Blog Posts

Regaining Gratitude This Thanksgiving

Ever notice how ironic it is that the holiday that’s designed to make us feel serenely grateful for all that we have—our family, our friends, our prosperous life here in the land of turkey and maize and cranberry salad—falls right in the middle of the most hectic, exhausting time of the year? Think about it. Our kids are burned out from tests and endless pages of homework. One school project follows closely on the heels of another. Sports and other extracurricular events have left all of us exhausted. Meanwhile, Hanukkah and Christmas (with all their economic, social and familial obligations) loom forebodingly on the horizon. So how can we pause for a day in the midst of all the chaos and stress—not to mention the weird family dynamics that must be navigated over the Thanksgiving table—and just feel thankful? The complete answer to that question could fill a book! (And if you know a good one, I’d love the name of it!) But because parenting i …

From Strategy to Authenticity: Writing Your Perfect Essay

Here’s one way to think about the college admissions essay. The task of the essay is to sway admissions officers. Writing a good essay is like marketing a product. It requires that you appeal to the preferences of admissions officers (whatever those are) and that you present a crafted and manicured version of your self – one that gives you the best chance of getting in. I call this the strategic approach. This admissions essay writing philosophy is based on two core premises: It is relatively easy to get inside the heads of admissions officers and figure out what they want to hear. By telling admissions officers what they want to hear, you increase your chance of getting in. The strategic approach has a seductive quality and is becoming more and more popular among high-achieving students and their parents. In a culture that values prestige and success, this approach offers what appears to be a sure-fire way of getting in to top institutions. The proble …

Reinvention

Decked out in robes and hats, my 200-something graduating classmates were arranged in rows on the lawn below the stage. Beyond them their family and friends sat waiting for the joint speech that was to be delivered by the salutatorian and me. It was not to be delivered by the salutatorian and me because I was the valedictorian. I was not. My GPA put me soundly in the lower-most quartile of my graduating class, and it was only a coincidence that my best friend—Andrew—was the salutatorian. We were speaking together because we wanted to and because my school didn’t care about grades when it came to graduation speeches. Anyone who cared to perform was welcome to audition—academic standings be damned. Our speech was probably as unmemorable as your average student-delivered graduation speech: full of stammers and stutters, creatively bankrupt. But I remember it clearly for two reasons. One, I gave it (and I was nervous as hell). Two, I didn’t think I real …

Admissions Anxiety: It’s Not Just a Problem For Students

It’s early admissions time and parents across the nation are teetering on the edge of a full-fledged nail-chewing, staring-at-the-ceiling-all-night anxiety attack. Yes, you read that right. Parents. While college-bound high school seniors surely care where they’ll receive their higher education, it’s their Moms and Dads who really suffer. There’s not just one reason why parents get so worked up over college admissions. Typically, it’s a mix of several complex reasons. Part of it is our terrible economy: parents are genuinely worried that if their kids don’t graduate from a prestigious school they’ll surely end up back in their old room four or five years from now sending out resume after unanswered resume. But that’s not the only reason. Reluctant as we may be to admit it, parental peer pressure plays a big role as well. Think about all the college bumper stickers you see on parents’ cars. Ever notice the shortage of community …

App Season (No, not those apps, college apps)

The college application season is fully underway and seniors across the country are madly collecting recommendations, gathering information about schools, and crafting essays about the meaning of life. As anyone who has been through an application process knows, it is an intensely personal and humbling whirlwind of an experience. Amidst this mad dash, a process given an almost insane amount of weight – will their location at age nineteen, in fact, be the most important determinant of all future trajectories? really? – they almost certainly have a few other things going on. They probably are attending school, doing homework and classwork, and possibly taking one or more honors or AP classes. They might have extracurricular activities, such as music, sports, art, or spiritual study. I hope they have family responsibilities and are, at the very least, responsible for making their bed and washing a few dishes. Given that they are adolescent, they are doubtless spending a sig …

College Applications Made Simple(r)

It’s nearing the deadline for early applications to colleges, and that can mean anxiety over whether your son or daughter is really “sure enough” to apply to his top choice, badgering him to get the essays done and a generally stressed-out household. We spend a lot of time with high school students, and there is one thing we know for sure: they don’t want the college application to take over their lives and result in non-stop strife in their families, but they just don’t know how to avoid it, and, frequently, neither do their parents. While it would be overly optimistic to think that stress can be completely eliminated from the process there are things that can be done to increase your child’s chances of putting together a good application without losing it. Here are our suggestions for what your kids should do: Organize your stuff. Sounds obvious, but you would be surprised how many times students don’t do it. Keep a folder with all o …

Busywork Blues

This was written by a student (and friend) involved with Challenge Success. We appreciate his wlllingness to share his personal story with us. In the living room of my parent’s house there is a table worn smooth from the weight of books and spotted with flocks of pen tip indentations. This of course is the dreaded “Homework Table,” which sustained nearly two decades of use by both me and my older brother. It is from this table that I would often depart early in the morning, only to return again later—after school was out, after tennis practice was out, well after sundown. Although I explicitly remember spending what constituted a significant portion of my adolescence at this table, I am hard pressed to recall the specifics of any of the actual assignments. Granted, this retrospection is a few years removed, it still brings up an interesting question: if the overwhelming majority of homework is busywork, why assign it at all? While each of the papers t …

Why Homework? And How?

