by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 31, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education, Tutoring
In my previous post, I outlined some of the ways in which the progressive methodologies that pervade much of the American system inadvertently fuel a reliance on the private tutoring industry.
On its surface, the tutoring model would seem to be the holy grail of progressive education. Teachers are encouraged to “personalize” their approach to fit students’ unique learning styles, “empowering” them to “find their passions” and “take ownership of the learning process.” But this perspective is based on both a simplification and a misunderstanding of how teaching and learning actually work.
Oftentimes, tutoring is assumed to be effective simply because it epitomizes personalized learning. But although personalization is a component of what makes tutoring effective, it is far from the only element – nor, I would argue, is it the most important element. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 20, 2015 | Blog, General Tips, The New SAT, Tutoring
As I’ve mentioned elsewhere on this site, I’m often a tutor of last resort. That is, people find their way to me after they’ve exhausted other test-prep options (self-study, online program, private tutor) and still find themselves short of their goals. Sometimes very, very far short of their goals. When people come to me very late in the process, e.g. late spring of junior year or the summer before senior year, there’s unfortunately a limited amount that I can do. Most of it is triage at that point: finding and focusing on a handful of areas in which improvement is most likely.
Not coincidentally, many of the students in this situation who find their way to me have been cracking their heads against the SAT for months, sometimes even a year or more. Often, they’re strong math and science students whose reading and writing scores lag significantly behind their math scores, even after very substantial amounts of prep and multiple tests. They’re motivated, diligent workers, but the verbal is absolutely killing them. Basically, they’re fabulous candidates for the ACT. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Feb 25, 2015 | Blog, Tutoring
A couple of weeks ago, MarketWatch reporter Charles Passy contacted me about the process of doing SAT/ACT prep on a budget, and we had an impromptu and delightful conversation about the test-prep process and the changes it’s undergone over the last couple of decades. While I’m thrilled to see this site mentioned in his article as a source of free test prep, I also realize there wasn’t room for him to include much of what we discussed.
Hence this post.
(For the record, I know I’ve been away for a while, but I finally got started on trying to revise my SAT grammar book for the new test in 2016, and, well, let’s just say it’s been eating up a lot of my time…)
Anyway, my conversation with Mr. Passy certainly wasn’t the first one I’ve had about low-budge test prep, but during and after our conversation, a couple of things occurred to me. An awful lot of fuss gets made about the correlation between test scores and socio-economic status, and while I am in absolutely no way denying the very real and stark macro-level educational disparities that correlation reflects, I also think there are some nuances that often get missed. (I know, nuances get missed in the sound-bite/twitter-ized popular media — how difficult to imagine!)
The usual media story goes something like this: you hire a high-priced tutor, pay them some ungodly sum, the tutor teaches the kid some “tricks,” and wham! the kid’s score goes up a couple of hundred points.
That makes for a convenient narrative, but the truth is a little more complicated.
Now, to be fair, tutoring does occasionally work like that, but usually only for kids who were scoring pretty well in the first place. They just needed to hear someone say one or two things that would make it all click into place. They didn’t need help learning to identify prepositional phrases or main ideas, and they certainly didn’t stumble over the pronunciation of common words. Some of them could have ultimately have figured things out even without a tutor.
For all those kids who improve by huge amounts, there are others who dutifully go to tutoring week in and week out, sometimes for months on end, and come out barely better (or worse) than they were at the start — even with a very competent tutor, a category that I would like to think includes moi.
“More tutoring is always better, right?” a parent wrote to me in an email recently, nervous about what she could afford. Well, no actually. Sometimes more is not better. Sometimes more is worse. Sometimes more backfires, and the kid just wants to be left alone. Sometimes the kid doesn’t really make that much of an effort. Sometimes the kid has so many holes in their foundational knowledge that they can’t get to a point where they can integrate and apply new knowledge under pressure, on the fly. It all depends on where the student is starting from, where they want to get to, and how much they’re willing to put in. And so on.
When it comes to standardized test scores and income, people tend to assume that the correlation is invariably linear, up to the highest levels: that is, a student from a family earning $250,000/year will automatically score better than a student from a family scoring $100,000/year, who will in turn always score better than a student from a family earning $75,000/year, and so on. Reasonably, they therefore assume that a student from a family earning, say $5 million/year is pretty much guaranteed to reach the highest echelons of SAT or ACT score-dom, and one from a family at the tip-top of the 1% is pretty much guaranteed a perfect score.
Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of my personal experience.
Almost all of my weakest students have come from the most well-off families. And by “well off,” I mean Upper East Side townhouse/penthouse/house in the Hamptons wealthy. Some of them had been tutored in every subject, for years. Not coincidentally, they tended to have a lot of gadgets but not many books. Often their vocabularies were staggeringly weak. Staggeringly. As in, you would probably not believe me if I told you the words they didn’t know. They were so used to being spoon-fed that they simply did not know how to figure things out on their own, and there were no real stakes for them. They’d continue to be equally privileged whether they attended Muhlenberg or NYU.
My relatively strong students have tended to be from well-off but not extraordinarily wealthy families. They had houses and nice things and vacations, but they also had some exposure to the world of ideas. Often they were willing to put in a moderate amount of work, but they lacked a realistic conception of effort relative to payoff.
My strongest students have been from from families that truly valued learning. Regardless of how much money they had, they were willing to spend on education (though granted none of them could be called poor). A number of them were from immigrant families, and some did not learn English until relatively late. But they were willing to accept that they didn’t know everything already, and they worked hard.
Then there are the kids who can’t afford tutoring at all — or who don’t want their parents to shell out for tutors — who simply buy my books, sit down with them diligently for a couple of months, and get perfect or near-perfect scores. I know they exist because they sometimes send me emails thanking me. Those emails make my day.
These kids are the ones that gets overlooked in all the discussions about scores and socio-economic status. Some of them do spend hours combing this site and PWN the SAT and Erik the Red and College Confidential tracking down the answer to every last Blue Book question and pull their scores into the stratosphere. Yes, they are comparatively few, but they exist, and sometimes they actually learn a lot in the process.
Don’t their accomplishments deserve some recognition too?
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 17, 2014 | Blog, Issues in Education, Reading (SAT & ACT), Tutoring
Occasionally I’ll stumble across a passage that seems perfectly straightforward to me, but that I see students get confused about over and over again. One such passage begins in the following way:
Through a friend’s father, Elizabeth found a job at a publishing company.
Her parents were puzzled by this. The daughters of their friends were
announcing their engagements in the Times, and those who joined the Peace
Corps or had gone to graduate school were filed under the heading of
“Useful Service” as if they had entered convents or dedicated themselves to
the poor.
The passage continues for another couple of sentences, but that’s pretty much the gist of it.
That my students should have such difficulty with this of all passages was a mystery I had filed away in a mental drawer somewhere, to be trotted out an examined from time to time but never yielding sufficient clues for me to draw any real conclusions from.
Then I had a couple of illuminating moments.
First, I had a student miss a Writing question because she did not know what the Peace Corps was. This was a girl who liked to read and had already scored a 750 in CR — not the type of kid I’d expect to have that sort of gap.
Next, a friend of mine who teaches high school told me that her AP students did not understand what a mistress was — as in, they had never been exposed to the concept and couldn’t really grasp it.
She also told me the following anecdotes about her son, who had just finished his freshman year of high school: One, he had accidentally bubbled in, on a practice ACT, that he intended to pursue a two-year college degree because she’d recently explained to him that it took her two years to get her master’s, and he didn’t realize that people go to school for four years of undergraduate education before they go to graduate school. And two, while going over a newspaper article with him, she discovered that he did not know what pesticides were. This despite his having attended an über-progressive middle school with a community garden!
Incidentally, her son is a very smart boy (albeit not much of a reader), but no one had ever bothered to explain to him these very basic pieces of information that most adults take for granted. Everyone, his mother included, assumed he knew them and therefore never saw any reason to discuss them. His mother was absolutely gobsmacked when she discovered what he didn’t know. (If you’re a teenager reading this, don’t be so quick to laugh. I guarantee that there are some very important pieces of information about life in the real world that you don’t know either.)
The moral of the story? Every time I think I’ve stopped taking things for granted, I discover that I need to strip away yet more of my preconceptions about what pieces of knowledge I can and cannot assume students possess.
