The world is changing, jobs are evolving, and far too many students are simply not being prepared to be successful adults. Most people first go to high school and then: College!

• Seventy percent of eighth graders are not proficient in reading—and most will never catch up.
• Every year, more than 1.2 million students drop out of high school.
• Many of those who do graduate are not ready for college, for the workplace, and for life.

This is not about schools in some far-off city. This is about the students you see in your own neighborhood. This is not someone else’s problem. This is an American problem that affects us all.

Continue reading “High school and then: College”

Yep, it won. I was home this week, sick. It was not your run of the mill stuffy head/cold/sore throat. This, I think, was some sort of flu, since I was beyond exhausted and all of my muscles were hurting, and oh yes, I had a severe fever. What I really think was wrong was that I was so sleep deprived. I don’t think I sleep as soundly as I’m supposed to in general anyway, and often times I will wake up several times a night.

I fall right back asleep without a problem, but the waking up leads me to believe it’s not a sound sleep that I’m getting. Maybe I should have watched the following video earlier and have prevented myself from this oh-so-annoying disease:

Anyway, all that means that I was home a few days this week. And my room was clean, so I even didn’t need to do any cleaning. Because of the flu, I actually had to go back to bed for a few hours on a few days, and then I really had to get out of the house and get some fresh air. I still have a few errands to run, probably just to Target and pick up the dry cleaning or whatever, and then its back to bed for this girlie. I really can’t afford to miss another day of work tomorrow, so rest it is. Continue reading “What to do when you Feel Sick”

It’s been more than four weeks now since I began my life without a fallback plan, and it’s been a pretty intense learning experience. Being on your own and working for yourself can be a lot more complicated than one might expect.  I thought in the beginning – “this will be great! I’m doing what I love and I get to make my own schedule and do whatever I want!”

Ha. How naive I was.

Well, I said that I would use this blog to hold myself accountable to document both my successes and my struggles, so here they are. Remember the list of goals that I made in that first post that outlined what I would strive to do every day? Remember that I said I wanted to earn my GED and follow the free GED Math prep at BestGEDClasses? Well, here’s my self-progress report for the first four weeks:

1. Follow the Map – C
Although I begin every day with a list of things to get finished for the day, there have only been one or two days where I follow and actually complete that list. I do a much better job of distracting myself following my path. Because of this, I’ve gotten a little behind, especially with my attempts to score a GED.

Continue reading “First Steps Without A Fallback”

St. Paul’s School for Girls is located in Brooklandville, Maryland. At this amazing school, the hearts and minds of the students are educated in an inclusive, supportive community founded on the basic Episcopal principles and values of integrity, spiritual growth, and respect. The school aims to nurture creativity and intellectual curiosity, empower the student’s voice, and be an inspiration for confident and ambitious leaders who will be ready for serving their communities and the world.

The school draws vision and direction from this mission. All of the school’s employees are committed to the individual experiences and journeys in the school. The school wants all girls to challenge their learning process to ultimately be able to forge their particular and distinct future paths in the ever-changing world.

The school wants all students to understand and harness the process and the power of asking the right questions and to learn to feel comfortable with making mistakes, taking healthy or calculated risks, and uncertainty. All these elements are important for what the school considers a robust and healthy learning community.

Continue reading “St. Paul’s School for Girls”

The Archer School for Girls was established by three visionary and bold women, From the beginning, some twenty years ago, the Archer School was meant to be a highly innovative school, a place where all programmatic decisions would be based on the most recent research and beliefs about how young women are learning, developing, and thriving.

The Archer School is a contemporary school for girls and it is the school’s mission to educate and shape this country’s future female leaders in a challenging environment that’s ambitious but in a joyful way.

That ambitious mission is clearly visible every day in the school’s classrooms and hallways. Visitors are often pleasantly surprised by how friendly and happy the girls at Archer are. They’re also often surprised by how stunningly confident and unusually poised Archer girls come across, and one of the key things is the girls’ competence that forms the basis for this confidence.

Continue reading “Archer School For Girls”

No matter your profession, your level of education, or your income bracket, almost everyone has a story about a dreaded writing assignment or a fanatical teacher who bled red ink.

Our teachers were all well-intentioned and gave us some necessary tools for success, but in the process, many of us learned that there’s a right way and a wrong way to write and that more often than not, we were doing it wrong. In the new era of Internet marketing and social media buzz, writing well isn’t just a necessary evil to pass a class, it’s often the only way to reach short-attention-span consumers who have too many choices and too little time.
So, here are five lessons that the real world teaches us about how to write to engage our target market:

Lesson 1: Yes, you CAN!

Forget what anyone has ever told you before. If you can participate in a conversation, you can write. If you worry about your grammar, you can use Grammarly extension or even better take some practice tests and lessons on Best GED Classes.

Spend some time to polishing your skills and you will feel much more confident. I highly recommend practice tests on bestgedclasses, this website has a reputation for helping students to get confident in their skills no matter what.

you are passionate about what you do, you can write. If you can text or tweet or post on Facebook, you can write. If you can’t spell, aren’t sure about punctuation, and lack an impressive vocabulary, you can still write.

Writing is nothing more than capturing those ideas swirling in your head and transmitting them to paper. Writing is the process of creating, or reflecting, or explaining, or persuading. Writing is nothing more than talking – on paper. Continue reading “Tips to improve writing techniques”

I profess to being an absolute feedback junkie. Positive feedback tells me that what I’m already doing, I should keep doing. Negative tells me I need to take a step back, and evaluate whether alterations need to be made. The more constructive it is, the better. So, if this is what I believe, if this is what I know will help me improve, then why is negative feedback so hard to take?

All of this came to rise earlier this week when a friend of mine read this blog. He was the second person I told to check it out, off-handedly. Little did I expect him to check right away, then proceed with a list of all the reasons why nobody cares. It could have been an enormous bulleted list. It was a full frontal assault, and no sugar coating it at all. If you’d seen me in a bathing suit, then you’d realize I like my sugar about 5 pounds too much. It took me a moment to step back and take the advice and decide what I would use and what I would discard. Continue reading “How to Handle Negative Feedback”

You learned all about it in kindergarten: Thanksgiving started about 400 years ago when the Pilgrims Mayflowered the Plymouth Rocks.

At some point in their quest, they crossed paths with the Indians, who were native non-Indian settlers of the Americas, still referred to as Indians, but settled to be called Native Americans. They made feather hats out of construction paper, glued macaroni to paper plates, and performed a children’s play called Pocahontas. More importantly, they celebrated togetherness and companionship with a giant feast, and by giving things to each other, then thanking each other for the things they gave to each other. Thanks, dude.

As with all relationships, time slowly passed and they quickly got sick of each other. The Indians still thought the Pilgrims were pretty cool, but the Pilgrims thought it would be pretty cool to genocide all of the native Indians. So, they went full-satan and handed out blankets laced with smallpox (don’t click), also known as the Red Plague. Or maybe they didn’t, I don’t know. I wasn’t there. Leave me alone.

Continue reading “Thanks, Really A Lot”