Every year, I have students bring me that essay --the incredibly heartfelt one-- about their trip into the woods, or up a mountain. Some of these students are accomplished hikers, some total, struggling newbies. 97% of the time there are blisters in these essays. It's hard to explain to the writer that this rubs a blister in the admissions readers. But I have to try. Here's why: what you experience on the mountain top or in the mosquito-thick woods is likely very similar to what every other person who ever hiked experienced: irritation, discomfort, transcendence, appreciation, disappointment. Often, you leave with gratitude, renewed perspective. It's also very likely those two last mental states are quite short lived. That essay doesn't translate to real life! Say: until someone double-crosses you at school, or you drink soured milk your sibling put back in the fridge, or you can't get a new bus pass and you have to walk somewhere in the sheeting urban rain, or...the list of irritating things in everyday, non-hiking life that ask you to face your inner self goes on and on. Where are the woods then? Where are all those blisters and mosquitos and the high cloud vista of the craggy peaks? Admissions offers have heard that essay too many times The admissions readers have heard your story 10000000 times, maybe literally. They know you mean it-- but everyone does. They also know, because they have lived a little longer than you-- that those take-aways are often temporary. So they are looking for something more. Sorry to say: Not the cliched journey with its predictable life-lesson. So what are you to do, if that essay is burning a hole in your mind, feels like THE ONE? Find a unique angle on that essay You need to dig much, much deeper into your experience. Beyond even those aggravating, debilitating blisters that dominated your psyche at the time. Last year, I worked with a student whose essay took a long time to find itself, but when it Continue Reading …
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Parents, Don’t Lose it Over the Essay
Last year I was a contributor at TeenLife Mag and got to offer some advice on one of my favorite subjects: relationships. In particular, how parents and kids can avoid losing it over the college essay. I'm a parent and step-parent now, and I really get how tricky it can be. We all need reminders that our relationship with our kid is faaaaar more important than anything we might want for them to accomplish. It doesn't always feel that way-- when our kids don't want our input. It doesn't always feel that way-- when our kids act annoyed that we parents seem so focused on a deadline. It doesn't always feel that way-- when we parents worry about the future. It doesn't always feel that way-- when we parents think our kid might be too focused, too stressed, and we want them to take a breather. An Interactive Talk For Parents (Let's Not Lose our Shiz!) If you're local to Brooklyn, you can come to an interactive talk at Bee Tutored-- register here. If you're not local, we can book a phone session. This might be the most important thing I have to offer, and that you have to offer: love, love, love. It looks different in every family system, just like every family looks different. I'll offer tools to help your inner world when the outer world is just a tad nutty. Please come be part of the conversation! We can take back the college essay! Continue Reading …
Let’s Not be Hypocrites about Learning Process vs Outcome
Decision Day marks the end point of the college application process, when high school seniors let colleges know where they are heading. It's not uncomplicated, though. This moment is the outcome and fruit of so much striving, and an event on which we've pinned a heck of a lot of hope. "Miss, I just want to hide in a corner," one student told me. And he was happy, proud, about where he was admitted. A flurry of articles are published around now about how to help seniors get anything out of the remainder of the school year. One NYT's article focused on where we lose sight of the learning process along the way and how to help seniors reinvest in themselves. Or maybe reinvent themselves, and how they think about themselves. Yes, We Could ALL Value Process More In theory, I totally agree. One of the major issues we face in education is that the learning process is not necessarily valued for itself, but only for where it might lead. That's capitalism right there, friends. But beyond that, from pre-K applications all the way to college applications, we're always telling our students to keep their eyes on the horizon- what's NEXT? Where -or what--will this get you? But how about: where am I right now? What's of value right now? What if there is more than the future that we're totally missing out on? Take, for example, my students. My middle school students at The TEAK Fellowship are some of the brightest in their public school classes. They have joined a fellowship that invests in them as future leaders, armed with the "best education money can buy." (And their financial aid packages subsidize the cost). But there is a(nother) cost: these students have, for themselves and their families, been trained to think far into the future. Everything they do is for something that comes later, hopefully. But what if you get hit by a bus? The value of "later" evaporates. Do we understand what "rewarding" really feels like? So why is it so Continue Reading …
Stubbing your toe, and getting past The Obvious
