, Author at My Learning Springboard

Caroline Johnston

March 31, 2019

A graduate of Vassar College, and mother of three little girls, Caroline was born and raised in New York City, where she attended Trinity School for 13 years. Caroline uses her years of experience as a middle and high school teacher, an instructor for college-aged students and adults, and a private tutor, to help students of all ages with their writing, math skills, and test taking.

After working as a private tutor for a family in Beverly Hills for three years, Caroline took on a full-time position teaching English and social studies to 8^th graders at the prestigious Crossroads School in Santa Monica. While there, she also taught drama to 6^th, 8^th, 11^th, and 12^th graders. Since moving back to New York, Caroline has been teaching adults screenwriting and acting. Additionally, she blogged for a quirky motherhood website, and does private screenwriting coaching.

Since graduating from Vassar, Caroline has enjoyed volunteering as an alumni admissions officer, interviewing scores of students from high schools in Manhattan and Westchester. She also volunteers as a mentor for the South Central Scholars program where she offers academic and social support for exceptional students from low-income areas who have earned scholarships at prestigious universities.

Caroline’s unofficial philosophy is that the most important thing in life is to improve the world by bettering people’s daily lives. She tries to do this by bringing positivity, kindness, generosity, and respect into every situation.

Lastly, if there is one thing Caroline regrets from her teaching career, it’s that she was not a parent herself when she was teaching young students full time. She feels that being a parent now makes her more empathetic to children’s struggles and strengths, and better at understanding parents’ needs.

Is Speed Reading Good Reading?

March 20, 2019 Brad Hoffman

Last week, a new speed-reading app was announced by Spritz, a technology developer. The company claims that:

“Reading is inherently time consuming because your eyes have to move from word to word and line to line. Traditional reading also consumes huge amounts of physical space on a page or screen, which limits reading effectiveness on small displays…Now, with compact text streaming from Spritz, content can be streamed one word at a time, without forcing your eyes to spend time moving around the page… Our “Redicle” technology enhances readability even more by using horizontal lines and hash marks to direct your eyes to the red letter in each word, so you can focus on the content that interests you.”

When the app was announced, Internet commenters immediately weighed in, mostly with positive feedback. However, is this app–and speed reading in general–a good thing for reading? According to a recent article in The Atlantic, this is not the first time that speed reading has promised to revolutionize reading and reading comprehension. “In the 1950s, a schoolteacher named Evelyn Nielsen Wood discovered that she could read at a much faster pace than the normal 250-300 words per minute by sweeping a finger along the page as she read, reading entire groups of words at a time, and by avoiding sub-vocalization, or saying each word mentally. These techniques helped Wood reach 2,700 read words per minute, she claimed, and it was these principles she espoused in Evelyn Wood Reading Dynamics, her speed-reading business. By the 90s, though, the speed-reading craze slumped again. Perhaps because its students found the method to be harder than it sounded, or perhaps because those early Clinton years were simply a more relaxed time.”

People do speed read on their own to a certain extent, by skimming an entire text or reading key sections to pack in the most information in a short amount of time. However, according to The Atlantic, “a 2009 study found that skimmers did not remember very many details, nor could they make inferences from the text.” Most research points to a correlation between reading quickly and a lack of comprehension: that is, as reading speeds up, comprehension goes down.

The fact is, when we allow our brains to process the words individually, we are able to understand the text more fully and be able to speak to various layers within the text. Ultimately, what is important to reading comprehension–and quicker reading–is practice. According to Michael Masson, a psychologist at the University of Victoria, “what differentiates fast and slow readers is not how they read, he points out, but their overall language skills and vocabularies…Beginning readers can expect to read faster as they gain more practice, but eventually we each reach some upper limit. The simple answer, then, is ‘read more.’”

Here are some ways My Learning Springboard thinks about reading:

Lateness: What Kind Of Late Are You?

February 27, 2019 Brad Hoffman

What Kind of Late Are You?

Some people are chronically late. Scientist Tim Urban proposed in a very humorous blog post that lateness is a form of insanity; however, most people agree that it is just a problematic habit. Like any habit, it is hard to change, but possible if you try. Sometimes, your lateness might not be a problem for you or anyone else. But, when it is a problem, lateness tends to be a big problem. Learning to recognize how and why lateness occurs is the first step towards managing it. Managing it really will help at school, in life, and eventually your career.

Five Common Lateness Personalities

Adrenaline Addicts. Many people love the adrenaline rush of anxiety that fuels them to complete tasks. They feel like superheroes overcoming insurmountable hurdles. Most people are not capable of meeting a deadline under that stress and require extensions. They are often very angry with themselves for the repeated cycle of procrastination and anxious effort. Learning to space work out over a longer time takes the acceptance that you are simply human and, like most, need to sleep and eat in order to get things done. A very small group of people do manage to remain in superhero land for much of their careers; they are lucky that situations allow them to take extensions. I always worry about the day they don’t get one and lose a major opportunity.

Dreamy and Distracted. This person would be on time, except that all sorts of distractions occur along the way. These people miss the bus stop because they are staring out the window, listening to their music, and forget what they were doing, where they were going, and when they needed to be there. The real question is why they are spacing out even when important things are happening or need to happen.

