Scholarships

School is expensive. Finding scholarships is important. I used to have to spend an afternoon in a research library. Today's students can check out http://www.collegexpress.com/home. If you haven't found the right college yet this site has the information you need to find and apply at the right school

Learning Hack of the Day - Learn for You

Know that you are learning because you want to learn. You are NOT learning for a teacher, a boss, a test or a job. You are learning for you. If you are learning for any other reason, you will forget the learning as soon as you leave the class, if not before. There is only one reason to learn, and that is because we want to learn.

Learning Hack of the Day: Remember when Learning Felt Great.

Separate thoughts about learning from thoughts about school. Learning sometimes has nothing to do with school We learn when we want to learn and when we put in the effort. Leaning is about something that happens inside us. School is something that happens outside of us. Learning is a good thing; school should be a good thing. But it is often about wrong answers on tests, grades, and report cards. Those things have nothing to do with learning. Proms, sports, bullies and popularity have nothing to do with learning. Start feeling good about learning again like you did when you were too little to go to school. Remember a time when you won a blue ribbon, or knew the meaning of a word everyone else was unsure about, or rode a bicycle for the first time. Before you start to learn anything new, sit down for a few minutes and think about how good that felt.

Learning Hack of the Day- Have Fun

Have fun. If you are not having fun learning.,you are not doing it right. Whatever the learning chore, find a way to make it fun. When I took college algebra, I was terrified. I dreaded it, but then I started looking on the algebra “problems” as types of puzzles. I enjoy puzzles so that helped. Algebra was also a break from all the reading and writing I did in other classes. It became enjoyable.

For Teachers Only: What Is Wrong With Testing?

For Teachers only: What is wrong with giving tests?

By Mary Ann De Neve Slavcheff, M.A.

Let’s take a test.

STANDARDIZED TESTS

I could give you one of those standardized tests that students are often expected to take. Doesn’t everyone hate those? Why should anyone have to know what a harangue or a tangent is? Does X plus Y ever equal anything other than two letters of the alphabet?

And then there was this week’s reading assignment which you were supposed to… Wait a minute. I didn’t assign a reading. I didn’t teach you anything, so how can I test you?

There is something about tests and quizzes that scares people. Even those of us who are not students anymore, even teachers, have a negative reaction.

CLASSROOM TESTS ARE LIKE LIE DETECTOR TESTS

I assigned a reading or a set of problems. The student claims that he read the assignments or did all the problems. He didn’t get help from his friends who always ace the tests. I, the teacher, don’t believe the student really did his homework. I think he is lying about the time he said he spent studying.

I will test him and let’s see if he is telling the truth.

Tests thus crate an atmosphere of distrust between students and teachers.

Students have their own questions. How important is the material on the test to the final grade? Will he be tested on this material again? Often instructors go on to new material, and they don’t go back. The student might just as well forget what he just learned. He doesn’t need it anymore. I have seen students walk out of the classroom after a test, sigh, and I know they have already forgotten much of the material that they just aced a test on.

For students, other important things like cell phone conversations, texting, Facebook, and the latest episode of “Walking Dead or “Game of Thrones” intrude on studies and take up time that could be spent learning. Today’s students have too much information coming at them and they don’t have the time to learn what they can’t use or don’t think they will use.

Students forget what they learned for yesterday’s quiz. Students feel they will worry about the next class when that class comes. Learn and relearn as you go may not be the simplest method, but it is the most popular one. Teachers know that the best students probably learned little more than the poor students.

So why even use tests? If the material is almost immediately forgotten and students clearly don't understand the relevance of much of the material, then aren't tests a waste of everyone’s time?

They are. But we still use them. That is because a teacher can base her grades on test scores. Also some tests have nothing to do with the teacher. These are standardized tests which are so popular with administrators and textbook companies. Here teachers teach to the test. They have to. They had no input in creating the test and may not themselves know the relevance to their topic.

Teachers lose the joy of sharing knowledge they themselves found exciting, and the student loses the joy of learning he took with him to Kindergarten so many years ago and quickly lost in the maze of school.

Standardized tests take time away from learning about short stories,critical thinking and the lives of authors and historical greats. On top of that teachers are sometimes accused of cheating themselves if they learn what will be on the standardized test and they help the student prepare.

I have no idea who creates standardized tests, or why certain vocabulary words for instance are included. The tests seem a way of undermining the teacher, and getting rid of her if the students don’t do well. This ignores the fact that teachers teach and students learn. We can’t blame one individual if another has not his chore.

There has to be a better way.

Tests are old fashioned; Socrates used them. Or did he? Actually the Socratic method is question and answer, but as part of a discussion between students and teachers. There were no written exams in ancient Greece. No wonder they were such great scholars.

