All Articles tagged high-school.

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.

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

Teaching Students to Embrace Mistakes

June 13, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Hunter Maats and Katie O’Brien, authors of The Straight A Conspiracy
Original Source: Edutopia
Originally posted March 20, 2014

For the last ten years, we’ve worked one-on-one with students from elementary school through graduate school. No matter their age, no matter the material, when you ask what they’re struggling with, students almost universally name a subject: “math,” “English” or, in some instances, “school.” Doubting that all of school is the issue, we then ask to see their last test. After some grumbling, the student digs down, deep into the dark, dank recesses of his or her backpack, and pulls out a balled-up, lunch-stained paper that, once smoothed out, turns out to be their latest exam.

To a teacher, this should be incredibly frustrating. You spend a huge part of your life grading tests, commenting on essays, and providing thoughtful feedback on homework assignments, only to have them wadded up and ignored. (Yes, students look at their tests, but you shouldn’t harbor any illusion that they look at anything but the red letter grade.) Before writing students off for being ungrateful or lazy, you need to understand why what they’re doing makes perfect sense.

The Science Behind Mistakes

Telling students they need to take advantage of the feedback they get isn’t just good advice: it’s established science. In the last few decades, researchers have discovered a lot about how people become experts. The main idea, made popular by everyone from author Malcolm Gladwell to rapper Macklemore, is the 10,000-hour rule. Ten thousand is the number of hours it takes to become an expert in almost any field. While it’s wonderful that people are starting to understand how work leads to expertise, the most important part of that research is not how much practice someone needs to perform, but what kind of practice. This latter category is called deliberate practice and involves isolating what’s not working and mastering the difficult area before moving on.

Picture a classical violinist rehearsing. He or she would not play a new piece start-to-finish, fudging through tricky sections and trying to “be done.” That musician stops in trouble spots, figures them out, and then plays that measure over and over again, and only moves on when it’s perfect. The same principle applies to schoolwork.

Mistakes are the most important thing that happens in any classroom, because they tell you where to focus that deliberate practice.

So why don’t students view their mistakes as a valuable asset? Well, students don’t think about their mistakes rationally — they think about them emotionally. Mistakes make students feel stupid. “Stupid” is just that: a feeling. Specifically, it’s the feeling of shame, and our natural response is to avoid its source. If we say something embarrassing, we hide our face. If we get a bad grade, we hide the test away. Unsurprisingly, that’s the worst move to make if you ever want to get better. Academic success does not come from how smart or motivated students are. It comes from how they feel about their mistakes.

Changing your students’ perspective on mistakes is the greatest gift you can give yourself as a teacher. Imagine having a classroom of students who are engaged and constantly improving…it’s every teacher’s dream. Instead, teachers face too many students who are disengaged and really rather surly. That surliness is years in the making. By the time students walk into your classroom, they’ve likely already internalized their mistakes as evidence that they’re just not smart. Getting a bad grade feels like a personal attack. No wonder they’re giving the deliverer of those grades the stink eye.

A Fresh Take on Mistakes

To help your students rethink mistakes, help them be specific about their errors. Knowing that answer #3 is wrong doesn’t mean much. Knowing that they didn’t understand mitosis gives them a mandate for getting better. Often, when we go through tests with students, the mistakes they perceive as dire are either careless errors or a single concept applied incorrectly on several questions. Either way, the “fix” is usually smaller than how big the problem feels.

You can also help students view their mistakes as helpful. The red pen isn’t the enemy: when students understand how to deal with errors, red means go. One way to encourage that attitude is to take the most common mistakes that the class made on a test or quiz and analyze them together. The more open everyone is about the mistakes they’ve made and how they happened, the less significance any student will place on future errors.

Mistakes happen for concrete reasons. A student didn’t memorize all the requisite facts, didn’t execute the steps of a process, or perhaps just ignored the directions. The red “X” is just a simple assessment of the actions that student took — actions he or she can easily fix next time. Sharing that clarity and causality with your students is the best way to teach deliberate practice, instill motivation and help them develop a more constructive relationship with mistakes. In short, this creates the class you and your students have always wanted.

Why Spelling is (Still) Important

June 10, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Spelling is a basic skill that has become neglected, but here is why spelling is still important, perhaps more than ever!

