every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
In an earlier post, I talked about how in Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz says “The purpose of life [has become] the accumulation of gold stars.” (Excellent Sheep, page 16) How does he relate that to education? How does it relate to high school? Can AP failure teach kids how to fail?…
In my last post, I talked in Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, William Deresiewicz says “The purpose of life [has become] the accumulation of gold stars.” (Excellent Sheep, page 16) How does he relate that to education? How does it relate to college admissions?…
Great Expectations is another movie that we watched for improving SAT vocabulary and reading skills.
Great Expectations (2012) is not as gloomy, grungy, and violent as the first scenes and trailer suggest. …
In my previous post, I talked about how William Deresiewicz starts out Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, with the assertion that mental health problems are on the rise among college students. Deresiewicz thinks the problem lies with education, especially elite universities.
Excellent Sheep talks a lot about how the desperate race to collect accolades for acceptance to an elite college affects students.
How it doesn’t stop after high school.
It continues on through college with the accumulation of multiple majors.
“The purpose of life becomes the accumulation of gold stars.” (Excellent Sheep, page 16)
As evidence…
Becoming Jane, about Jane Austen’s young romance with a Mr. Lefroy that may have inspired her books, is another movie that we watched for improving SAT vocabulary and reading skills. It’s based on the book Becoming Jane Austen, by Jon Hunter….
You’ve read about them. Those super-start students who’re valedictorian, took 7 AP classes and tested out of 3 more AP credits, played in the school marching band, got accepted to Harvard, and started up their own non-profit on the side. All while making it look easy. But was it easy? William Deresiewicz starts out Excellent Sheep, the Miseducation of the American Elite & The Way to a Meaningful Life, by pointing out that the easy super-star student is a myth.
He goes into all sorts of statistics to show that while it appears students are effortlessly over-achieving, when you look at the numbers, what we have — according to one college President — is “an epidemic of depression among younger people.”
Of course, it’s just numbers, and just because it’s written in a book, doesn’t mean it’s true. But when what I’m reading matches my own experiences, I start to take notice….
The Pride and Prejudice BBC mini-series is another movie that we watched for improving SAT vocabulary and reading skills.
There’s a reason that this Pride and Prejudice BBC mini-series is the iconic Jane Austen movie. …
Finland’s education system ranks at the top of the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? How is the US education system compared to Finland? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my first post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system and then at how the Finnish educational system structured.
How else do Finnish schools differ?
In Finland, they actively try not to punish students for mistakes and there’s very little testing….
Pride and Prejudice is another movie that we watched for improving SAT vocabulary and reading skills.
My main impression looking back on this movie is “brown,” like the entire movie had a brown tone. But, that’s not to say it wasn’t a good movie; it will keep your interest and the plot is easy to follow. It’s just not as colorful as our favorite, Emma.…
The Finland education system is the best in the world by almost every measure, in all sorts of rankings. How do they do it? To get more information, I watched The Finland Phenomenon:Inside the World’s Most Surprising School System, from the Robert Compton Documentary series on Global Education, directed by Sean T. Faust. In my last post, I looked at the differences between Finland’s school system and our school system.
Regardless of whether or not we could completely copy the Finnish school system, what can be learn from it? How is the Finnish educational system structured? In addition to some small new pieces of information, I found that if I listened between the lines and looked at what was I saw in the video, I picked up on a few more nuances.
There are high entrance requirements to even start teacher training, much less get your certification, which is a masters degree. …