As ‘Back To School’ evenings are being held across the country, I know that homework has resurfaced as one of the most hotly debated topics among all constituencies – students, parents, teachers, and administrators. In my opinion, here are the three essential questions to ask of every piece of homework: What is the point? What is the timeline? How will it be assessed? What is the point? Is this a skill-building exercise such as writing practice or balancing chemical equations? If it is, and has been designed to help a student build what Teresa Amabile calls ‘domain skills’ so that the learner can move toward richer, more complex, and creative work, how can it be effective for all learners? Each student does not need the same, standardized amount of practice to master every skill. Is the work needed to prepare for the next class? I have wrestled with this question for years. For a long time, I believed that i …

Want to Avoid the Homework Wars? – Here’s How

School is back in session and parents everywhere are bemoaning the return of the dreaded H-word. Homework. Yes, kids are coming home loaded down with math worksheets to compute, reports to write and projects to do. By the time they’ve slogged through it all—and done the extracurricular du jour—it’s bedtime. In fact, it’s past bedtime. Forget relaxing. Forget hanging out with friends. Heck, forget a sit-down meal with the family. In general, kids have too much homework these days. The amount of time students in high-achieving schools spend on homework has dramatically increased over the past 30 years or so, and guess what? Their lives haven’t gotten any simpler during this time frame. Not only does too much homework not foster academic achievement, it can actually hinder it. What’s more, it may harm kids in countless other ways. (For more info on this subject check out our research on homework at challengesuccess.org.) Excessive home …

Back to School, Back to Routine

As a magical summer winds to a close, I cannot help but get excited for the new school year. After two decades in the classroom as a student and another two decades as a teacher, my calendar begins at the end of August. In our house, a return to the routine of the school year revolves around the one immutable piece of the schedule: bed time. Summer sunlight, travel, spontaneous family movie nights, and more all wreak minor havoc on sleep. With the added complication of juggling different sleep needs for our four, ten, and thirteen year-olds, our evenings can be, in a word, interesting. Like Madeline Levine described in her recent blog, sleep is one of the most critical factors in maintaining health and happiness. In addition to the studies she cited linking good sleep habits as a protective factor against depression and extreme crabbiness, sleep helps the brain consolidate memories and learning, allows the body to process carbohydrates correctly (preventing excessive weight gain), b …

Back to School Alert: The Necessity of a Sane Bedtime

As a culture, we’ve somehow gotten to a place where a good night’s sleep is typically seen as a luxury. Sleep deprivation is de rigueur for many adults all year long. And as summer fades away and a new school year looms on the horizon, it’s about to be even more true for our kids. It’s not hard to see why sleep has fallen to the bottom of the priority list for many families. Our lifestyles are crowding it out. Our kids often have not just one but several extracurricular activities, each of which requires a significant time commitment. And let’s not forget homework: most kids have plenty of it to fit in between soccer practice or music lessons or karate class. By the time we’ve picked up the kids from whatever practice they’re at, shoveled in dinner and gotten them started on homework, it’s already late. By the time they’re done with assignments and study time it’s alarmingly late—but what are you going to do? The thinking goes like this: we live in a super-competitive world w …

The Art and Practice of Play

4 year-old: So, what do you want to do? 10 year-old: I don’t know. 4 year-old: Well, you could be my dog. 10 year-old: Ok. 4 year-old: But this time, you have to behave. If you live with a preschooler, play is probably the default activity in your home. Make believe, construction, water play and more are staples in our house, even for our thirteen and ten year-olds. Variations of the conversation above, one I overheard a few months ago, occur on a daily basis and the infectious enthusiasm of our youngest is nearly impossible to resist. Assorted scholars define play differently. I am comfortable with this simple definition of play: play is any freely chosen and self-directed activity. Soccer practice, while hopefully fun, is not play. A neighborhood whiffle ball tournament with group-decided bases and imaginary all-star players is play. While we live in an era in which play and free time have been marginalized, I am thrilled to see the increasing attention paid to th …