Self-focused. Their precious time would be lost if they arrived before others. Being late ensures that things have started. They don’t consider what effect this has on other people’s schedules. Here, the issue is recognizing the impact you have on others, because what you do and how you do it matters for yourself and those around you.

Busy-Bees. These people agree to do too much and can’t do it within the time frame they imagine. They try to fit errands and tasks into every time slot. They always have more to do and so are always fitting one more thing into their day. Assessing the time for activities can help them become more realistic planners.

Victim—Things always happen to this person on the way somewhere. The bus was late. There was an accident. The rain slowed traffic. The list is endless. It’s never their fault and so they don’t understand why anyone is irritated. Being a victim has never led to success. It suggests that you are not in control of yourself or your own life so how on earth could you be made responsible for others?

Steps to Overcome Lateness

Recognize yourself in any of the above descriptions? That’s okay. You aren’t alone. The following tips can help you manage time better:

Time your routines. Time your morning routine for a week to get an accurate sense of what you actually use each day. Look up your commute online to learn how long it usually takes, including typical delays.

Be generous. Don’t give yourself 13 minutes to get somewhere. Round up. Take 20.

Stay active. Have something to do when you get where you are going so you don’t feel like you are wasting time if you are early. Use that time to ask the teacher or boss a question, check in with your peers, review your notes or the reading for class, prepare notes for an assignment, or write a thank you note to your grandmother who sent you cookies and a really ugly sweater.

Schedule! Use Your Phone. A huge part of time management is about remembering what you need to do and when. The easiest way to deal with that is a schedule, a calendar, as well as many reminders, and we all have those at our fingertips with our smart phone.

Despite many claims otherwise, lateness is a choice. Chronic lateness is a habit and though hard to change, you can do it with slow, steady, consistent attention to shifting the patterns.

By Charlotte Kent, PhD | Private Tutor and Executive Functions Coach

What Does College Writing Readiness Look Like?

January 31, 2019 Brad Hoffman

When people talk about college writing readiness, they usually characterize the main difference between high school and college writing by saying that college writing is heavily based in analysis. But too often, the conversation proceeds without defining a key term. What does “analysis” mean in this context? And how can parents and tutors help high school writers build analytical skills for college writing readiness?

When I consider the sort of analytical writing that happens in college classrooms, I am reminded of the definition offered by David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen in the first chapter of their book Writing Analytically. “To analyze something is to ask what that something means,” they write. “It is to ask how something does what it does or why it is as it is. Analysis is, then, a form of detective work that pursues something puzzling, something you are seeking to understand rather than something you believe you already have the answers to.” While high school teachers spend a great deal of time teaching critical thinking and analysis techniques, high school writers tend to deploy those skills by performing the acts of analysis and writing as separate steps — by figuring out and planning all of their ideas, then recording them. High school writers would likely be surprised, and perhaps intimidated, by the notion of “thinking on the page” in this way. Accordingly, a key aspect of facilitating college writing readiness is helping students become comfortable with this concept, and comfortable trying new writing and learning approaches overall.

Parents and tutors can help their high schoolers develop a number of writing techniques that make it easier to engage in college-level analytical writing. For instance, they can introduce brief, low-pressure exercises that make it easy to perform thinking on the page, to generate material that can become part of a more formal composition, and to conceptualize the writing process as a series of small, manageable steps. They can strengthen high school writers’ executive functioning skills by showing them how to set — and meet — deadlines for each distinct step of a writing project. They can help high school writers identify sources of support at their institution, such as writing centers. They can help to remediate weaknesses in reading that inhibit students from fully understanding and engaging with the texts they write about. They can find exemplar essays and help writers examine and learn from them. They can help writers move from perceiving revision as a one-time activity to perceiving it as a process of rethinking and rethinking again, of crafting several drafts, of revisiting a piece of writing and re-engaging with its ideas and its object of analysis until the writer feels that they are saying what they truly want to say.

These techniques pay off beyond the matter of college writing readiness; they help with college readiness overall. Students can employ low-pressure writing exercises to reflect on course readings and to prepare for class discussions, for example, and they can use their strengthened reading skills to navigate challenging technical documents. Stronger planning and time management skills are helpful in countless situations.

More importantly, these approaches bring about shifts in thinking that prepare them for the challenges of adult life. Dividing big tasks into manageable pieces prepares students for a range of professional situations. Visiting a writing center or a peer tutor helps a student realize that asking for help is a sign of initiative, not weakness, and that they don’t have to struggle alone. Moving from a rigid revision process into a more recursive and rewarding one teaches writers the importance of flexibility and perseverance. After all, in life, it often takes us more than two tries to get something right. It is not lost on me that when it comes to the Common Application personal statement — often the highest-stakes essay that they have composed up to that point in their lives — high school writers generally go through six to twelve drafts before the piece is ready to share with colleges.

“Analysis is, then, more than just a set of skills: it is a frame of mind, an attitude toward experience,” Graff and Birkenstein conclude. By helping high school writers cultivate both this set of skills and this attitude, parents and tutors are helping them not only to develop college writing readiness but to prepare for the world beyond.

