5 Essential Strategies to Excel in your Freshman Year of College

Many students experience a culture shock when they enter college — not because they finally have no curfew or can eat whatever they want in the cafeteria, but because the academic expectations professors & teaching assistants have for their students are dramatically different than most high schoolers have experienced. In college, students are expected to […]

Mind the Gap (Year)

Consider two students:  Anna: A senior in high school, Anna is passionate about organic food and healthy living. In a high school elective class, she wrote a promising business plan that combined those two passions. In the summer after high school, she will intern at an organic health food store. Instead of going to college, she […]

Your Action Plan for the College Admission Essay

Three straightforward strategies any teenager can practice in the years (or months!) leading up to applying for college. These strategies introduce students to the personal essay genre and provide opportunities to practice its basic tenets so that they aren’t learning how to write a college essay at the very moment they’re called upon to master the genre…The most successful personal essays don’t just answer a question in one way; they interrogate an issue, unwrapping layers and layers of thoughts, experiences, and assumptions.

How do we create engaged classrooms?

In a recent New York Times article, Michael S. Roth bemoans his students’ collective inability to construct an argument. Their argumentative process, he finds, consists only of one skill: battering the opposing side’s arguments by pointing out apparent contradictions. “But this is thin gruel,” he protests. Roth counters that students must embrace an author’s inherent […]