After all that, I started taking a look at the SAT from another angle: that of cultural reference points that most adults don’t give a second thought to but that plenty of kids taking the SAT haven’t picked up. I was inspired, of course, by E.D. Hirsch, but the reference points aren’t so much Great Events in Western Civilization as they are things you learn from reading a newspaper on a regular basis. Even a really bad newspaper.
Then today I happened to be going over the passage cited at the beginning of the post, and suddenly I had a lightbulb moment. It’s chock-full of references that wouldn’t give most adult readers pause, but that the average teenager wouldn’t be able to make heads or tails of.
1. “Announcing engagements in the Times”
Assumed knowledge: The Times refers to a newspaper, e.g. The New York Times. When people get engaged, they sometimes post announcements in the local newspaper. Usually the people who do this are relatively well-off or socially prominent, especially in a newspaper like The New York Times. This piece of information suggests that Elizabeth’s family is probably at least upper-middle class, if not outright wealthy, which in turn suggests why her parents are surprised that she doesn’t want to take money from them.
2. The Peace Corps(!)
Assumed knowledge: The Peace Corps is a governmental organization that places American volunteers (usually college graduates) in various high-need areas in the developing world. Members may teach English, help preserve wildlife, or run recycling programs. In general, they have a reputation for being left-leaning tree huggers.
3. Graduate school
Assumed knowledge: “Graduate school” refers to any post-college academic program leading to a masters or doctoral degree. Most masters program last two years, and most doctoral programs 5-7. The doctorate is the highest academic degree one can receive. In order to apply to graduate school, you must first obtain a bachelors degree (four-year undergraduate degree).
4. Convent
Assumed knowledge: a convent is a place where nuns live apart from the world in order to devote themselves to prayer. For a good part of European history, unmarried women were expected to enter one. By equating joining a convent with “Useful Service,” the author is being ironic — that is, suggesting that Elizabeth’s parents would have considered it more useful for Elizabeth to renounce all worldly goods and lock herself away than to take a job at a publishing house.
Are you starting to get the picture?
Technically, it is not actually necessary to understand all of these references to answer either of the questions that accompanies the passage. But that is somewhat beside the point. The point is that if the reader does not have a pretty darn good idea of what these things refer to, the passage itself has the potential to read like sheer gobbledygook. At that point, it’s not even relevant whether the questions can be answered without that information because the reader is so thoroughly lost that he or she can barely even focus on the questions.
Knowledge deficit indeed.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Oct 2, 2013 | Blog, Tutoring
1) Do not take anything for granted
The more I tutor, the less I assume about what any given student can or cannot do. In fact, now assume that my students do *not* possess any given skill until they’ve clearly demonstrated to me that they’ve mastered it — and that includes reading the words that are actually on the page. Harsh? Perhaps, but I’ve learned the hard way that students, even high scoring ones, often have unexpected and sometimes very large gaps that need to be addressed as quickly and directly as possible.
Here’s a brief sampling of things students of mine have not known:
-SAT passages have arguments; they’re not just “talking about stuff.”
-Introductions and conclusions contain important information
-Discussing an idea is not the same thing as agreeing with that idea; phrases like “some people think” indicate that an author is introducing an idea they do NOT agree with.
-Main ideas usually come before, not after, specific examples.
-The word “important” is important>
-A colon can be used to introduce an explanation.
-“Is,” “are,” and “were” are all parts of the verb “to be.”
-Singular verbs end in an -s; plural verbs do not.
-How to sound out unfamiliar words (thank you whole language!)
And the following vocabulary words: permanent (two students in the same week, both native English speakers — I’m still reeling from that one), surrender, compromise (first meaning), tendency, and chronicle.
2) Take everything your students say in stride
Do not *ever* criticize or make fun or them for not knowing as much as you or your other students. You have no idea what they have or haven’t covered in school, and I’ve met some pretty bright kids who were missing some pretty serious basics. It’s nice that you could figure things out on your own, but alas, the same does not hold true for everyone else. No matter how surprised you are by something they sincerely don’t know (and aren’t just being lazy about), try not to react. Your students are starting from where they’re starting from, and jumping on them for not knowing what *you* think they should know won’t really accomplish anything. Explain what you need to as neutrally as possible (or have them look it up) and move on.
