Admissions Consulting Archives

4 Qualities of a Great Tutor

August 26, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

1. Fairness. You are the leader in the tutoring session and your behavior determines the student’s behavior. The student will look to the tutor constantly for consistent leadership. It is therefore important that the tutor understands what he or she asks from the student and is prepared to readily admit mistakes if any occur. Nothing destroys a student’s respect faster than insecurity and inconsistency.

Example:
Tutor: Caroline, that is incorrect, that is not the way you should be interpreting the text.
Caroline: But it says here that my teacher wants us to learn it this way though!
Tutor (after several moments): I apologize, Caroline, I was mistaken. I understand why your teacher wants you to learn it this way and here’s why…

2. Malleability. Tutoring is not a boot-camp, nor a funhouse. You run an environment that gets the best results out the student. So when the student deserves a break or some leeway, give it to them. When their behavior forfeits your goodwill, these relaxed gestures should be curtailed. Maintaining strong boundaries helps keep them focused on the task at hand.

Example:
Ethan: I don’t want to do this, it’s so boring! I just did so much work too!
Tutor: Ethan, you’ve worked cleanly and with a lot of dedication for 30 minutes straight. During the next simple exercise, you can put on your headphones and listen to some music.

(The tutor monitors his progress as Ethan does so.)

3. Promptness. When a student knows that his tutor will be sitting there every 5 o’clock on a Tuesday, it translates into engagement with the material and teaching character. A late tutor is seen as weak and ineffective, one that doesn’t take his job or the material very seriously.

4. Sense of Humor. A student’s mood often proves to be the only obstacle between success and glorified baby-sitting time. A mind consumed with a bad day at school has little room for Math or English. To get their attention in the right place, a joke is in order. Find something entertaining about their One Direction, American Girl, or Yankees obsession and crack wise (gently, of course). Putting a smile on their face will relax the session and open their minds to learning.

By David Hollander, Private Tutor

Essential School Supplies and the Magic Backpack

August 13, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

When I think back to my childhood and what starting a new school year meant to me, it usually revolved around going school shopping to get the school supplies we thought we needed to have a successful school year. I recently read an article by David Valdes Greenwood in the Huffington Post entitled “The Magic Backpack: 5 Must-Haves for Every Student”, which I loved and absolutely recommend reading in its entirety. As I read it, I realized how materialistic going back to school has become. Students and parents alike are so concerned about all the “stuff” they need to have in their backpacks in order to be successful. But the reality is that being truly successful is not about the “stuff”. Yes, you need pencils, paper, glue, etc., but the back-to-school conversations that we may be missing out on are the ones about compassion and thoughtfulness towards the other students in the classroom or what it means to be successful in a community of your peers. These, too, are “supplies” that students need to have.

I love how David broaches this subject by using five essential classroom tools to illustrate his point. For example, he uses the eraser to discuss gender stereotypes in the excerpt below:

Stereotype Erasers

Kids don’t innately know stereotypes. Limiting shorthand visions of human behavior accrue over the years, fed by TV shows, pictures in books and magazines, and, of course, conversations overheard. My daughter was as comfortable wrestling with boys or wielding a light saber as she was with donning tulle or sequined shoes — until school started. Her favorite color was blue until classmates kept telling her that pink was the right color for girls. And this pattern applies beyond gender issues to family configuration, ethnicity, class, faith, and more. There’s no escaping the fact that school, where kids are trying to piece together the workings of the world, is often a hotbed of prejudices trotted out as fact. We’re trying to help our daughter resist the lure of stereotypes and to not feel the need to conform to other’s preconceived notions, but instead to experience the freedom of self-definition and to extend that latitude to her friends.

If we head into the new school year thinking less about all the “stuff” and more about the way we treat our fellow school community members, it should be a successful school year that we can all feel good about.

To read David Valdes’s full article in the Huffington Post, click here.

Written by: Editorial Team, My Learning Springboard, Inc.

The Lowdown on Longhand: How Writing by Hand Benefits the Brain

August 11, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Anissa Ramirez PhD
Original Source: Edutopia
Originally posted August 6, 2014

My Catholic school third grade teacher was extremely tough on me. Her biggest gripe was my handwriting, which looked more like an EKG scan than penmanship. For years, I harbored not-so-fond memories of her, but now I know that her strictness about penmanship was actually helping my brain develop. Recently, scientists have shown that longhand writing benefits the brain.

