How Many Dreams Are Destroyed By The Weight Of Debt?

Was it the right score? What’s more important is that there are millions of other kids who cannot afford the test preparation. What do we do about them? Infuse tutoring into scholarships? A better solution is to just get rid of the tests. Many schools are beginning to move away from them, thank goodness. Let’s add speed to that retreat, throw our parental weight behind it. And instead let’s rely on high school transcripts, personal essays, and interviews. Yes, these take longer both to acquire and to sift through, and offer little in the way of shortcuts, but sorry, college admissions departments, that’s precisely the point. We don’t want to sacrifice the vivid uniqueness of our children just so you can save some time in your admissions process. Just ask our children to submit their high school transcripts, to write essays describing themselves and their passions, and conduct actual interviews with them. Then make a qualitative decision based on what you’ve seen in each child. Nothing wrong with you using your judgment to make a qualitative decision. Far better than relying on the shortcut of fake data. The listing of these activities was begun, presumably, to allow the child to present the full extent of who she really is, but they no longer serve that purpose.

Don't Break Easily

They have become badges, applicant flair that she is coerced to pin to her application. Even more alarming, these badges mask who the applicant truly is. Let’s stop covering up our kids with badges. If they have a hobby or a special interest, have them write about it in their essay or describe it with passion in their interview. The working world would fall over itself to support the development of this curricula. The fact that no such curricula currently exist is both a huge productivity miss and a moral failing. Demand curricula change. Currently, the generally accepted method of teaching is to impart information in the classroom and then have the child do homework and assignments on their own. This makes sense only if the goal of middle and high school is to use each student to generate quiz, test, and assignment scores that can then be inputted into admissions forms and sent off to colleges. But if the goal of school became to help each student identify and contribute their loves, then you would flip the classroom around. Each student would do their learning and reading by themselves at home, and then in the classroom the teacher would help each student refine their unique way of turning the new information, facts, or processes into actual work. The classroom should be the place where the teacher pays attention to this idiosyncrasy.

From Small Things Big Things Come

Teaching thus will cease to be solely information transfer, and will instead become coaching of the individual student. But in terms of helping the student grow, it will certainly be more effective work. From a data standpoint, they are an embarrassment. But that doesn’t make the data right. Our students deserve better. For most subjects, the grade is not an objective measure, but is instead the subjective response of an idiosyncratic teacher. We pay the teacher for the wisdom of their response, and we expect them to know their subject well. We should just ask teachers to use their best judgment in grading. We should submit all of these best judgments to colleges in the form of a transcript. Because they aren’t and never will be. Of students who graduated in 2018, 69 percent did so burdened with, on average, 29,000 in debt. Will this job be able to pay down my debt? How many quality teachers or nurses do we lose because those instinctively drawn to these professions do the math and discover the money doesn’t add up? Flipping this around, how many people choose lucrative roles such as lawyering or doctoring that don’t fit their authentic selves, simply because finances trump fit? How many dreams are destroyed by the weight of debt? Not all of these data points can be explained by the pressures of student debt, but common sense tells us that something’s amiss.

Don't Worry About A Thing

A healthy, productive team is one where each person finds a role in which to express the very best of themselves. A healthy, productive nation requires the same. But my greatest advantage was that my college tuition was entirely paid for by my nation of birth. Someone, somewhere made the decision that I would be more likely to contribute more, and more intelligently, if debt didn’t distract me. Those were the good old days. For the sake of our kids, ourselves, and our nation, let’s see if we can find our way back there. The most powerful way to help your child learn and grow is to reveal to them what is already inside them, and to show them how to turn what is inside them into contribution. To turn loves into work. Any action, any class, any educational reform that gets you closer to this is a significant step toward doing what is right by your children. Are you done? the kids’ mother asked. Yes, Coco replied, the show ended a few minutes ago. We were very late again. Their mom reached into her purse. This is a particular approach to parenting. Not entitled, necessarily, but extremely proactive. You reach in and take every single step you can think of to get your kids what they just might want. They had a grip on the joystick, and as they surveyed the field of play, they could somehow see further and faster than anyone else. They would sense opportunity or danger, jerk the joystick this way and that, and their children would move safely forward, darting around corners, the danger averted us. With these parents at the helm, the kids made it through, level after level, eating the fruit, munching the ghosts, racing to the next level and the next, and still with all their lives intact. And who can fault parents for grabbing the joystick so tightly?