Archive for June, 2010

How To Learn And Have Fun (At The Same Time)

Posted on Jun 8, 2010 02:43:00 PM

For some unknown reason, tutors love giving endless exam materials for us poor students to learn in a short period of time.

Being sure that I am the most talented student ever, I used to think that if I read the whole material once (without bothering myself too much) I would do great on the exam.

So, before an exam I would just open my books, turn on my favorite music, put a bar of chocolate by my side and started reading. The time I spent reading was very useful, because I managed to make a few important phone calls, thought of what I was going to wear the next day and analyzed the past week.

Somehow this proved to be wrong, because at the exam I found myself unable to remember a single word from what I was supposed to learn. So I realized that my perfect learning concept was not that perfect after all.

Being the most talented student ever, I decided to find out what was the problem and moreover, how to solve it.

I thought I read the material, but in fact, my eyes ran over it, while my mind was busy with completely different stuff. This is not a thing to do. When reading something, you should think of what you read. Text is not just a string of words somehow connected to one another. Those words have a particular meaning, which is sometimes quite difficult to understand.

I developed my own technique of reading and understanding things. I first try to understand what the author meant by a certain sentence. Then I try to connect that idea to my life. It makes it more clear, and it’s also a great memorizing technique. When you link some information to your own experiences, you are sure to remember it.

Another good way for me to understand and remember things is by imagining what I read in colorful images– sometimes I even make up whole stories of what I learn.

Snow Day Productivity

Posted on Jun 7, 2010 10:02:52 AM

Sometimes you have to just give up on getting any real work done. This was excruciatingly true yesterday and today, when Seattle had some “snow days,” (I use the term loosely). Seattle is a city with little or no annual snowfall, which means there’s not much by way of snow removal equipment. Also, Seattle is basically a collection of hills all lumped together. Not as bad as San Francisco, but it’s not like driving through snow in the flatlands of Kansas, either. All of which means that a few pathetic inches of frozen white stuff shuts the whole damn city down.

This is what happens: We get a few inches of snow, which is slush by late afternoon. Nighttime comes around 3:30 p.m. (oh how I wish I were exaggerating), the temperature drops, the slush freezes, and the whole city is one giant hilly ice rink. Most Seattleites are transplants from California, like me, and can’t drive for s**t on anything but freeways (Southern Calif., not me) or foggy country roads (Northern Calif., me). Although, I’d like to see anyone try to drive up the steep hill I live on when it’s covered with a solid inch of ice.

My husband and I like to drink our morning caffeine on snow days while standing by the front windows, watching car after car attempt to make it up our hill. They always give up and have to try to look cool (and like they know what they’re doing) while trying to back—braking—down an icy hill. It’s never pretty, and that’s why we park our cars around the corner where no inept, ice-driving chuckleheads will smack into them as they slide back down the hill.

A snow day in Seattle also tends to mean that the icy roads have hosed the school bus routes. Which means delayed or non-existent school days. And while I do love to spend the day trapped inside with my offspring, I don’t get any work done. About mid-morning yesterday I started to get that panicky, today-is-going-to-be-a-complete-waste feeling. That particular flavor of panic always makes me cranky. I dislike an unproductive day. I tried to work, but it’s hard to finish a thought (intelligent or otherwise) when tiny humans are asking you a seemingly infinite number of questions.

I was this close to snapping and turning into the fire-breathing version of myself when I remembered the post Gear Fire had up the other day about implementing a Task Kill Day. It’s the holiday season, so I have an a**load of tasks to kill. I took a deep breath, gave up on the idea of getting any real work done, and told the kids it was Getting Stuff Done Day. They are 7 and almost-3, so they didn’t really have any tasks to kill other than some artwork and bouncy-ball testing. But because I wasn’t sitting in one place and trying to have long, involved higher thoughts and was instead running around the house being super busy and kicking task ass, they mostly did their own stuff and left me alone.

I crossed several items off of my To Do List that were causing me more peripheral stress than I had thought; when I took stock of how much I’d gotten done, I saw several dark Eeyore clouds lift.

My point is this: if your day is suddenly not going in the preferred productive direction, sometimes redirecting your Unplanned Non-Work Day into a Task-List Demolishing Day can make you feel better and save you time later on. And you’ll be saving others from the cranky version of you, which people always appreciate.

Adult Scholarships explained in brief

Posted on Jun 7, 2010 10:02:15 AM

There is no age limit for education. So if you are an adult wanting to return to education there are many adult education centers available for your help. There can be numerous reasons for not pursuing education at the right age. While it can be frustrating at a later stage, you can easily do away with that frustration with adult education. However, not everyone is financially sound enough to fund for their education. This is where Adults Scholarships can be of great help. But you do need to qualify for a particular scholarship before you can start taking its advantage. Details such as your previous qualifications, the subjects that you want to pursue etc are required to be registered in order to become eligible for an adult scholarship. The internet can be your best resource while looking for adult scholarships. You can always look for scholarship information online and register for them. You will be automatically informed once you qualify for a specific scholarship.

Play Doh-Smeared Credentials

Posted on Jun 5, 2010 10:03:03 AM

While I understand the need every parent has—on a weird, biological level—to do as much for their child as is feasible in order that said kid’s life path can be as smooth and highly elevated as is everly possible, I have never been able to be anywhere near fine with the insane pressure and bizarre hoop-jumping some parents put their kids through.

Succeeding in life is super great, don’t get me wrong. Going to college for the sake of the education and the life experience is not something that can be duplicated. I’m pro-success and pro-college, absolutely. But I really (a whole damn lot) can’t fathom how working your ass off from preschool on through grad school to be in the top 5% of your cohort for any and all school and extra-curricular activities is either necessary or healthy. Plus, it can’t be all that fun.