Even if Socrates had used written exams, do we still use the medical equipment that Hippocrates used? Are books still copied by monks and letters carried by the Pony Express? We have found better ways of doing most other jobs. Not teaching. Teaching still reties on written tests just like it did when our founding fathers were in school.

Testing itself is not a good way to measure learning, so shouldn’t we at least try to find other ways. One way would be to let students write their own tests and quiz each other on the material. Or let them test the instructor. I used to let my students quiz me on the assigned short stories. Sure they came up with some odd questions like, “What color were the main character’s anklets on page 14?”

I may not have known some of the answers, but we could all look it up. Even if the student made up things for his quiz, it was still fun, and we were all learning despite ourselves. These quizzes started conversations, and then we could talk about archetypes and plot types, and discuss the story. Students were more likely to tell me what they liked or didn’t like about the story. They stopped worrying about what they were supposed to get from the story. They got enjoyment and an understanding of the characters and the theme. It came more naturally than it would have in a test.

Attendance was very important with me. Even if the student was daydreaming and not paying one bit of attention, I always assumed, something was getting through to that student. Required attendance is much less scary than a quiz.

We must give teachers more autonomy in the classroom. Textbook salesmen and administrators are fine, but they need to do less dictating and more listening to both students and teachers. Teachers are professionals. Why are they being bullied by so many administrators, parents and board members? Get out of our way and let us do our jobs.

Make classes smaller so teachers and students can share more of the learning.

We can also give students more time in class to work on reading and doing assignments. If they get into the study habit in the classroom, they might be more likely to do it at home.

Discussions and essays are tougher to grade than multiple choice and true or false quizzes, but the student learns more and retains more. To save the teacher some time and to increase learning, essays can be read in class and or passed around the class room. That will make the classroom more of a community. Now that you have read this article, how about a test on its contents?

Just kidding.

The End

How to Ace Tests

How To Ace Tests By Mary Ann De Neve Slavcheff, M.A. It’s mid semester and chances are you are getting ready for mid terms. Finals are coming up fast. If you have been following my suggestions, you have chained or pegged the new learning and reviewed it a few times. You probably feel much more confident than in past semesters.

Most students, even prepared students, hate tests and instructors don’t like them either. It would be great if we could get beyond tests. But discussions and essays are even harder to create and to grade. Most students don’t like essays. Essay test questions are even worse than term papers because the student has limited time to work on them. So expect to put up with old-fashioned tests for many more decades.

If we have to take tests anyway, let’s get more comfortable around them. Think of tests as a chance to show off your learning.

What can we do to be better prepared for tests?

We can write our own tests for study practice. This does not have to be elaborate. Start with the obvious. If you are studying a short story ask:

Who are the main characters?

What items play a part in the story?

Are any of these items symbolic? Explain.

What is the order of events? List them.

Are flashbacks used?<[> In whose point of view is the story told?

Did the instructor stress plot? Historical significance? Author’s biography?

Those are all good review questions for review.Now ask what questions lend themselves to essay questions and what questions will most likely be short answer. Write down the answers to all your questions. Look up any that you need to look up and then chain or peg the answers to each one. Review your questions and answers a few times.

Now you have the information memorized, write out an answer to each essay question as you would answer it in an essay question. Have a main point and support for your main point. Organize your answer. This will save you time and frustration if you get a similar question on the teacher’s test..

Not all information lends itself to an essay question. What parts of the quiz will be simple answer like multiple choice or fill in the blank? Write your own test for the material that will be covered here..

After you have tested yourself on the material, and have determined that you know the answers, quiz a classmate. Ask the classmate what questions she thinks will be asked. Have her quiz you..

You will discover that often you will come up with the same questions as classmates or as the instructor. Correctly guessing the test questions is as good as having an advance copy and guessing the questions is NOT cheating. It is just a successful study technique..

Think like the instructor. As you guess multiple choice questions, use it as an opportunity to learn unusual spellings or difficult terms. In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, the character Dee has changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo. That is a lot of name to learn. But if you can include the name with the correct spelling in an essay question or fill in the blank, your instructor will be impressed. Divide the name into syllables..

Wan Ger O .

Lee Wan Ik A .

Ke Man Jo.

Spell the name out with your fingertip on your arm. Write it a few times with the fingertip and also with a pen on paper. The instructor will be proud you got the name right and may even give you extra credit points. Also look up the possible meanings of unusual names or words..

The presidents name provides an interesting example. Barack means soul of the sun from the sea mother; Hussein means blessed and Obama means man soul of the sea mother.. Adding a little learning just for yourself is okay.

Know that sometimes in multiple choice questions, instructors try to confuse the student with similar spellings or words that look alike. If you learn the material well, you won’t be tricked. If there are similar spellings or soundalikes in a multiple choice answer, then one of those answers is the correct one. In multiple choice questions, the correct answer is most often in the middle and “C” is the correct answer most of the time. That might help you some time when you just don’t know.

