If you're taking the SAT tomorrow, don't forget these wise words:
Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.
-- Winston Churchill
Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis
Quotes
I Love A Great Quote
Quotes
Inspiration Friday
I love a good quote.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” --Aristotle
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge. " --Daniel Boorstin
“An education isn’t how much you have committed to memory, or even how much you know. It’s being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t." --Anatole Franc
“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.” --Pablo Picasso
Discovered via Red Horse Tutoring.
Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis
Quotes
Understanding is Remembering in Disguise
If you're anything like me.....
....E V E R Y T H I N G takes way longer than you think it will.
With regard to the SAT (or I should say, with regard to learning anything, and remembering what you learned), multiply that idea by at least 50.
Thankfully, at this stage in my life, the SAT stakes are about as high as the public humiliation I will have caused myself if I don't improve.
However, if you actually need a good score for a reason more valid than thinking this is a good time, follow this man's advice:
As far as anyone knows, the only way to develop mental facility is to repeat the target process again and again and again.
So, apparently, studying hard doesn't protect against forgetting ... But something else does: continued practice.
Practice is another significant contributor to a good transfer. Working lots of problems of a particular type makes it more likely that you will recognize the underlying structure of the problem, even if you haven't seen this particular version of the problem before.
It is virtually impossible to become proficient at a mental task without extended practice.
Children do differ in intelligence, but intelligence can be changed through sustained hard work.
Intelligence is malleable. It can be improved.
...the amount of information you retain depends on what you already have.
Understanding is remembering in disguise. We understand new ideas by relating them to things we already know.
These are a few of the many many passages I highlighted from Daniel Willingham's book about how we learn.
If you don't believe me, believe him. I promise, he's not wrong.
Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis
Quotes
The Best Evidence Is Frequently Ignored
From Inside Higher Ed about a new book called Uneducated Guesses:
Then Wainer examined four colleges that let students submit SAT or ACT scores, and for which first-year grades were also available: Barnard and Colby Colleges, Carnegie Mellon University and the Georgia Institute of Technology. At all of these institutions, the students who submitted SAT scores had slightly better first-year grades than those who didn't.
Wainer argues that these and other data suggest that colleges that seek to enroll those who will perform best in their first year are acting against the evidence when they make the SAT optional. "Making the SAT optional seems to guarantee that it will be the lower-scoring students who perform more poorly, on average, in their first-year college courses, even though the admissions office has found other evidence on which to offer them a spot," he writes.
I quote this as someone who did terribly on the SAT in high school, and I don't think it's because I "didn't test well."
Making up for lost time in 2011.
(Discovered via great blog: Cost of College)
Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis
Quotes
How the Brain Works
I'm reading a book about memory, called Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer, and I've come upon a section about the work of Dr. Ericsson:
"What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled 'deliberate practice.'……They practice doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance."
This is right in line with what I am experiencing, and would explain why the 4 hour Kaplan diagnostic test, which ended with an email telling me that I would get my results back in 5 days (which turned out to be 10 days), was so frustrating.
Instinctually, I knew that "immediate feedback" was an essential ingredient for me to learn.
Illustrations by Jennifer Orkin Lewis
Quotes
When parents asked me when a student should begin preparing for admissions tests, I always answered, “in kindergarten.”
-Stanley Kaplan