Today, cursive writing is becoming a lost art as note taking with laptops becomes more and more prominent in classrooms. But what we are losing is much bigger than a few scratches on a page — we are losing a robust way of learning.

There has been much debate on the use of laptops for note taking in classrooms. The pro side sees laptops as an efficient way of collecting and storing information. The con side sees laptops as an opportunity for distractions and multitasking. What’s missing is an understanding of how taking notes by longhand influences the brain. Recent studies have shown that students taking notes with laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than the students taking notes by longhand. In short, they had the information on their computers, but did not have an understanding of that information in their brains.

So in this age of technology, I’m suggesting that students take notes with paper and pen. It’s a crazy idea, but hear me out.

A Plea for Penmanship

When students take notes with their laptops, they tend to mindlessly transcribe the data word for word, like speech-to-text software. But taking notes verbatim is not the point. What is lacking in their note-taking-by-laptop is the synthesis, the re-framing, and the understanding of the information. Students that transcribe with laptops have shallow connections to what’s being presented to them. However, those who are taking notes by hand are processing the information and representing it in a way that makes sense to them. They are learning.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that longhand writing is so 19th century. But we need to answer a question: do we want students to have a deep or shallow connection to the information we’re giving them? While we live in a world of short sound bytes where news is thrown at us unprocessed, this should not be the mode for schools. In the 21st century, the ability to connect knowledge in new ways is more important than the knowledge itself. So students with deeper connections to information can link it in new ways — they can create.

The Pen is Mightier

All this begs the question of how we can incorporate longhand in a digital age. What about a daily notebook, written by hand?

A lost art in the world of science is the lab notebook. In it, scientists write down observations, impressions, and all the variables and outcomes of an experiment. If you are teaching STEM classes, might I suggest that you resurrect the lab notebook and have students personalize it? Give them assignments where they have to hand-draw pictures of what they see and what they predict. Let them figure out how to visually represent these things — without digital pictures, by the way. The data says that taking images with a camera does not improve one’s memory either, so these notebook entries must be written or drawn. Skill doesn’t matter. What we are fostering are experiential links in a child’s brain, and one of the best pathways is through their fingers.

If you are not teaching STEM classes, have students carry a personal notebook in which they write down observations and draw things by hand on whatever topic. We are trying to create more connections to information, and developing fine motor skills along the way.

If you have a classroom with lots of technology, try to integrate note taking. Often when I give my PowerPoint slides to students, I pass out a version that doesn’t have all the information that students are seeing on the screen, which means that they need to fill it in by hand. And when I glance over their notes, I see how their work doesn’t always look the same. This is great because my students are doing the most important thing we can teach them — they are learning how to teach themselves.

So let us not confuse efficiency with the real goal of teaching. Teaching is not a job of cramming as much as we can into a brain. It is about learning. And getting students to learn means that we must use every pathway to connect them with the information. Using laptops reinforces the Industrial Revolution ideal that every kid should get the information in the same way, and that it should come out the same way. But by occasionally replacing the laptop with a pen, learning happens, which is why we got into this business in the first place.

College Essay Tips and Tricks

July 14, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

The spring and summer seasons are a great time for rising seniors to start working on their college essays. There are numerous books, expert guides, and how-to checklists for writing the the most important few-hundred words of a high schooler’s career; however, there really are only a few key things to keep in mind. When discussing ideas and approaches with your child, make sure to relate the following:

DON’T rehash your resume. Are you a debate club junkie? Have you won numerous awards for your arguing acumen? Is your debate coach writing one of your recommendations? Then it’s covered–don’t write about debate team or anything related in your essay.

DON’T use obvious or overused examples such as a story about how you fell down during a cross country race and managed to finish, or one about how you got a C in Chemistry in the fall but worked hard to raise it to an A in the spring. The former is a generic trope that doesn’t reveal anything about you; the latter will be obvious from your transcript.

DON’T try to be funny. Admissions counselors are reading the essay to get a better, more well-rounded sense of who you are. If you come off as chummy, you will look like you don’t take the school or the application process seriously. Even worse, your sense of humor could come off as offensive. Save your jokes for your texts with friends.

DO show. DON’T tell. Boring verbs=boring sentences=boring essay.

Example Prompt: Explain your desire to attend Princeton University.

