Dr. Jason Boulet
Honours B.A. (Minor in Classics), M.A. , Ph.D. (English Language and Literature)
Subject: Language Arts
What will my child walk away with? Students leave my class reading more carefully, writing more precisely, and thinking more historically — understanding that many of the ideas they encounter today have roots stretching back centuries. Drawing on my doctoral work in English literature, I guide my students through close readings of complex texts, helping them build valuable analytical skills that transfer across multiple disciplines.
What can families expect? Expect a classroom where literature is treated as a living discipline, not a series of comprehension questions. I connect texts to the cultural, historical, and philosophical worlds that produced them, providing the context that students need to engage with great works of literature that might otherwise seem intimidating or unrelatable.
What does class actually feel like? My classes are scholarly but accessible. I try to bring the academic energy of a seminar room into the enrichment setting, asking students to wrestle with ideas rather than simply identify them. There is always more going on in a poem or a story than first appears, and discovering those hidden levels of meaning can be genuinely rewarding.
How do you challenge a curious mind? I give curious students more context, so they can find new ways into texts and issues that they might think are straightforward. A student who grasps the surface-level meaning of a text might be directed toward the cultural assumptions behind it, the literary movement it originated from, or the significance of the things it leaves unaddressed.
Credentials and Experience Ph.D. in English Language and Literature, Queen’s University (funded by a SSHRC Canada Graduate Scholarship). M.A., Queen’s University. Honours B.A., Mount Allison University. Specialization in nineteenth-century British literature. Published in Victorian Poetry, the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, and the University of Toronto Quarterly. University-level teaching experience spanning from medieval to 20th-century British literature.
Why Jason? Why Brain Power?
My approach connects the cultural richness of the past to the questions students are asking about the world they live in now. At Brain Power, students get to tackle those questions with a group of like-minded peers, while also learning from what has been thought and felt about them by the centuries of thinkers that came before us.