every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
The Emma BBC mini-series is another movie that we watched for improving SAT vocabulary and reading skills.
The Emma BBC television mini-series doesn’t seem to stick as closely to the original as the Pride and Prejudice BBC series. …
Finland is the highest ranked country in education by many measures. To further understand and compare U.S. education vs. Finland, 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. At first, I was thinking that I wasn’t really learning anything new or surprising. I’m not sure where I’d already heard most of the information. It may have been The Smartest Kids in the World or World Class Learners.
In any case, if you don’t have time to read two complete books, the documentary is a quick way to get a good overview of the Finland school system if you can get your hands on a copy. It isn’t readily available.
So why is the Finland school system so important? Several quick facts at the start of the film summarize it well….
If you’ve read my previous posts about a liberal arts education at a small liberal arts college, starting with Consider a Liberal Arts College, you probably didn’t expect the title of this post. But sometimes you consider an idea and then find it to not be the best fit. In my last post I covered some reservations I had about a liberal arts degree. But our biggest issue was that we were looking for a college with a computer science degree, a liberal arts college engineering degree. And yes, that turns out to be a contradiction.
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Watching movies to improve your SAT score? This past summer I’ve been watching movies with my daughters to work on their reading comprehension for the SAT.
Emma is a great movie to watch to improve your SAT reading vocabulary score. It is by far our favorite of the Jane Austen movies. As luck would have it, or maybe because we started with this one, it was the first of many literary movies we’ve watched with SAT prep in mind. My girls loved it!
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I started down the path of considering a liberal arts education at a liberal arts college for our son, because I was questioning the value of chasing the grades of top 10%, and was worried about my kids’ chances of getting into a “competitive” (read “good” or “well-ranked”) college if they didn’t join that race. (This turned out not to be true. You can get into a good college without a high class ranking.) One alternative is to attend a small liberal arts college instead of a large research university….
The trailer during the Olympics for Disney’s Queen of Katwe caught the attention of my teen girls!…
It might seem like the easiest way to figure out which colleges and universities are good, or the best, is to just look at the college rankings.
The short answer is that is not a good idea.
In fact, it’s a TERRIBLE idea.
If you want to know why, read on….
You’ve probably heard that the best thing you can do to improve your score on the College Board SAT is to read, read, read.
You know how as a reward your English teacher would show you the movie Romeo and Juliet – fast forwarding through all the racy bits – after you read the book?
She had it backwards!
When it comes to great stories, it doesn’t matter if you know the ending, because you’re enjoying getting there so much. That’s why great novels – and great movies – can be enjoyed again and again. The enjoyment comes not just in the ending, but in the path that gets you there….
Because I was worried about the chances of getting into college if you don’t chase the top 10% (a misconception that turned out not to be true) and I liked the idea of getting your undergraduate degree at a school that emphasized teaching undergraduates over graduate research, I found the idea of a liberal arts college appealing. So, what is the difference between college and university degrees? What are the differences between liberal arts colleges and research universities?…
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