Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog, page 47

The Rose Throne book trailer

Monday Book Recs--Kristine Kathryn Rusch's The Disappeared

I listened to this book on audio over the course of nearly a month, and always found myself thinking about the characters and the dilemmas they faced. I wondered for a while, frankly, why I was still listening. It was a difficult book, full of painful scenes, particularly for a parent of young children. But ultimately, the characters were trying to do what was right in a terrible ethical dilemma. And I think that is pretty much what life is about.

It takes a long time to get into the story because the worldbuilding is very complex. There are multiple alien species with which humans have made alliances and treaties. This means that humans who violate alien laws are subject to alien courts and alien punishments. It could have devolved into a paint by numbers description of what is wrong with the UN, but it never did. There are certainly chances for the reader to make comparisons, but the author never does.

Weeks later, I am still thinking about this book and about what is right and what is wrong when cultures clash. I really want to see the world from inside the aliens, and I assume that is just what the other books in this series do. I am eager to get to them next.

How to Get Your Kid Into a Top School--Part 3

Here is a list of things I think the best schools actually care about:

"Good enough" test scores (on the ACT, I suspect anything above a 32 is good enough. There is no need to continually retake it in an attempt to get a 35 or 36). Since I live in the West, where the ACT is the standard, I don't think I could say accurately what the SAT scores are for an equivalent here? 700's?

"Good enough" grades in school, with an occasional B or C in a class your child did not like—a perfectly normal and reasonable decision to make. I would estimate a 3.8 is good enough on average, but I'm sure it varies. I suspect that a kid who has a "D" in one class and then outstanding grades in all the others is actually doing themselves a favor. That one "D" speaks volumes about the teacher, not about the kid. And it makes for great conversation at an interview. Be prepared to talk about it, not defensively, but with dignity and humility.

Hard classes. The focus on getting good grades in all classes tends to train kids to want to take classes they know they can get an A in. This is an extremely bad habit. Taking hard classes every year and dealing with lower grades or perhaps excelling is going to make your child stand out. On the other hand, there is probably no need to take hard classes that are not interesting to your kid.

AP classes are in my opinion the standard of the best teachers and best curriculum in the national high school world. I have seen even mediocre teachers rise to the challenge of AP material and get kids to pass. The earlier your kids take AP classes, the earlier they are learning the level of college material they will need to study. Passing the tests is less important. It's the class that matters. And no, in my opinion CE classes are not nearly as rigorous.

Real hobbies, without a stamp of approval from the adult world. If your kid is making great youtube videos, don't think that telling them to join the swim team is going to be better. Passion is what schools are looking for. Kids with passion change the world.

A narrow interest in only one field. This may not be what every college is looking for, but there are specialty colleges that may be even better for your child. If you have a child who is great in art and lousy at math and science, you may do that child a disservice to insist on tutoring in math and science. You may be better off finding a great art mentor for your child and then building an incredible portfolio of stunning artwork. If your child is great in one area, it can make up for a lot of deficiencies, at college and in real life.

Teach your kids to write essays with their own voice (as per yesterday's post).

A normal social life. Despite the idea of Tiger Mothering, dictating too much of your child's time to academic or other pursuits can backfire on you. Don't insist that they go into any one particular activity, but encourage their own pursuits. If they have friends over to play Pokemon or Starcraft, that is building community and it will serve them well in college and in life. You may be surprised to discover that these interests may help rather than hurt their chances to get into a top college.

Hard work and focus on what really matters, not jumping through hoops. If your child chooses to take more academic classes instead of the ones more and more ridiculously required for graduation, guess what? It is likely that the college will not care and may not even notice. High school graduation matters a lot less now than it did in the past. Just make sure you are up front about this. You can say your child is partly home-schooled, which they are. All good parents are homeschooling.

Real social awareness. Participating in bogus service projects a thousand times is worth less than one real moment when your child sees someone in need and gives up a coat or a sandwich. It may make you crazy to replace the coat, but I believe that you can tell the difference between kids who see other people and kids who don't.

Hope was not the valedictorian of her school. I hold no grudges against the young man who was, who had a 4.0 and fewer AP classes and got into a less prestigious undergraduate institution. But I also told her not to focus on trying to annoy teachers into giving her the A rather than the A- because it didn't matter. Hope took 12 AP tests in her three years of high school (9th grade is in the junior high in our part of Utah). She also took numerous college classes from the local university while she was enrolled in her junior and senior years.