The longest and most complete answer in a multiple choice is most often correct. Think of answers from the instructors view. She won’t write out a long involved answer unless she has to do it..

Also read all the choices in a multiple choice questions. Here is an example:.

Mullien is: a herb that can grow anywhere in the U.S.

a cure for hay fever..

a herb used by Native Americans to treat conditions in all areas of the body including respiratory ailments, burns, swellings and wounds..

found in North American meadows..

Thus answer “c” is correct and is the one that should be circled. The other answers are all also correct, but “c” is the most inclusive. Note it is also in the middle and is the longest answer. This question would be labeled a trick question by students, but it is easy to figure out if the student has studied and read the question and answers carefully..p> Sometimes answer “d” reads “All of the above.” I used to find many incorrect answers in a question like this because instead of reading all the choices, students selected the first correct answer they saw. When taking a test, use clues like these to find the answer when you are not sure, but always go in prepared having learned as much as you can from the assigned material..

Understanding Difficult Material

Memorizing is a great skill for new information, but what if the information is uninteresting and hard to follow? What do you do?

I never could concentrate on the “Illiad" or the “Odyssey.” In high school I just didn’t have the self discipline to read them. In college, I read both, but my mind kept straying. I could not stay with the story. Sure there have been movies, but they didn’t interest me either. Here are some strategies for understanding difficult or seemingly uninteresting material.

I could have gone to a study guide. I would still have to read the stories because even the best study guides sometimes have theories or off information. Many students think reading the study guide is enough. It isn’t.

One semester I was teaching, “Hamlet.”. We were discussing Ophelia’s suicide. One student said Ophelia was pregnant. That was an interesting take on the story, but inaccurate. Yet other students agreed. What was happening?

I asked a student where in the text it said Ophelia was pregnant. She rushed up with a copy of “Cliff Notes,” which usually makes very good study guides to important literature. One paragraph suggested that a pregnancy might explain Ophelia’s odd behavior.

Ophelia wasn’t pregnant. In fact, her dad thought she was a virgin. Ophelia was a romantic, but Hamlet didn’t have much interest in her, and according to her dad he never would. The study guide was wrong. So use study guides as a tool to better understanding, but read the story, so you know when the guide is off target. There are hundreds of study guides online, so these are not difficult to obtain.

One advantage of famous plays like “Hamlet” is that they can be taped or seen as live performances. Sometimes when we watch a very good actor read the lines, they make more sense than just the text on a page. Some novels have also been made into great movies. When I assigned “Lesson Before Dying” by Ernest Gaines, I showed students the HBO movie starring Don Cheadle and Micah Phifer. But beware, not all films are that good.

“Hart’s War” is a great novel. The movie changes the plot and would be of no use to a student.

Talking books are wonderful tools for understanding novels and those shorter fiction and non fiction pieces that have been recorded. free public domain audiobooks has thousands of free recorded titles. The readers are volunteers, but the quality is generally very good. One can put on a pair of ear phones and read the assigned text while doing housework, running or driving.

I sometimes make movies in my mind when I am reading books. I imagine the scenes as they would be presented. I cast the story with actors I know from film and television. It is fun and making the story into a movie does make it more understandable. How would Martin Sheen or Johnny Depp read that line?

Another method is to follow the arc of one character at a time. This is easy with a play that has dialog tags. When following a character arc in a novel skim looking for the character’s name and scenes. Read the chapters out of sequence. Start with the last chapter and read the chapters in reverse order. Skip every chapter. When I do this I usually have to go back and reread everything in order, but I have a better understanding of the story.

Some subjects like math require learning to be in a certain order. In those cases, I look for not only study guides, but for explanations online. Youtube and iTunes U are overlooked resources.

Some short stories are read on youtube. Others are acted out. In teaching, “Sonny’s Blues,” I found scenes from the story on youtube. While the entire story was not there, these scenes helped students and increased their interest. I had the students read dialog from the story in class.

When I was teaching grammar, I found youtube very useful. I found a site on youtube where the apostrophe sang and danced. The students loved that. It saved what was bound to be a boring lecture. For home study, youtube singing punctuation marks can break the boredom.

Annotating books is the best technique in studying most courses. When I was in college, I would pre read all my textbooks and mark them up with different colored highlighters. That way during the semester when I was very busy working and studying, I could just read the highlighted main points and support. It made the study and the understanding go faster.

Don’t feel bad if you don’t like or just don’t get a famous story or poem. We all have different tastes in movies and television programs. It is only natural that we have different taste in all forms of fiction, nonfiction and school courses. When the story is about a distant place or time frame, it helps to go to an encyclopedia or other reference book, but don’t beat yourself up if you still don’t like the story.