Is it peculiar and freakish that I lump “success” and “happy” in the same pile? Perhaps. I love my kiddos, and I really do believe the high-pressure helicopter parents love their kiddos, too. We have different ways of showing it, however. I have some grandparental units who showed their love for me, for the first 25 years of my life, in ways similar to the hyper parents of today; they wished me every success, including unfounded dreams of sending me off to medical school because that’s what they had done and that’s where all of their friends’ grandkids were obediently marching off to (like cranky little lemmings, I might add).

My grandparents’ way was to coddle, protect, pressure and prepare me for the future until I was incapable of getting their lecturely tones out of my head. For the most part I’ve let it all go and have moved past the self-doubt and the second-guessing and the perfectionist tendencies I harbor. I put a lot less pressure on myself and I don’t intend ever to crush the souls of my own progeny, turning them into miserable beings, incapable of happiness or contentment. (It’s conceivable that I haven’t moved on entirely.)

My way is to support my kids and the choices they make, and to make sure they have a rich, well-rounded education, both in the classroom and at home. My main goal is to have happy kids. I honestly don’t care where or if they go to college, and whether they go right after high school or never. That sounds incredibly slackerly of me, I realize, but there it is.

The older I get (I just turned 35) the more I realize how hard it is to be a content and beatific adult. I’m happy, but only after letting go and unclenching a little. I’m fine with giving my kids an education (one where they are not expected to kick everyone else’s ass) and following their lead as to where they want to go in life. In this day and age, that’s a pretty revolutionary statement. I’m supposing people will respond with, “That crazy b**ch is going to let her kids do what they want with their lives!”

Anyway, this spew was brought on by Eduwonkette’s guest blogger, Hilary Levey. She’s a PhD candidate at Princeton, and wrote her dissertation on the whole high-pressure parent phenomenon, specifically the credentials those parents expect, want, and need their kids to acquire and achieve. The post is basically a summary of her dissertation, “Playing to Win: Childhood, Competition, and Credentials Bottlenecks.”

It’s a great article, and in it Levey does such an excellent job of explaining what the motivation is behind these insanely gung-ho parents, that I was able to open my mind up a smidgen more and maybe, a teensy bit, see the parents’ point. However, as much as I’d love to read the actual dissertation and all of her research (because her papers and her research sound fascinating), I think it would either enrage me or curl me into a ball that I wouldn’t want to come out of for a few days.

Options for Parents to Pay for Their Children’s College

Posted on Jun 3, 2010 02:20:32 AM

It is no secret that a college education is expensive.

In fact, the average price for tuition at a private college according to the College Board for the 2009-2010 was $26,273, a 4.4 percent increase from 2008 and public school was an average of $7,020, up 6.5 percent. Over the next 18 years, the cost of a college degree is expected to increase to a couple hundred thousand dollars.

There is hope however for families who will need to start planning now for those expensive four years.

Here are some brief overviews of different options for new parents paying for their child’s education:

529 College Savings Plans: Named after Section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code, a 529 Savings Plan allows the state or a hired money manager to invest $50 to $300,000 in stocks or bonds or a combination of both, aggressively during the early years of your child’s life and then become more conservative as the child approaches high school and college.

There is also the option of the prepaid 529 plan, where you may pre-pay some or all of the costs of your state’s universities at the current rates. The maximum investment is  allotted to those attending public state universities as only partial credits will be available for private colleges or out of state schools.

Coverdell Education Savings Accounts (ESAs): Previously known as the Education IRA, anyone can invest up to $2,000 a year into stocks, bonds or mutual funds. The money then grows tax-free, as long as it is applied to a child’s educational costs, including elementary and secondary schools, uniforms or even laptops. Single parents whose income exceeds $110,000 or married parents who make more than $220,000 are not eligible for an ESA.

Uniform Gifts to Minors and Uniform Transfers to Minors Acts (UGMA/UTMA): This investment in mutual funds, stock and bonds opportunity allows your child, once they turn 18 or 21, to receive control of the account and are permitted to use the money in any way they deem fit. These are subjected to child taxation laws and may potentially affect the financial aid amount the child qualifies for.

Hope you weren’t too attached to that summer house in the Hamptons, because your child will need you to forgo that and instead write a check for textbooks and tuition.

More With the Education, Less With the Simulation

Posted on Jun 1, 2010 10:03:28 AM

It sucks that there is poverty in the world, and there’s something to be said for promoting poverty awareness, but I’m not sure Princeton and Dartmouth are going about it in the most effective way. It’s probably possible to educate people about poverty, but I don’t think there’s a feasible way to simulate the true poverty experience for college kids.

College kids are often lacking in disposable income, yes, but if they were actually living anywhere near enough to the edge to be capable of looking starvation in the eye, they would have bigger things to worry about than midterms and research topics and they would not currently be working to cross “College Degree” off of their To Do lists.

Dartmouth recently hosted the “Two Dollar-a-Day Challenge” and Princeton will host their own Princeton Poverty Simulation on Saturday, Nov. 22nd. Again, it’s excellent to be making people aware of how this lifetime is going down for a large portion of the human population, but I’m not on board with the attempt to simulate anything.

Nina Shield at IvyGate nails it superbly with this:

We had something like this once a year in elementary school gym class. It was called TRAFFIC and we all wheeled around on scooters and if we sped or veered off the roads or ran through the stop sign we were sent to traffic-jail, and when we went through the car wash Mr. Hennessey spritzed us with water. It was exactly like real driving.