A few weeks ago, a friend of mine had her daughter try a session with a tutor she’d met by chance at the gym. She didn’t know anything about him, but he talked her into a trial session. When he met with her daughter, however, he spent virtually the entire session berating her for not knowing things that “all” his other students knew, and he made a point of telling her that they were scoring 2200+. That’s nice for his other students, but guess who lost a job?
3) You are there to focus on your student, not yourself
Doing well on the SAT and teaching someone else to do well on the SAT are two totally different skills, and what worked for you might or might not work for them. Don’t get hung up on your own accomplishments; they’re only relevant insofar as they allow you to help other people achieve their goals.
4) Be precise, but don’t over-explain
You might be able to recognize all those picky little grammar rules without knowing what anything is called, but your students will most likely need to be taught things directly. Avoid saying things like “well… it’s kinda like this,” or “you’ll just know how to recognize it after a while.”
There’s a fine line between giving someone just enough terminology to be able to understand a concept clearly and giving them so much information that they start to feel overwhelmed. It’s your job to know what information is relevant to the test and how to explain the necessary underlying concepts, and which information is superfluous or likely to be confusing.
5) Don’t ask students whether they understand, just test them or have them explain it back to you in their own words
Kids are not always the most accurate judges of what they know, and plenty of times they’ll just say “yes” to get you off their back. Go by what they do, not by what they say.
6) Adjust your approach to the student’s level and needs
This might sound very obvious, but different students may have very different sets of needs — a student with a weaker background may need things explained slowly and repeatedly, while one with stronger preparation may only need to hear things once. If you treat the former like the latter, they’ll end up confused and frustrated; if you treat the latter like the former, they’ll get bored and tune out. One of the fabulous things about private tutoring is that you don’t have to follow a one-size-fits all approach; you’re free to focus on whatever the student needs to focus on. A student scoring below 600 usually requires a very different approach than one scoring 730 and aiming for 800.
7) Use College Board or ACT material only
This is exceedingly important for Critical Reading: most College Board passages are based on the “they say/I say” structure; they’re designed to gauge students’ ability to follow arguments throughout a passage and keep track of various points of view and attitudes. The passages used in most commercial test-prep books do not include this structure (or, if they do, include it in a too-obvious way), and students will not have the opportunity to practice identifying it and employing the many shortcuts that quick recognition of it can create.
8) Be realistic about what you can and cannot accomplish, and don’t make guarantees
If you’ve only worked with a relatively homogeneous, well-prepared group of students and have never encountered a student who couldn’t sound out “methodology” or didn’t know that “to found” could be a verb, it’s easy to overestimate what you can accomplish. Unless you’ve worked with the extreme low end (300s), persistent 400/500-range scorers, and/or students who were never properly taught to read, you have no idea how challenging it can be to help some students improve.
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jul 23, 2013 | Blog, SAT Critical Reading (Old Test), Tutoring
On the surface, the answer to that question might seem pretty simple. If Critical Reading is a reading test, then wouldn’t the obvious way to raise one’s score be to read more? Well… maybe. But also maybe not. Like most thing involving the SAT, it depends where you’re starting from, what you know, and where you want to get to. And if you’re looking for a summer study plan, then you need to think about what you can realistically accomplish in the space of a few months.
If you’re not one of the “lucky” people who’s read so much since childhood that you can simply intuit the answers to Critical Reading questions, then spending your summer trying to slog your way through Dickens or Dostoevsky probably won’t miraculously allow you to acquire that skill — especially if you don’t actually enjoy reading five-hundred page nineteenth-century novels and will spend most of your time trying not to tune out while reading them. You might pick up some vocabulary, especially if you keep a list of unfamiliar words, look up every single one, and go out of your way to learn how they’re actually used, but if you’re not a strong reader in the first place, a Great Work or two won’t suddenly compensate for years of just reading things like Harry Potter or Twilight (or nothing at all). As a matter of fact, reading fiction will most likely have limited value in terms of helping you recognize and summarize arguments, understand rhetorical strategies, and make inferences in the precise way that the SAT requires.
