College Essay Preparation
Submitting a good college essay is another aspect that has to be considered by the high school student who wishes to attend a competitive school. This essay, together with the SAT (see my article on SAT Test Preparation), are two key aspects that must be satisfactorily completed by the college-bound student. Sometimes the college essay is what makes or breaks a student’s chances of getting into the school of his or her choice.
The college essay gives the admissions board a chance to sneak a peek inside the head of the prospective enrollee. Given comparable grades and other “good” qualities, the student with the better essay—the one which is coherent, well thought out, and captivating—will almost certainly get the nod. Why so? Because the ability to write a good essay shows the admissions board that these students have a number of desirable qualities: that they can communicate effectively in written form; that they can express their thoughts clearly and capture an audience; and that they can infuse their personalities into a written vehicle which becomes an extension of themselves.
Most people know that writing is not an easy thing to do. Most high school students—indeed most college graduates—would be hard-pressed to write an effective essay on whatever topic. For this reason, students who can generate a well written original college essay will certainly stand out amongst their peers. Writing such an essay, however, is not such an easy task. Even students who have good writing skills would be well served to have some expert assistance. This assistance can be the difference between a ho-hum essay, and a home run.
Someone skilled in college essay preparation can spot banal areas inside the body of the student’s writing, injecting life and color where only gray shades of hazy color abide. Moreover, an appropriate essay mentor will be able to spot and correct faulty non sequiturs, thus smoothing out the overall texture of the essay so that the reader is segued down a winding, colorful valley of enticing scents and sights. This accomplished, the essay is sure to get notice. And why not? The admissions board will certainly see few that fit such stringent criteria of good expressive writing.
Keep such thoughts in mind as your son or daughter engages this terrain. Remember. Given two students of seemingly equal caliber, the essay can make or break the camel’s back of college admission. See here for more information on this topic and my philosophy regarding the college essay College Essay Preparation.
Effective E-Mail Math Tutoring
When people think of additional school help for their child who is struggling in math, they usually think of one-on-one private tutoring. Private tutoring is a great way to get help for your struggling child. As mentioned in my article on effective math tutoring, the knowledge that a tutor brings to the table is not so important as his ability to relate well to your child and to identify with their source of difficulty. Even though private tutoring is the way parents think they need to go, there are alternatives such as email tutoring that can be a welcome help to your child.
With the omnipresence of the computer and with online internet service as ubiquitous as the telephone, email tutoring is something that has come of age. Combine email tutoring with the telephone, and you can now become a virtual tutor capable of working with anyone across the country. Effective email tutoring is the result of clearly defined questions responded to with easy-to-understand answers. Critical to effective email tutoring is a tutor with very strong written communication skills. This is one area which I have worked hard on throughout the years, and I attribute a lot of my success in tutoring students—whether in person, on the telephone, or via email—to my strong written and verbal communication skills. Knowing one’s field is one thing; being able to communicate that knowledge to a struggling student is another.
Some might think that math tutoring has to be done one-on-one, teacher sitting beside student ready to respond to his every need. Admittedly, the one-on-one scenario does have advantages; however, a competent tutor with strong communication skills can effectively remediate most problems as though he were sitting next to the student. A student who is struggling with quadratic equations, for example, can get his problem fixed via email, provided the tutor is competent at communicating this topic. With several problems worked out methodically, showing step-by-step procedures, a tutor can get the student back on the road to health in a short time.
Because I have worked on the various modalities of tutoring—in-person, telephone, email, and combinations of these—and have proven successful with each one of them, I wanted to make my tutoring techniques available to the student who might not live in central New Jersey, and thus be geographically “untutorable.” For this reason, I created my website where you can go here Email Tutoring for more information. Remember good tutoring does not have to be only in-person.
Effective Math Tutoring
People may think that the key to effective math tutoring, or tutoring in any area for that matter, is contingent upon the knowledge that the tutor brings to the table. While knowledge of one’s field is certainly important if a tutor is going to be effective, more important is the tutor’s ability to relate to your child and give him or her the necessary confidence to succeed in the math subject at hand. During my many years of math tutoring, students would come to know that I knew my field well, but more importantly they came to know that I could relate to them on a deeply personal level. Once this aspect of the tutor-student relationship is established, tutoring becomes markedly more effective.
Whether you are working with the slow learner, fast learner, or in-between learner, you as a math tutor must be able to get inside that student’s head and find out what makes him or her tick. You also need to assess whether your particular student is an auditory learner, visual learner, tactile learner, or some mixture of these. It certainly does not hurt to find out the interests of your student and gear your remediation of the troubled subject toward this particular interest. Thus if sports is dear to Johnny, the struggling algebra student, then you should try to center your lessons around sports and interject some sports related problems to the sessions. For example, in remedying Johnny’s problems with decimal equations, you might relate decimals to batting averages and percentages such as a pitcher’s earned run average (era). In dealing with projectile motion problems, certainly use Johnny’s favorite quarterback as the one who throws the football, which is governed by the equation to be solved, in the air.
Techniques such as those mentioned above will not only stimulate interest in the subject but also show the student how such seemingly irrelevant courses in school can actually relate back to the student’s world and realms of interest. Remember, you can thoroughly understand both integral and differential calculus, but if you cannot teach your students to navigate in these waters, your knowledge is essentially self-serving. Identify with your tutoring students and watch both them and you grow to become better learners and better teachers. See more on my tutoring here Private Math Tutoring.