In recent years, electronic devices have become equipped with powerful spell check systems that automatically correct our spelling mistakes. In addition, we often use Google as our dictionary. Many highly-educated, successful, intelligent people have this trouble. Some say spelling stifles creativity by blocking the writer’s flow of ideas, while others argue that there is a stigma against people who do it poorly. Unfortunately, a bad speller can easily be mistaken for a bad student.

It is not merely stigma though, for young students, spelling may be the key to becoming successful readers and writers.

Spelling Improves Writing

Some students find spelling to be incredibly easy, noticing immediately when something does not look right. For others, words are unpredictable and confusing. The English language can seem daunting and filled with strange rules and inconsistencies. Students who struggle with spelling often feel insecure about writing anything. They may say “I hate writing” or “I have no good ideas.”

Often, these same students are creative thinkers who express themselves well verbally. What holds so many students back is the fear of not being able to spell. For these students an explicit reading program like Preventing Academic Failure (PAF) is vital. Through programs like these, students learn the English language’s rules and patterns and begin to read and spell words with ease.

Spelling Improves Reading

Spelling and reading are inextricably linked: learning how to spell is learning to read. Learning the way spelling works helps with decoding, which improves overall comprehension. The more a student understands these building blocks of language, the more fluent their reading becomes.

A Place for Inventive Spelling

Inventive spelling is the process of making words phonetically, which leads to unconventional examples of writing the same words. While exact instruction is helpful for students in first grade and above, inventive spelling does have its place.

Students in Pre-K or Kindergarten who are just learning how to form letters and words should be taught inventive spelling to learn sound and symbol correspondence.

They should practice pulling sounds in words apart and blending them together. Only as students gain experience writing, should they begin to learn spelling rules. Even as students advance through the upper grades, students should always have a place to journal without worrying about spelling. Even adults misspell words and there is always value in learning to proofread, edit and rewrite.

By Joanna Brown, Reading Specialist

The Incredible Power of Mnemonics

June 3, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

If you took piano lessons, as I did, it was so much easier to remember the lines of the treble clef by intoning the mnemonic: “Every Good Burger Deserves Fries…E, G, B, D, F.” Who can ever forget the colors of the spectrum (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet) after coming in contact with the famous “Roy G. Biv”? And the ditty, “Columbus Sailed the Ocean Blue in Fourteen Hundred Ninety-Two” will be forever ingrained in our collective consciousness.

Mnemonic devices have the power to dramatically increase the amount of information that students can remember, including learners with disabilities! The latter take the same tests as their non-disabled peers, and memory skills related to learning may be difficult for children with learning deficits. These students spend the majority of their day in general education classrooms (including content classes such as English, Science and Social Studies). “Chunking” is a simple way of breaking down large pieces of information into smaller organized chunks–mnemonics are a simple way to chunk information, and is a useful tool for all students. Cutting up larger quantities of information into smaller pieces helps our brains remember more information, more easily.

Chunking, and mnemonics can also help children encode (put the information into their memories) and make the data easier to retrieve. As memory-guru Ed Cooke wrote in The Guardian “You can trick your mind into remembering useful but dull facts by weaving the information into vivid mental shorthand.”

Mnemonic devices are very old; some, such as The Method of Loci, date back to the Ancient Greeks. This is how it works: imagine a place that is familiar to you, such as your kitchen. Then go through the list of vocabulary words you need to memorize, and associate each word with an object in that room. For instance, if the word is “cacophonous,” you can create the image of a blaring radio on the kitchen counter. If the word is “loquacious”, you can imagine the teakettle as talkative, and so on.

There is more than one method to use mnemonic devices. The most popularly used memory aid is the Expression or Word Mnemonic. If you are studying for the SAT, it’s simple to recall the seven coordinating conjunctions, once you’ve heard FANBOYS (for, and not, but, or, yet, and so). Rhyme Mnemonics helps put information in the form of a poem such as the “30 days hath September” ditty. Image Mnemonics are constructed in the form of pictures that promote recall.

The sillier and more outlandish the image, the easier it is to remember. If trying to remember the name of a character in a book, imagine a pirate with a woolen leg for “Peggy” or a hairy beast for “Harry.” You’ll always remember how to spell “geography” once you know that “George Edward’s Old Grandma Rode a Pig Home Yesterday” and that “potassium” has “one tea, and two sugars.”

Even though mnemonics are not a replacement for experiential learning or comprehension, they are an important tool to pull out of the box when test time rolls around.

What’s your favorite mnemonic device?

By Deborah H. Friedman, Private Tutor