I broke my pinky toe this week. What I stubbed it on should have been obvious. I mean, a plastic tub of legos, taking up half the hallway? That my three year-old left there, during his righteous fit? What's more obvious? That's why I don't have a good story to tell you, which is annoying. Pay Attention--starting with the obvious! But my attention was elsewhere. It was past 9PM, and I was on my own righteous mission: to get my older kids to clean up after themselves in the kitchen while the baby meowed from the bedroom. (The three year old harumph-ed along beside me to chide his big brothers.) The minute I felt my toe make contact, I knew I had broken it. Your brain gains a momentary crater where it used to sense a comfortably in-tact body part. In my intero-ception, the damage was obvious. WHAT HAPPENED?, the three year old alarmist said, when he heard my expletives reserved for those choice toe moments. I BROKE MY TOE ON YOUR LEGOS! I half-yelled, because the obvious works better in ALL CAPS. The thing is, when you stub or break your toe, it's almost always on something that's right in front of your face, and could have been avoided. It's not like the walls switch around their location to mess with you and bait your appendages (except in Alice in Wonderland. Or when you're chronically exhausted). Look at the story you're telling yourself... From the site of injury, I started building a story-- sound familiar? "Tomorrow is going to suck...so is the next day...Why did I not put that away?" I also thought: dang, this would be a lot more acceptable if I had a good story to tell. Then I realized, a good story can start with the obvious, it just can't stop there. Moving beyond what's obvious What if I looked more closely at why we don't do what we know we should? Or examined the structure of the foot, the function of toes? What if I wrote about the evolution of emotion, studied my three-year old? The fits he has over things the Continue Reading …
Power of mixing
When stakes are high in writing (like, say, is true for the college essay) we can forget how much joy there is in mixing unlikely things together. This is a form of play young children know well, and shed reluctantly. Only after enough adults have said, "You can't do X with Y!" a la "You can't put a POTATO on the TRAIN TRACK!" does the kid eventually "get it" = the adult world is full of arbitrary rules, and really missing out on the power of mixing up. We need our poets to keep our language lively This morning, the power of mixing tackled me from the first lines of Terence Hayes's poem "When James Baldwin & Audre Lorde each lend Stevie Wonder an eyeball/ he immediately contends with gravity, falling either to his knees/or flat on His luminous face." I mean, lend an eyeball? Thanks, guys. We know right away we're in the presence of a player. In mixing surprise with pragmatism, absurdity with serious verbs (lend...contends...falling), Terence says: get in on this, it's going to be good. I'm not going to give you what you expect, because you don't want me to. And did you notice the rock stars in my poem? Be the kind of player who mixes meanings Speaking of players; There were plenty of the other kind of player in my high school and college (both elite institutions, GULP!), the sort who slept with girls and then thought nothing of ranking those experiences on a scale of crap to Cardi B the next morning in public lounges. The only reason those guys were fun to be around was the same reason anyone wound up the topic of their conversation: they kept it light, everything, even themselves, was a joke. I mention them because they were mean: but the player of words is not mean, though perhaps slicing. The poet players are truth-chasers. When Terence plays, we have to play along. The poem is full of nouns, and potential white-people repellent. Nods at lyrics and artistic endeavors, "inner visions" of Wonder are now populated (purpled!) with Continue Reading …
Everything That Happens to You & Prompts
My writing students complained the other day about certain canned responses to their disappointments: Well-meaning folks assured them, "Everything that happens to you is for a reason!" I asked them to raise hands if they agreed or not with this statement. 75% said they disagreed. I'm their writing teacher, and find cliches born of other people's discomfort with our discomfort hard to stomach too. But I suggested a revision: what if you said to them (and yourself), "Everything that happens to you...is for art?" A common problem: Where can I say how I really feel? At a seder this weekend, an older female guest in a glow-worm white jacket confided in me, "We're about to lose our family home. My husband got forced out of his work two years ago. I'm so sad--'" she lowered her voice, "but no one really wants to hear about it." I am always interested in what's really going on for people, and as a result, even strangers often open up for me. I felt for her, what felt like losing her roots. And she was right: it was hard to elicit the empathy she really needed. Much worse things were happening to people everywhere...but so what? This was her grief. She should be able to find an ear for it. My philosophy: Everything That Happens to You Has a Home in Your Art I couldn't tell her this, then, nor did I know if she ever wrote, but we could say: Every single thing that happens to you has a home in your art. That annoying comment your teacher made about your test. That t-shirt you won at the fair. The way your mom looks at you when you get home late. The family home you lost. The cough that wouldn't go away. The school you didn't get into. The kid you hope to have. It doesn't matter what it is: art can handle it. Art will hold it. Art gives you a place to hold it and understand it. In my intro to personal essay class, "Word UP," I ask my students to call out, "Thank you, Life, for giving me my material!" It's goofy but accurate and it never hurts to be Continue Reading …