A couple of months back, I stumbled across a paper in which Emory University English professor Mark Bauerlein discusses the difficulties that the Common Core’s emphasis on non-fiction pose for English teachers. Bauerlein makes the very valid point that English teachers are trained to teach literature, not “informational texts,” and that requiring them to shift their focus to non-fiction would not only require them to abandon their area of expertise but would essentially create a curriculum that would place a physics textbook on the same aesthetic footing as Hamlet.
I’m not entirely convinced by Bauerlein’s next claim, however, namely that students who are continuously exposed to a rigorous curriculum consisting primarily of challenging classic works of fiction do not really need to study non-fiction because they will be able to automatically transfer the comprehension skills they’ve developed over to non-fiction texts for tests like the SAT. As evidence, Bauerlein cites Massachusetts pubic schools, which do generally offer a traditional curriculum based on challenging works of fiction and whose students consistently obtain some of the highest reading scores in the country.
As a product of the Massachusetts public school system who studied a curriculum much like the one Bauerlein describes, and who went on to achieve top Verbal scores with minimal formal prep, I think Bauerlein is generally correct in stating that the comprehension skills developed through the study of complex classic work of fiction do carry over to non-fiction.
At the same time, however, there are important differences between the two genres, and it seems like an oversight for schools to focus on developing the former at the expense of the latter (especially since so much of college is based on non-fiction reading). The type of character/plot/theme-based analysis I did in school and the kind of structural/rhetorical/inferential reading required by the SAT required two very different approaches, and the fact that I literally understood what I was reading on the SAT did not make what it was demanding of me any less foreign. I intuited the gist of what it was trying to accomplish well enough to figure out what I needed to give it, but it would have been much, much easier if someone had sat me down with a “complex text” like, say, Samuel Huntington’s The Clash of Civilizations and directly taught me to analyze its arguments rhetorically and logically à la the SAT.
But I digress.
The point I’m trying to make is that unless you fall into the very small minority of people who have somehow automatically absorbed everything the SAT tests just by reading, the best way to improve your Critical Reading score is to practice reading critically — the extent to which you can do that outside the structured format of SAT practice tests depends on you. But if you are going to do some independent reading for the specific purpose of prepping for the SAT, here are some suggestions.
1) Focus on relatively short pieces of non-fiction. They don’t have to be as short as CR passages, but they should be short enough for you to practice looking at how they’re organized. That’s much easier to do in a three-page article than in a twenty-five page one.
I would strongly suggest that you go on Arts & Letters Daily and pick an article or a couple of articles to read every day; pretty much everything on there is written at or above the level of the SAT. The New York Times Opinionator is also great.
2) Look out for pieces that discuss some of its most common topics and themes: string theory, the effects of technology on the reading/writing and the humanities, animal cognition, the body/mind problem, immigrant/minority experience. (There are LOTS of articles that touch on these subjects on Arts & Letters Daily because these are hot topics in the real world.) After a while, you’ll start to get familiar with the conventional arguments surrounding these debates, which means you’ll have to waste a lot less energy just trying to figure out what they’re literally saying.
3) Look up every unfamiliar reference, not just vocabulary words — names, places, concepts. Never heard of de Tocqueville or Hegel or Stanislavsky? Go find out who they were and why people care about them. Critical Reading does not exist in a box; it’s designed to reflect the Common Core, and passages are deliberately drawn from a wide range of topics in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. The more you know about the world, the easier it will be to literally comprehend readings about an incredibly wide range of topics (it’s much harder to appreciate a passage about an anthropologist if you don’t know what an anthropologist does.) It’ll also give you lots of fodder for the essay.
4) Treat everything you read like an SAT passage. Pay particular attention to the introduction and the conclusion when looking for the point, and see how quickly you can figure it out. Make sure you’re clear on when an author is expressing their own ideas vs. someone else’s ideas, and look at the words and phrases they use to indicate or suggest agreement vs. disagreement. Notice when an author is supporting their point with personal anecdotes vs. hard facts vs. broad generalizations, using extreme language (expressing “the strength of a conviction”), and using common words in alternate meanings.
Provided you understand what you’re reading and can accurately identify the elements discussed above, pending even thirty minutes a day reading this way will most likely help you go just as far — if not farther — toward increasing your Critical Reading score as simply sitting with a Princeton Review book and taking practice test after practice test. You’re also a lot more likely to learn something in the process.
