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When I was in graduate school, I tutored low-income high school students through the Princeton Review’s non-profit branch, to prepare them for taking the SAT. While I had the satisfaction of knowing I was helping some really smart kids get into college, SAT prepping isn’t really education. Most of it consists of teaching kids how to game the system — the SAT is a really unsophisticated test, and all it takes is a few simple tricks to boost your score 100 or even more points. [Continue reading] Read/Write Web has a great list of online applications for students. Online applications are generally free (at least for basic service, and upgraded services tend to be cheap), fairly easy to use, and most importantly are available wherever you have access to a computer. [Continue reading] Universities are complex. Needlessly complex. The modern university represents an accretion of over a thousand years of tradition – why else do you think you are expected to dress like a medieval scribe for graduation? [Continue reading] My, my, we do hate the idea of outlining, don’t we? Most people think of an outline as a rigid straightjacket hampering the flow of true creativity. But guess what – the writers you admire most for their creativity almost without fail are outliners (and those that aren’t are lying – they most likely keep an outline in their heads and trust their memories to keep it straight). The reason is simple – an outline takes most of the work of organizing and structuring their writing off their shoulders, which means they are free to actually be creative. [Continue reading] A conspiracy is afoot, my friends. Microsoft is in on it, for sure, but they’re only the public face of what may be the vastest, most insidious plot to undermine America’s credibility ever carried out. I’m pretty sure the North Koreans are in on it, and the Teachers’ Union. And MTV, definitely. Their plan: through the cunning manipulation of word processing software, particularly the spell-checking function, they hope to make Americans look stupid and awkward in front of the rest of the world. And it’s working! [Continue reading] Learning is a craft, a set of skills that you put to use over the course of your life to construct your education. Like any craft, your mastery of the tools at your disposal is crucial. One of the most overlooked tools in the learner’s toolbox is your computer and its software. Your instructors have probably spent a lot of time teaching you how to use books and the research library, maybe how to glean information from the Web, and definitely how to use language to put forth and defend an argument, but how much time have you or your professors spent on how to use your computer? [Continue reading] This is the first of a multi-post series I’ll be putting together over the summer. The goal is to accumulate a collection of tips that can be compiled into a guide for college and university students. If you have any good advice for students that you’d like to share, please contact me. [Continue reading] One of the greatest frustrations that professors face is the lack of solid writing skills among some of our brightest students. To see a student who we other wise know to be smart and even articulate bury their written ideas under poor grammar, bad spelling, awkward colloquialisms, and misconstrued logic is painful, even heart-breaking. I’ve come to believe, though, that a big part of the problem is not so much that students are inherently lazy writers or that they simply don’t care enough to do well, but that they do not proofread their work, at least in part because they haven’t learned how to do it well. |
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