Dr. Ryan Fics
B.A. (Honors), M.A., Ph.D. (Comparative Literature)
Subject: Language Arts
What will my child walk away with? The ability to synthesize, evaluate, and communicate information with clarity and precision. My teaching focuses on helping students master the foundations of a subject so they can think independently and do something original with what they learn.
What can families expect? A fun, interactive learning environment with a teacher who is genuinely curious about ideas and expects students to be too. My goal as an Academic Campus Head, instructor, and as the lead for our High School and University Admissions Preparation programs, is to help students grow into independent thinkers. Every class is designed with that long-term aim in mind.
What does class actually feel like? An engaging, intellectually challenging environment led by a teacher who is genuinely curious about ideas. As Academic Campus Head and lead for our high school and University Admissions Preparation programs, my goal is to help students become independent thinkers.
How do you challenge a curious mind? By building strong foundations first. Depth of understanding, not speed of coverage, is what allows students to engage confidently with difficult ideas. Once that foundation is in place, I raise the stakes.
Credentials and Experience Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, Emory University; Joint M.A. in Religious Studies, University of Manitoba and University of Winnipeg; Honours B.A., University of Manitoba. Teaching experience includes the University of Manitoba, Emory, Wesleyan, York University, and the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics. Published articles and book chapters with presses including Palgrave Macmillan and Mosaic, An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal and extensive teaching experience as a Reading Teacher with students in Grades 3 through 12.
Why Ryan? Why Brain Power?
I have taught everything from classical literature to biology of story, but what unites that literature is a belief that education should awaken curiosity rather than simply deliver information. Great literature and philosophy cannot be mastered through memorization. They demand interpretation, judgement, reflection, and the ability to defend ideas with evidence.
Over time, students develop a distinctive intellectual competence at Brain Power: the ability to navigate ambiguity, evaluate arguments, recognize assumptions, communicate with nuance, and revise their thinking when confronted with better evidence. While every discipline develops valuable expertise, these habits of mind emerge most powerfully through sustained engagement with challenging texts, rigorous writing, careful reading, and repeated revision. Students learn not only what they think, but why they think it and how to communicate those ideas effectively. Brain Power’s Language Arts curriculum is uniquely designed to cultivate those intellectual capacities.