What about extracurricular activities? Hope was in orchestra and swim team her sophomore year, but she dropped both her junior year because she didn't have time for them. She got a job with her father's company as an intern over the summer and during the school year and learned computer programming in the real world. She became a certified Labview programmer. Was she ultra-focused on computers? Yes, she was. That's what she wants to do with her life? Did she have a patent pending, as she was worried that so many other MIT applicants had? No. She did spend time with the Lego League of another school, using her programming skills because she was genuinely interested in that.

In general, Hope did things she wanted to do. She did not have a long list of service projects she was involved in. She is sincerely dedicated to her church and she worked hard in or out of the leadership there. She was also involved in doing triathlons with our family. She was equally involved in visiting England to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate (two of her heroes from Doctor Who) in Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. She crocheted a doll of David Tennant as Doctor Who and wrote about what crocheting had taught her about her real life. One of the professors who read that essay told Hope that of all the students he had known at MIT, her essay gave him the best picture of her unique personality. Win.

My second daughter, Sage, excelled in music from a young age and I began to have to drive long distances to take her to teachers and various musical opportunities. However, Sage did not enjoy high school, in part because she felt (rightly) that the seniors were always given preferences for parts in plays and other musical opportunities regardless of the talent of younger students. She took several AP classes, ranging from European History to Music Theory, Psychology and Physics. She also spent a lot of time in choral groups and in plays, until she gave up and decided she hated high school midway through her junior year. She then smashed her entire senior year in with the last half of her junior year and graduated with honors at the age of 16. She had a 34 on the ACT and ended up deciding to take a year off before she applied to colleges because she was so exhausted.

She had also written and performed an entire CD of her own music at a professional studio and was pursuing a career as a vocal performer. She had an offer of a lucrative contract with a local talent studio before the funding dried up, and she has worked both at a local restaurant as a waitress and as a copy editor for a local publishing house. She can tell interesting stories about real sexism in the workplace, when the restaurant she worked for hired back a man arrested the day before for inappropriately touching one of the other waitresses. I think that real world experience is invaluable, though I suppose if I could have protected her from it, I would have.

New Youtube Video: Reading The Rose Throne

This is me reading the first meeting between Princess Issa and Duke Kellin. She thinks he is proposing marriage to her, but he isn't. Think Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennet.

Ironmom cover photo shoot

Any thoughts on these as cover material?

author photo shots

Need your vote for which of these to use as my new author photo.

Writing Wednesday: Tips for Writing a College Essay

I suspect that these tips on writing will actually apply to just about all writing. But I am going to preface this by saying that what your sixth grade teacher taught you was the structure of an essay (and which your eighth and tenth grade teachers may have reinforced) is about as accurate as your fourth grade teacher’s rendition of the First Thanksgiving.

If you are thinking of writing something like this:

Thesis paragraph

1st proof

2nd proof

3rd proof

Recap

Please, don’t. Really. Just throw away this idea. Go deep into your mind and expunge it from your thoughts. This has nothing to do with good writing. If you send an essay with this structure in to any college, they are going to immediately put your whole application in a pile reserved for the leftover money for scholarships.

If you haven’t read any professional essays, you may want to get on that. I’m not sure why schools tend to have students read so few non-student, real-life published essays by professional writers, but they don’t. You’re probably going to have to do this research yourself. And if you ask me where to find essays, I am going to shake my head at you. There are essays EVERYWHERE. Any magazine that you get will have essays in it. There are essays in newspapers, on-line, and in collections of essays at the local library. You can hardly read anything without getting a taste of an essay. Google “classic essays” if you need to.

One of the things you may notice about real essays is that they aren’t all the same. They don’t follow a particular format AT ALL. Because essays are actually more a creative writing piece than your teachers want to admit to. Because they don’t know how to teach that. They only know how to teach to the rubric. And to be fair, they have to do that because that’s what NCLB is demanding in order for them to continue in their jobs.

Essays can be long. Like, as long as a novel. Essays can be only a couple paragraphs long. Most colleges will give you a word count to aim at, but of course, you should be doing a lot of pre-writing where you look at your thoughts and choose the best ideas, and then rewrite them into something that will fit the word count that you’re aiming at.

Then you are going to be following some basic rules of writing:

1. Be interesting.

2. Be real.Be yourself.

3. Say something that other people haven’t said before. I know you’re only 17, but please don’t repeat a teacher or famous person unless you have of your own something to add.

4. Tell a story about yourself.

5. Try really hard not to make yourself into the hero who has only good qualities.

6. Show a sense of humor (yes, about yourself.)

7. Contradict accepted wisdom. Yes, even if the college has given you a prompt—feel free to disagree with it strongly. But not superficially.

