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Your time is up! ‘Tis the season for New Year’s resolutions, and boy, do I have one for you. Stop CRAMMING! That’s right; you read it. No more cramming. You’ve made it through all your end of term finals, but don’t breathe too deeply yet. There is a whole new semester gearing up and with it, more tests. This means…more studying! I know, it is terribly exciting, but please calm down enough to continue reading.

I personally am a member of Procrastinators Anonymous and completely understand where you are coming from. Why do something today that you can put off until tomorrow? Excellent question. When it comes to tests and reports, however, I have learned that organizing and managing my time have resulted in the best outcome. I’ve pulled my share of all-nighters, frantically scribbling (typing) until the wee hours of the morning. And EVERYONE around me suffered–my friends, my roommates, especially my grades!

Top Reasons Why Cramming should be Canned

1. You’ll become stressed out
2. You will loose sleep and become more stressed out
3. You’ll be stressed out and forget the answers, causing you to be even more stressed

So if not grades, what does cramming increase? Your stress level! And who wakes up in the morning thinking, “Gee, I’d really like some more stress today. That would be great!”

The argument in favor of cramming, which I have heard time and time again, is that you will more easily remember what you have just learned. This only works for your short term memory. To actually learn something, you need to input it into your long term memory. Still doubting? The following article, “Back to School: Cramming Doesn’t Work in the Long Term,” in Science Daily goes into further detail.

To test or not to test? While not a question posed by Shakespeare, it does appear to be ever-present in today’s society of No Child Left Behind. Since the law was enacted in January 2002, the concept of standardized student testing to judge teachers’ effectiveness in the classroom has come under the microscope. Both lauded and lambasted, standardized tests at every level have been discussed by everyone from teachers to parents to politicians to economists. In his December 20, Freakonomics column in the New York Times, “What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Quorum,” Stephen J. Dubner opens the floor up to five exam experts. On the question of whether there should be more or fewer standardized tests in the school system, the majority of these testing gurus seem to be in agreement. Where do you stand?

What is a high school student to do when she has conquered parametric equations and polar coordinates? Where is there to go when a student has surpassed the highest math class offered in his high school by his junior year? Should she put math on the back burner and focus on another subject? Should he become home-schooled and left to navigate the treacherous waters of Calculus III by himself? Should advanced students stifle their love of a science that is ever present in our world, that explains the intricacies of our universe and perhaps our existence simply because they have eclipsed the high school curriculum? Not anymore.

Georgia Tech offers these advanced Math Masters the ability to continue their learning while earning credit for high school and college at the same time. For the past 3 years, Georgia Tech’s Center for Distance Learning has been enabling students from Cobb and Fulton counties to continue their math education beyond the limitation of the Georgia high school curriculum. With the help of two-way video and e-mail, high school students can attend Tech lectures from the comfort of their own classrooms. With just under 100 student participants from twelve high schools–Chattahoochee, Milton, Roswell, Lassiter, North Springs, Wheeler, among others–the program is growing.

You can learn more from Diane R. Strepp’s article A formula for higher learning: Taking on college math early, teens tune in to Georgia Tech classes in the Atlanta Journal Constitution.

It’s no surprise that I am a big fan of higher education, continuing education, any education. With this in mind, I was every synonym you can think of for happy this morning when I learned Yale University is offering 7 full undergraduate courses online for FREE. And it’s not just one lecture here and there but complete courses with video lectures, syllabi and transcripts. The university hopes to have 30 more complete courses online within the next 3 years. 30 courses! That is almost like a whole new degree! (There really aren’t enough exclamation marks in the world to fully express my somewhat nerdy but wholeheartedly sincere glee.)

Of course Yale isn’t going to start handing out diplomas will-nilly. But, if you are in it for the learning and not the paper, visit Open Yale Courses to learn more. I’ve listed the courses below so you can get a head start.

Happy Learning!

