educational advice in a most sincere manner.

Changing our focus from on-site small group classes - our previous very busy market - to online classes has been a big step. In spite of the fact that online classes are more and more abundant on the net, instructional design for such classes is improvised, at best. How must online classes be conducted in order to be effective? How do they engage the student? Many parents had already come to us with a plethora of complaints about online classes they had taken elsewhere. By listening to them, we realized that there was much to be done to design the virtual class as well as to educate people about their expectations from a class conducted remotely. As we are experienced instructors who understand the needs of the field, we are able to provide engineers with specifications that, instead of resulting in a general purpose classroom, provide us with an environment that allows us to teach most effectively.

Parents usually tell us they prefer in-person classes to online classes. But we already have almost two years of online teaching experience and our findings show that - at least with our methodology - students learn as effectively or more effectively in a remote class. In an on-site class, students often 'buy time' through their reactions to direct questions: they respond by starting a debate that distracts from the topic and wastes instructional time. In the virtual classroom each student is more directly connected to the instructor and feels more compelled to work on questions and provide an answer that competes favorably with other answers sent by participants. In the online environment, peer interaction retains its positive role while many of the negatives associated with group lessons disappear.

Read our blogs to find out in detail how we work and what you can expect from purchasing classes from Goods of the Mind. Join us on the journey to a future of better learning!

Currently at PDI/Dreamworks, Silviu earned a doctoral degree in 1995 from the Technical University in Berlin, in the field of mathematical physics. A former medallist at the International Physics Olympiad, Silviu is an insider to the competitive process and has always enjoyed problem solving at all levels.

Silviu supervises the mathematical content, helping us create the most effective problem sets.

Cleo graduated summa cum laude from the University of Bucharest with a degree in physical engineering. She started teaching as she homeschooled her two sons and eventually started teaching full time in 2006, after earning a California teaching credential for math 7-12. She was an SAT instructor at one of the largest training companies in the SF Bay Area, where she introduced and started classes for competitive math training. In 2009, she started teaching independently, leading to the founding of Goods of the Mind, LLC. Cleo has helped a steady clientele of students identify and expand their strengths, work on their weaknesses with a steady plan, and select the best opportunities for academic growth.

Cleo has many years of experience coaching students for competitive mathematics. She currently teaches in Millbrae, Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Cupertino, San Jose, Milpitas, Fremont, San Ramon, Pleasanton and Dublin where she coaches over 140 students. She has helped an impressive number of students qualify for the American Invitational Mathematics Examination (AIME), a very exclusive venue. As a result, many of her students have also achieved stellar admissions to college. In 2008, her Cupertino AMC 12 team ranked 2nd best in California, after Lynbrook HS. In 2009, she had 29 qualifications for AIME from a total of only 120 students. Significantly, three of these students were in grade 8! In 2010, more than 60% of her students qualified for AIME, one student qualified for USAJMO and her BAMO-8 team earned 2nd place in the Bay Area. In 2011, 14 of her students won awards at Math Kangaroo.

Throughout the years, she has coached middle school students who literally hated math to overcome anxiety and to become confident independent learners in mathematics. Her classes are designed to build a cohesive foundation that will also help improve students' scores on standardized tests. Cleo has also developed a methodology that is very successful for SAT and SAT Subject exams.

Cleo volunteers a lot of time and effort to Math Kangaroo in USA and is the current Contest Director for Northern California (2010-2011, 2011-2012).

Cleo is fluent in English, German, French and Romanian and holds language teaching certificates for German and French.

Andrei maintained a strong track record in mathematics and computing contests throughout his high-school years in Canada, consistently placing among the top ten high-school students for computing in grades 10, 11 and 12. His high-school achievements also included several prizes in math contests, including a national gold medal and a POPTOR creativity prize for submitting an original physics problem. He formally studied computer science at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA and graduated magna. Upon graduation, Andrei co-founded Lignab Technologies, Inc., for the purpose of developing network administration and security tools for web services. Additionally, Andrei handles all computing technology requirements of Goods of the Mind, LLC. Dissatisfied with the low compatibility levels, poor reliability, and high maintenance costs of existing teleconferencing software, Andrei wrote most of the Lignab Learner classroom software from scratch. On the side, Andrei enjoys writing computer-verifiable proofs for simple algorithms in theorem-proving environments such as Isabelle/HOL. Andrei teaches the USACO class and additionally teaches a small number of select students individually. His main USACO training approach is to help students consistently write the shortest possible code in every practice problem, especially by identifying and exploiting symmetries. His training approach also emphasizes the importance of leveraging the built-in Java libraries to the greatest possible extent and supplies his students with highly refined techniques for "offloading" implementation tasks to library routines that were actually intended for different or simpler purposes.