8. Resist the temptation to use twenty-five cent words. Unless they are truly the only word that will do.

9. Use the right words. Use detailed words that give texture to your writing, that fit with the story you are telling and the world that you live in.

10. Don’t ramble and don’t repeat yourself. Which means don’t—really don’t-finish your essay with that deadly dull wrap-up paragraph your English teachers have drilled into you as correct. By all means, add something new in the final paragraph—make your readers think all the way through.

I’m not going to put links up to essays my kids have written, but let me describe a couple of essays I think really worked.

#1 Oldest daughter who went to MIT wrote an essay about crocheting. Not the kind of hobby you might imagine you would want to highlight for admission to MIT, but that is precisely why it was such a great topic. It was a short essay, but it was about why crocheting mattered to her, how she designed her own patterns, and some of her favorite projects. It gave an insight into her personality, and showed who she really was. Her freshman advisor told her when she got to MIT that he had never read an essay that he thought told him more about one of his incoming students. I called that a win.

#2 Second daughter wrote an essay on why she wanted to have a career in music. This could be a deadly essay. I don’t know why schools ask questions like this, except that they assume that most people will end up utterly failing and that the ones who don’t will really stand out. My daughter wrote about growing up in a family of people who are musically illiterate (which we are). She had to do everything on her own. Her mother (me) was willing to drive her to lessons and pay for them. But guess what? I couldn’t help her at home. I didn’t even listen to music at home. I didn’t have any cultural musical references, which is a huge disadvantage when teachers expect you to have heard certain pieces of music before. It ended up being a great essay, not because she was dissing her family, but because her voice was very clear and so was her determination.

#3 First daughter was asked how her parents would react if she got less than an A in a class at MIT. She told a great story about the first time she got less than an A in high school. Her mother (me) was so proud of her that she took out a $20 bill and handed it to her. Some parents pay their kids for good grades. I pay my kids for daring to take hard classes and then doing their absolute best, even if that doesn’t turn out to earn them an A. She talked about the fact that her parents would scrimp and save on clothes and food, but if any of the kids said they needed something “for school,” there was no budget. School needs were at the top of our priority list. These two short snippets give a perfect picture of her family life growing up, and again, told everything that was necessary about her as a person. And the sense of humor in the essay didn’t hurt, either.

Look, everyone has stories to tell. You high school students applying to college tell stories to your friends all the time. Tell those stories in your essays. Make the readers—the college admissions officers—laugh. Make them feel a real emotion. Make them feel like you are a real person. That’s the point of this exercise. It isn’t to make you look like a super-hero. It isn’t to convince them to give you money, even if you think that’s what it is. It isn’t a sales pitch. It’s a story. You are a novelist, of sorts. All you want to do is make the person reading the essay want to know what happens next.

What People Think Will Get Your Child Into a Top College

I wrote a first draft of this essay about two months ago, but postponed posting it because I was waiting on my second-oldest daughter’s results in her quest to get into Berklee School of Music. Now that I feel justified after two successful quests (my oldest daughter is at MIT), I have decided to share my thoughts on the college application process. This will be a 3-part series over the next several days.

Here is the list of what my children were told in junior high and high school would get them into a good college:

1.4.0 GPA.

2. Good scores on standardized tests like ACT or SAT.

3.Extracurricular activities that showed they were “well-rounded” (including sports and music in particular)

4. Service activities.

5. A college essay written with an elevated style, using lots of twenty-five cent words.

6. CE (concurrent enrollment) classes. (I don’t know how common these are in other states, but in Utah, all the academically minded students are pushed toward these classes, as if it will prove they are college-ready. It is also supposed to help kids graduate earlier from colleges. Ha!)

7. IB (International Baccalaureate).

8. Student government involvement.

9. Focusing on school rather than a job.

10. Graduation from high school with all the requirements that state governments have begun to impose, leaving no wiggle room and no way for principals to exempt academically minded students from classes that are truly a waste of their time.

11. Being valedictorian.

In my opinion, these are all bunk. I kept telling my kids that a completely different set of things mattered to the actual committees of real people (not computers) who were going to look through their applications.I’ll go into that tomorrow.

But I want to talk a little bit about why people think that the above are going to get you into a top college. It’s because of our current obsession with standardized tests and the need to quantize everything. Because we imagine that our schools can be given a score that says something about how much learning is going on, we have begun to imagine that students can also be given a score to decide how valuable they would be at certain colleges.

Parents, teachers, and students think that everything can be distilled into a “formula.” And perhaps in some sense, there are schools who give points for each item in a checklist, and hand out acceptances and scholarships that way. It may be true that the best schools have done this on occasion, in order to justify admitting who they admit.