Courses available:

Astronomy 160: Frontiers and Controversies In Astrophysics
Professor Charles Bailyn

English 310: Modern Poetry
Professor Langdon Hammer

Philosophy 176: Death
Professor Shelly Kagan

Physics 200: Fundamentals of Physics
Professor Ramamurti Shankar

Political Science 114: Introduction to Political Philosophy
Professor Steven Smith

Psychology 110: Introduction to Psychology
Professor Paul Bloom

Religious Studies 145: Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible)
Professor Christine Hayes

Take a deep breath. Relax. You’re done. You’ve licked your last envelope and pasted your last stamp. Now the future of your college education lies in the very capable hands of the U.S. Postal Service. A sense of relief steals over you; a calm settles in. For about 5 minutes. Then your pulse begins to pound and your mind begins to race. “When will they get my application?” “How will I know if they got my application?” “What if the mail plane carrying my application flies into a rift in the space-time continuum and all evidence of my academic existence is erased?”

Jackie Mantey’s article “What to Do While Waiting for Admission Letters” in U.S. News and World Report answers these questions and more. Take another deep breath and read on. Her advice will help spare your nerves and your fingernails as ACCEPTANCE looms in the distant future.

It is a cliché for a reason. We’ve all heard it a million times whenever we’ve tried to master anything as complicated as tying our shoes. Any first-chair violinist or cross-country team captain will tell you about the dull sense of dread they felt humming underneath their excitement as they faced their first Bach concerto or 5 kilometer course. However, after much dedicated practice, these challenges became as second-nature as…well, tying their shoes.

Few and far between are the people who can pick up a violin for the first time and create anything more than a fair impression of a cat being strangled. How many couch potatoes can roll off their Laz-y-boys onto a 5 kilometer cross country course and finish first? About the same number as pre-schoolers who can tell you what a quadratic equation is. The practice makes perfect maxim applies to academics as much as to extracurriculars. In high school, I knew that extra practice made me a better Spanish-speaker, a (somewhat) better violinist and a better SAT-taker. However, for whatever reason, I thought that the math practice I received in class and for homework would be enough to make me the next John Forbes Nash. It wasn’t.

I would listen in class, take notes, work practice problems, do the homework, and file all the knowledge away into a tiny filing cabinet in my brain. Come test day, I would open the filing cabinet and retrieve this information. Never fail, some time in between the filing of the formulas and the retrieving, some dramatic tragedy would have occurred inside that cabinet. By the time I got to the test, all the information was tangled and mangled and impossible to decipher. After about two years of cold sweats and nightmares, I realized that for the information to stick in my slippery brain, I would have to drill it in. That meant extra homework just so I would be comfortable with the concepts on test day. Once this epiphany struck me, my grades continued to steadily rise. As did my SAT score!

For those of you like me who need extra practice with certain math concepts found on the SAT and ACT, this Web site should be a great help.

http://www.edhelper.com/algebra.htm

It allows you to create your own practice worksheets filled with custom-made Algebra I and Algebra II problems. There is even an answer key. I imagine it will be a great confidence-booster and cure for those panicky cold sweats.

Prince Hamlet’s lament doesn’t need to be the morose mantra of the average SAT student. Even though 40% of the verbal section of the SAT relies on the strength of your vocabulary, you don’t need to spend your Saturday nights curled up on the couch with a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary. We’ve all been told the best way to augment our lexicon is by reading–novels, newspapers, magazines, Tutor Talk blogs! However, there are only so many hours you can spend reading before your eyeballs start to goo over. How do you escape the dialect doldrums? Is there a cure for the vocabulary blues? Below is a list of three avant-garde ways to become a convivial belletrist.

Charades
What could be more entertaining than watching your little brother try to act out a “specious diletante”?

Monikers (Nicknames)
You could improve your vocabulary while trouncing the opposing team. “Hey, Paragon, pass me the ball!” Think of the intimidation factor. How would their goalie react if you called him a “pernicious charlatan”? He’d probably drop the ball.

