Thank you for writing numerous letters every year, often an extra duty added to an already lengthy list of duties. When teaching, it took me a while to figure out how to write a letter of recommendation, piecing together advice from more veteran colleagues. So, having asked many different admissions officers about useful letters of recommendation over the two decades…
During the last fifteen months of living a pandemic disrupted experience, kids experienced unstructured days amidst distance learning and suspension of regularly scheduled activities. Simply seeking to stave off boredom, many (re)discovered talents. Perhaps a break from running on the hamster wheel of modern family life, chasing prosperity was just what we needed. Pandemics throughout history have disrupted, short-circuiting the status…
As millions of students (and their parents) discovered the potential of learning from home during the COVID-induced dispersion of entire schools into an educational diaspora, some lessons learned will endure. As we recall students and teachers onto campuses, attempting to reconnect school communities, an opportunity for real innovation in education dawns, though not without struggle. In response to Ms. Washington’s…
Even though students are returning to K-12 campuses, either in hybrid models, toggling between in person attendance on campuses and virtual school, or a full five day a week schedule, the social dynamic amongst students as well as the learning process, is shifting. New social divisions amongst students are forming, as some students, especially secondary school students, are discomforted confronting…
The idea of Zoom fatigue isn’t Gen Z’s contribution to the long list of complaints about school. It’s real. Dr. Jeremy Bailenson and his team at Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab explain why Zooming is fatiguing even though we’re sitting in a single place, typically comfortable at home, talking or listening to others. First, we’re not accustomed to looking at…
More K-12 school administrators are either preparing or have already reopen(ed) school campuses amidst subsiding COVID related health concerns, declining infections, hospitalizations and deaths. Of course, variants (viruses evolve) or declining vaccination rates leading to worsening infection, hospitalization and even death rates, would lead to a likely-swift reversal of school reopenings. Reopen, yes, but not fully business as usual as…
As the numbers of diagnosed COVID cases wanes and more Americans are being vaccinated, the desire to re-open schools seems to be increasing. In a recent Pew Research poll, more Americans believe that students need in-person interaction to continue their academic progress: Yet, in the same poll, 59% of respondents also believe schools should wait to reopen until all teachers…
In Zoom School, some parents are redefining “Parent Participation”, or from their kids’ perspective, finding new ways to be embarrassing. 😂 To learn more how experts at Creative Marbles Consultancy, help families resolve complex educational and college admissions concerns, especially during the COVID-induced disruption of education, read more at creativemarbles.com
Sometimes, we gain clarity and/or confidence about our aptitude when the thoughts of another like Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, reflects our own experience: When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to…
E.O. Wilson, a Harvard-trained renowned biologist, and reported Father of Sociobiology, the study of the social behavior of insects and animals which includes humans, has published an entire biology course—an interactive tome—synthesizing much of Professor Wilson’s life’s work, a rethink of the biological idea, free to anyone on iTunes, Biology: Life on Earth. Image of E.O. Wilson from Wikipedia In…