Boring Intro: “Since I was a kid, I always knew I wanted to go to Princeton because it has a good English Department. I have always loved reading and writing, and Princeton’s program is one of the best the nation. The Great Gatsby is my favorite novel in particular, and, since F. Scott Fitzgerald attended Princeton, I know I would like it there.”

Better Intro: “In my family, we call my Aunt Beatrice “Aunt Bookie” because every time I go to visit her in New Brunswick, she sends me home with armloads of books to read. She introduced me to Alice and the rabbit hole, Milo and his tollbooth, Bilbo Baggins and Middle-Earth, and, most importantly, Nick Carraway and West Egg. When I finished the Great Gatsby, she suggested that we take a trip to nearby Princeton so I “could see a college for writers.” As we walked around the campus, I began to imagine I was Fitzgerald dreaming up Gatsby’s extravagant parties…”

DO be vulnerable. DON’T be defiant or depressing. Were you scared after your mom lost her job? Did your brother’s rare cancer put stress your relationship to him? It’s OK to highlight rough patches in your life as long as you do so to illustrate what you learned about yourself or how you grew as a person. If your grandmother dying last year was the hardest thing you’ve ever had to go through, that’s perfectly fine to write about–just make sure your story has an arc.

Finally, remember that the essay is only one piece of the application pie. Your personal statement could be the best one in the pile, but if your grades, recommendations, test scores, and extracurriculars are not up to par, it won’t be what gets you into school. That being said, if you have a solid application, an essay that provide insights into who you are that the admissions team otherwise would have no indication of from the rest of your documents will be an enormous asset in setting you apart from the other applicants.

By Daphne Muller, Private Tutor

Why Handwriting is Still Important

June 17, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

A recent article in the New York Times outlines the work of a few scientists who argue that handwriting, an art quickly disappearing from curricula and state standards of education (including the Common Core State Standards) is more important than some realize. Maria Konnikova’s comprehensive article highlights the work of psychologist Karin James, at Indiana University, who has used brain imagery to show that the process of learning how to write by hand might actually help children learn in the long run.

The Experiment

In Dr. James’ experiment, “Children who had not yet learned to read and write were presented with a letter or a shape on an index card and asked to reproduce it in one of three ways: trace the image on a page with a dotted outline, draw it on a blank white sheet, or type it on a computer. They were then placed in a brain scanner and shown the image again.

The researchers found that the initial duplication process mattered a great deal. When children had drawn a letter freehand, they exhibited increased activity in three areas of the brain that are activated in adults when they read and write: the left fusiform gyrus, the inferior frontal gyrus and the posterior parietal cortex. By contrast, children who typed or traced the letter or shape showed no such effect. The activation was significantly weaker.”

In Dr. James’ view, these differences can be attributed to the messiness of learning how to write with free-form handwriting: “not only must we first plan and execute the action in a way that is not required when we have a traceable outline, but we are also likely to produce a result that is highly variable.” These variabilities might be a learning tool in themselves. “When a kid produces a messy letter,” Dr. James said, “that might help him learn it.”

Possible Explanations

In another study conducted by Virginia Berninger, a psychologist at the University of Washington, it was shown that among children in grades two through five, printing, cursive, and typing are all associated with “distinct and separate brain patterns–and each results in a distinct end product.”

Berninger’s result showed that “when the children composed text by hand, they not only consistently produced more words more quickly than they did on a keyboard, but expressed more ideas. And brain imaging in the oldest subjects suggested that the connection between writing and idea generation went even further. When these children were asked to come up with ideas for a composition, the ones with better handwriting exhibited greater neural activation in areas associated with working memory — and increased overall activation in the reading and writing networks.”

Takeaways

Even though the importance of handwriting does have detractors–the Common Core, for instance, only requires that children learn handwriting in grades K-1–new research does suggest that the benefits of handwriting extend even beyond childhood and learning how to learn: “For adults, typing may be a fast and efficient alternative to longhand, but that very efficiency may diminish our ability to process new information. Not only do we learn letters better when we commit them to memory through writing, memory and learning ability in general may benefit.”

This research has suggested that writing by hand, even for older students, “allows the student to process a lecture’s contents and reframe it — a process of reflection and manipulation that can lead to better understanding and memory encoding.”

So what does this mean for your child? Encourage your student to leave the laptop at home and write notes by hand: you never know what good it will do.