Poetry
Maybe you’re the next Billy Collins or ee cummings. Whether your forte is iambic pentameter or a classic haiku, put your imagination to work with our online magnetic poetry. Stay tuned for our new Magnetic Poetry Page and Contest!

I came across this site today completely by accident.

UN Vocabulary Game

You actually play a vocabulary game. Just define the word it gives you, and for each question you get right, 20 grains of rice will be donated to the UN World Food Program (which gets distributed to people all over the world).

This is a very interesting tool to use for students. Just going through these questions, I am learning new words and figuring out roots and meanings of certain prefixes and suffixes. The game also tracks your “vocabulary level” and gives you questions accordingly, so it only gets harder as the person answering gets better.

While 20 grains of rice sounds totally inconsequential, think about how much food could be donated if thousands of people were playing this every day. I just played for 10 minutes and donated 300 grains of rice - and I had fun! I really wish I would have found this before taking the GRE, as I’m sure it would have helped me out a TON.

250 words? That hardly seems like enough to convey your special interest, your perspective on diversity, or your reasons for applying to a particular college.

What many colleges are looking for in these “short answer” essays is how you can efficiently, effectively, and in some cases, creatively, make your case. Is this essay going to make or break your application? Most likely not. It’s not going to save an application that is already in the pits, and it’s not going to get an otherwise perfect applicant tossed in the “no” pile. It will, however, help selective institutions to make the fine distinctions necessary when reviewing the applications that fall between those two extremes.

Don’t save these “shorter” essays for the last minute – give them the same amount of thought and soul searching that you would a longer essay.

Do stay within the word limit they give you; it’s there for a reason. Show the admissions staff that you have the ability to follow directions.

Don’t take the word “optional” literally. If a school offers an “optional” essay, send the message that you rise to a challenge and go above and beyond. (Exceptions would be optional essays addressing extenuating circumstances or breaks in your education; these are only necessary if applicable.)

At the beginning of November, Tufts was featured in the New York Times in an article about the optional 250-word essay on their application – it’s an interesting look from the other side.

And this, my friends, was exactly 250 words.

While I was in college, I’d receive the same voicemail every November like clockwork. “Hi, Linda! This is Betsy from Development! We’d like you to come by and write a thank-you note to the donors who made your scholarship possible! OK, thanks!” (Yes, some people can only be punctuated with exclamation points.) So, every November like clockwork, I’d find myself walking across campus and up three flights of stairs to scribble the same four sentences of gratitude for my Presidential Scholarship or Ivan Allen Endowed Scholarship or whatever the Financial Aid Office decided to name my scholarship that year. To me, a thank-you note was a small price to pay for a college education–smaller than tuition.

But thank-you notes are not a new invention. For generations kids have been writing thank-you notes to grandparents, aunts, uncles, second cousins twice removed and neighbors for birthday, holiday and graduation presents. However, students are now using these well-honed skills to send thank-you notes to college admissions counselors, tour guides and alumni. In her New York Times article “Thank-You Note Enters College Admissions Game” from October of this year, Karen W. Arenson explores this rising trend. Students are taking gratitude to a whole new level. Who needs personalized stationary when you can send personalized candy?

While thanking someone for their time or advice is polite, the general consensus seems to be that elaborate thank-you notes will not give you the edge over some less gracious applicants. Patrick Winter, Senior Associate Director of Undergraduate Admissions at the University of Georgia, agrees. “The notes are not included with a student’s file, nor would they be utilized in any way in the admissions decision.  UGA does not measure the student’s “desire” to attend as a factor in the decision process.”

Though heartfelt thanks and tasteful stationary might not tip the scale in your favor, this exercise in politeness would be good practice for the future. The business world is just as competitve as the academic; sending a thank-you note after an interview is a great way to keep your name in the running. Besides, it’s just good manners. I believe Emily Post would agree. Wouldn’t you?

Check out how companies like Appelrouth Tutoring Services are making a difference in students’ test scores in Georgia:

http://www.ajc.com/print/content/printedition/2007/12/01/evsatprep1201.html