I sometimes wonder why so much of what is considered “good literature” for ourselves and for students has to be dark, depressing, or unhappy. I’m not against stories in which something bad happens, but knowing that bad news seizes and clings, while good news slides right off us, I like to prime myself with uplifting […]
What Scares You? For Anna, it’s driving. Watch her learn to use imagination to make it less scary:
In this video, Anna takes her first step in building resilience… Click on the Photo above to watch the video. Or go to youtube.
If a young adult you know is in the bottom 80% of the class, you may have been told that she is “an underachiever” (a polite way of saying lazy or dumb). Ask yourself, “Underachiever compared to what?” Compared to the narrowly-defined, standardized measures of school performance? Or compared to the abilities that will help […]
Successful. Entrepreneur. Prime Minister. Nobel Prize Winner. Scientist. Leader. What words come to mind when you think of people described by this list? Underachievers? Learning disabled? Unmotivated? These probably weren’t your first thoughts, but many people with these job titles weren’t good students. In fact, A BBC-study found that a “significant majority” of self-made millionaires […]
The other day, 20-year-old Andy said to me, “I just don’t know what I want to do with my life, and I worry that I’m not going to get a good job when I graduate.” In the past year, I have heard this concern so many times from students that I decided to write… An […]
With all the focus on grades and scores, let’s take that to the nth degree. IF your child suddenly does a 180 and gets an A+ in every class between now and the end of college AND because he got perfect SAT scores, he went to Harvard, now what? “The world is his oyster,” you […]
This is the first episode in a new video series: how to create positive change and resilience in students. In this clip: 18-year-old Anna doesn’t like school, science or textbooks. She wants to motivate herself to finish high school. One step you can take with someone who doesn’t like school is to identify ways s/he […]