speaks-love tutoring: September 2010

Friday, September 17, 2010

Joy of College Application~

What I enjoy most about the college application process is witnessing the turn of a high school student toward adult life through meaningful content and dialogue. This is an important venture; it empowers them to think critically about their beliefs, value systems, how they belong to a greater community, and how they will fulfill their responsibility to humankind. It gives them dedicated and patient time to reflect on and plan for their lives…. Through these steps, they begin to gain more awareness of and respect for what their adult support group has had to consider while taking care of them. Forced to go inward, they grow~ gain a more insightful identity and higher sense of confidence. It is this process that wakes the student to the morning of adult life.
Folade Speaks-Love

College Application Process Services

We provide

College Application Process Services

It is time; let us walk you through it...

With our College Application Process Services,
you will receive:

Unlimited Sessions and Phone Time
Time Management Coaching through all deadlines
Inspiration and brainstorming help for essays & statements
Final Editing for college essays (common application, regular and supplemental)
Assistance sorting through college choices and best fits
Resume Creation (Academic/Extracurricular & Athletic)
Support from an objective adult to help students work through their excitement, concerns and fears about college

*We also provide help with Scholarship Search and Applications (following the college app process), and/or time management plans for SAT/ACT study

*We work with students on Early Decision, Early Action, Regular and Rolling Admission timelines

This services augments the support of your school, it does not take the place of it. However, it provides your young adult with a coach...another caring adult to help them through what many families feel can be an exciting, yet overwhelming process.

Please visit our website for more information http://speakslovetutoring.com/

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

An except from the review...

With Mike Rose, We Should All Be Asking - Why School?

Why School? Reclaiming Education for All of Us
by Mike Rose
(The New Press, 2009)

Reviewed by Kenneth Bernstein

:::In “Politics and Knowledge” and “Reflections on Intelligence in Workplace and the School,”, his fifth and sixth (of thirteen) chapters (and there is a conclusion), Rose offers some of his most valuable insights, including his respect for both the capabilities of people of working class background and for the requirements and skill of the work they do. Having come from a working class background, and having studied the thought required to do blue-collar and service work, Rose makes us focus on how we demean and diminish categories of work and the people who fill them, disconnect our schooling from the vocational paths that many of our young people will follow, and perpetuate an unfortunate historical pattern that belittles those not rooted in the academy and the formal professions. As Rose points out, this ignores a crucial part of our past. He reminds us that “Shakespeare was as popular on the frontier as in the city” (p. 68) and “My Uncle Frank, a railroad machinist, would quote Longfellow in his letters’ (p. 69). He writes that

As an ideal, democracy assumes the capacity of the common person to learn, to think independently, to decide thoughtfully (p. 85).

Further, there is a real danger in an attitude that belittles common work as mindless, that the instruction we develop will fail to develop instructional connections among the different kinds of skills and knowledge. And worse:

If we think that whole categories of people - identified by class, by occupation - are not that bright, then we reinforce social separation and cripple our ability to talk across our current cultural divides (p. 86)::: read the full review.

Meeting Students Where They Live

:::Richard Curwin kicks off his advice book for urban teachers with a story about a king looking for a teacher for the young Prince. After testing all of the teachers in the land, the king selects the three finalists. One has the best content knowledge; another has the strongest classroom management and discipline. You have probably already guessed that it is the third teacher who wins the job — not the strongest in either category but an individual who combines great skills with the philosophy that it is a teacher’s role to serve and guide, on behalf of both the pupil and society at large....:::read the full review.

Huffington Post Article:::University of the People

"The extent to which information and knowledge is being offered free online is impressive. It allows people to study at no charge, whenever and whatever they choose. You

can watch an MIT lecture in Vietnam or read an article by a Nobel Prize winner from a refugee camp in the Sudan. The free flow of information online and access to quality open access material must be furthered, but we must also remember that open access alone is not sufficient to the democratization of education."read the full article here.

University of the People Website

http://www.uopeople.org/