What to Look For in a Tutor
Before, during, and after the school year, lots of students and parents recognize the need for amazing tutors. But once you start shopping around, you likely become a bit overwhelmed by the sheer volume of options out there for academic tutoring and test prep. Should you go with a private agency? A fellow classmate? A retired teacher? After school, or only on weekends? One-on-one, or in groups? And what if you plan on taking both tests? Does it even really matter? If these are some of the questions rattling around in your head as you search for a tutor, maybe take a step back and ask some questions about yourself instead. You’re one-half of the student-tutor relationship, after all, and to know what to look for in a tutor, you should understand what you want out of tutoring. Consider the following: Have you ever taken the SAT or ACT? Just…
Perfection is Overrated
Summer break is already about halfway over, and for a lot of high school students, that means the pressure is already back on. You’ve got summer reading to do, math practice to finish, tutoring sessions and extracurriculars to sign up for before they’re full. It’s all overwhelming enough without knowing that colleges are getting pickier every year. If you’re aiming for a top school, you’ve probably gotten the impression that you need a schedule full of AP classes, a 4.2 GPA and flawless SAT and ACT scores to stand a snowball’s chance, and in some ways, you’d be right. Ivy League universities and other schools of that caliber can afford to expect perfection, and some students thrive when they’re striving for that perfection. That’s all well and good–our society needs its academic juggernauts. But not everybody is built for that kind of rigor, and if you’re not, it can be…
Chronotypes
Summer is well and truly here, and that means that teenagers around the country are finally catching up on sleep. It’s no secret that the typical high school schedule is not kind to teens’ natural circadian rhythm, or the internal “clock” that determines when you feel awake and when it’s time to sleep. Adolescence is a time for intensive growing and thinking, and that requires plenty of rest—about 10 hours a night is considered ideal for high schoolers, but between class, extracurriculars, homework and a social life, that’s probably not happening for most of them. The good news is, you can tweak even a super busy schedule so it works with the natural rhythm of your cognitive functioning. Dr. Michael Breus, a clinical psychologist and sleep specialist from California, coined the term “chronotype” to describe the particular rhythms of sleeping, waking, working and playing that people fall into. Most people…
Do SAT & ACT Subscores Matter?
When test scores come back, making sense of it all can be overwhelming. Composite scores, section scores, percentiles—it’s a lot to decipher, and people taking the SAT or ACT for the first time are often surprised by subscores. These tests are broken down into sections, but the sections break down even further into different types of questions. Subscores measure how well you did on each of these types, and they show up on score reports in a couple of different ways: for the SAT, they’re listed at the bottom of the first page, and for the ACT (which calls them Reporting Categories), they’re listed under Detailed Results. The SAT measures seven different subscores: Command of Evidence Words in Context Expression of Ideas Standard English Conventions Heart of Algebra Problem Solving and Data Analysis Passport to Advanced Math On the ACT, each section measures three Reporting Categories. In English: Production of…
What to Read This Summer
Summer is just around the corner, and for high school students, that means that pretty soon you’ll be getting your summer reading assignments. It doesn’t matter if you’re a natural reader with a full bookshelf—nobody really likes having to slog through a list of “classics” before the fall semester starts up. Reading skills are crucial for teenagers, though, and developing any skill takes practice. Reading regularly can help make even the most difficult novels easier to get through, and as a lifelong bookworm, I’ve got plenty of recommendations. These are titles that I find myself returning to over and over because I actually enjoy them, and some of them might already be on your required reading list anyway. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner. This beautiful work of historical fiction depicts two women’s intertwined lives in Afghanistan through the Afghan-Soviet war and the rise…
Different Ways to Be Intelligent
Every student and parent in the U.S. knows that there’s a lot of pressure on kids to be “smart.” In fact, intelligence is very cool right now—Gen Z, or everyone born in the mid-90s or later, is the most educated generation in American history. The hashtag #BookTok on TikTok, where readers share book-related content and bond over their love of reading, has over fifty billion views. Quintessentially geeky games like Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering are more popular now than they’ve ever been. If it’s brains versus brawn, brains are enjoying a winning streak these days. But society tends towards a pretty limited view of what intelligence really means. In our public school system, it’s easy to feel like you’re not smart if you can’t hack homework or ace tests. The SAT and ACT especially are mistaken for intelligence tests, even though they’re definitely not. Being book-smart is…