By Elizabeth Walters, Private Tutor and Writing Coach

Should 9th Graders Study For College Entrance Exams?

January 29, 2019 Brad Hoffman

Worrying about college entrance exams — the ACT and SAT — seems to start earlier and earlier, which can unnecessarily derail important resources during the 9th grade year. It’s important to remember that many of the skills and concepts that you learn throughout high school — starting day one — will help develop the skills needed to succeed when testing time comes.

Freshmen year is an important foundation year to learn lessons that underpin the rest of your high school journey. It’s also when you should establish or continue good study patterns and organizational habits for the years to come. These habits will help when you cultivate test taking strategies and start officially preparing for college entrance exams in January or February of 10th grade. During freshman year of high school, it’s best to focus on a successful transition to high school both academically and socially.

Classroom Instruction and College Entrance Exams

One of the most important ways that students can prepare for college entrance exams is by recognizing that daily classroom lessons are already preparing you! You will encounter terms, concepts, and ideas every day that will serve you in the test taking to come.

Keep in mind that the “boring” basics are vital to your future success. Building vocabulary is key. Look up words as they appear in texts to minimize drilling later. Learn grammar now. English teachers will provide sentence level corrections on essays at this stage so that subsequent teachers focus more on organization, concept development, and higher order writing skills. This is the moment to establish and retain grammar rules because you will have so much more to study later. Math and language classes are strictly sequenced so mastering those foundation skills will ensure you succeed in and enjoy future classes.

The PSAT

Most schools organize a PSAT date during the Sophomore year. Many students worry about and even compete for high PSAT scores, but studying for the PSAT isn’t really necessary unless you aspire to earn a National Merit Scholarship. For most students, the purpose of the PSAT is to provide a concrete experience with college entrance exams and to show what knowledge areas you need to enrich and what types of questions are hardest for you.

The PSAT simply provides an initial baseline from which to judge your strengths and areas that require additional attention. It’s an abridged multiple-choice test, thus stamina and attention factors aren’t pushed to the same limits as full length SAT or ACT test, and it does not include a writing section, so this testing yields only limited information for planning purposes. Therefore, don’t take time away from your school work to study for the PSAT.

Test Taking Strategies

One of the challenges with college entrance exams are their structure, and that’s where learning the format of the test and developing some basic test taking strategies really helps. However, strategies must be taught in conjunction with content. Like tools in a toolbox, students need to know when to choose a particular strategy, or they’ll end up trying to hammer a nail with a screwdriver. As content is mastered, strategies help with efficient pacing and approach.

As a means of demonstrating subject matter mastery and building test taking skills, many students are in a position to take at least one SAT subject test at the end of 9th grade. If a SAT subject test aligns with a 9th grade course that is also a subject area of strength for you, then we strongly recommend taking it. Popular 9th grade choices are biology or foreign language, particularly if the student is a native speaker. Math 2 and physics are usually too difficult to take until junior or senior year. Subject tests related to chemistry, history, English, and literature are often managed during 10th and/or 11th grades. For students enrolled in AP courses, these exams are typically layered in during grades 10, 11 and 12. Students enrolled in IB programs have other specific planning to manage that can be leveraged for SAT subject tests or AP exams.

Regardless of school environment, it’s often the case that a school course isn’t completely aligned to any particular standardized test, or the course pacing isn’t on target to cover all necessary content. In January of 9th grade, we recommend you take a baseline assessment as a benchmarking opportunity so that any supplemental private tutoring needs and/or independent study can be strategically managed.

Timing For College Entrance Exams

Ninth graders don’t need to be thinking too much about college entrance exams, but they should be thinking about developing their intellectual engagement with the world in order to be prepared for those final high school years when tests and applications dominate. Ninth graders should also be thinking about their extracurricular activities and exploring new interests and hobbies, or deepening existing ones. Ideally school breaks and vacations allow students to discover their own pleasure reading, take fun workshops or courses in areas of interest, and/or manage a part-time job. They are, however, also an opportunity to create and launch a study plan for college entrance exams as well as SAT Subject tests, AP tests, or challenging subjects in school.

Most students should plan on taking college entrance exams officially for the first time in the late fall, winter, and/or spring terms of their Junior year. We recommend completing diagnostic testing in January or February of 10th grade in order to make an informed and strategic choice between the ACT or SAT. It’s absolutely not necessary to manage both tests.

Targeted instruction, structured practice, and accountability are all critical to your success with college entrance exams. Baseline ACT or SAT testing will reveal strengths and areas for growth. The summer between 10th and 11th grade is a great time to work more intensively. If a private tutor hasn’t already been established, now is the time to find one that will help address the specific areas of competency that need improvement. Taking the test 2-3 times during Junior year ensures that you have completed one of the major components of the college application process. With college entrance exams completed, you can spend the summer between 11th and 12th grades focusing on college visits and developing the Common Application essay as well as supplemental essays.

For a college planning overview from grades 7 through 12, please click here.

To further discuss high school and college planning as well as private tutoring, please contact our office.

By Brad Hoffman, MS.Ed., and Faya Hoffman, MA, and Charlotte Kent, Ph.D.