But my guess is that the points given are almost always used as a justification for admitting the students who they want to admit, rather than the other way around. I think that the best schools (Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Stanford, Berkley, Yale, and others) have become quite canny about being gamed as a system and have learned how to see past the paper student.

One way they’ve tried to do this is by having interviews with students. Both of my daughters went through these interviews, one with an officer sent to our state and one after we flew her to the college of her choice. You can imagine the stress that an interview like this causes for people who want a checklist. They want to be able to prepare answers for all the questions they might be asked. And with my oldest daughter, we did do some mock interviews at home to help her know what to expect. I’m not sure these mock interviews were of any use at all. Because the interviewers are purposely trying to get past the preparation and to the real person.

Padding your application with lots of extracurricular activities that are utterly meaningless to your child is not going to make a bit of difference in an interview like this. Nor do service activities that are unrelated or that don’t matter to your child. The best schools want real children, not academic Pinnochios who have no idea what to do when they get to college and no longer have Mommy and Daddy telling them what to do. They also want students who accept that they may not get an “A” in every class and who can accept less than perfection and move on with life, without harassing teachers into giving them better grades than the ones they earned.

I have always told my children that I wasn’t paying for college because they were perfectly capable of getting good enough grades to get into a state college with a full-ride scholarship. I have said many times that I didn’t believe that the truly expensive schools were worth the money. I also didn’t believe that they would make any effort to help middle class kids financially. I have been happily proven to be wrong in this.

MIT, where my oldest daughter is, claims to accept students need-blind, and then make sure everyone accepted has the means to go. They really did this for us. My daughter now works part-time and pays for the small amount of tuition she was asked to pay, and then earns enough for her own room and board on the side. Berklee School of Music does not make the same guarantee, but it looks as if my second daughter will manage the tuition portion and room and board if she is also willing to work part-time and through the summer. I believe that this will be good for her, and that it will help her to value her education more.

It isn’t impossible to get into the top schools in the country and it isn’t impossible to get a scholarship for them. But it isn’t by following the rules above that are so frequently handed out as the answers. It’s both more complicated than that, and more simple.The one mistake, if I can call it that, that I feel my two daughters both made, was in setting their sights for one particular school and not making broad enough application. I’m not sure I believe that you can will yourself into one specific school. It can be painful if you don’t get into your top choice if your only other option is the sure-pick your mother made you apply to, so you would definitely get in somewhere.

That said, it can be expensive to apply to ten different universities at $100 each, not to mention the expense of sending scores to all those schools and the energy expenditure in writing different essays for each of them. So maybe some middle ground would be useful to find. I haven’t done a great job of that so far.

Tune in tomorrow for more.

Friday Feminism: Female Conversation

At my Cross-Fit class, the normal group is about 8 women and 2 men. This means that sometimes the conversation tends to be about the topics the women want to chat about. It’s an interesting situation, because most of the time when you’re in mixed company, you get women making sure that they don’t have female conversations in front of men. But here, the men were simply ignored and we had our chat about childbirth.

For women who have been through childbirth, it is an intense experience and sharing stories of triumph through it can work as quick bonding. I know that for teenage girls it can feel intimidating and even horrifying to hear about the details. But in some ways, childbirth is like boot camp for women and talking about how bad it is just gets you more cred for surviving it.

A lot of men who get trapped in these conversations become annoyed or worse than that, verbally defensive. They say “that’s gross” or “I really don’t want to hear about this,” and seem to want to shut the conversation down. I was glad that didn’t happen here. The men seemed perfectly happy to listen and felt no need to participate.

What I liked about this is that women are so often trapped in male conversations and yet we often feel like we don’t have the right to say that we don’t want to listen to men talk about women’s bodies they appreciate or the latest football scores (if you’re a woman who doesn’t care about football, for instance). Men, on the other hand, seem entitled to police women’s conversations. Because it’s about power, of course.

I remember distinctly having a conversation with a friend about shopping. We were talking about which stores had the best prices on which items. Her husband was really frustrated by the conversation, which to his mind was extremely boring, and asked us to move on to something else. Which we did! But afterward, I was angry at myself and at him. Just because something was boring to him doesn’t mean that the conversation has no value. Shopping can be seen as trivial and superficial, but for women in traditional marriages, shopping is also about power.

I think it’s one thing to throw up your hands and just exit a conversation you are not interested in. It’s something else altogether when you tell the people having the conversation that they shouldn’t be having it because it is uninteresting to you.

Unrequited Love

On Unrequited Love, Martha Jones and the 10th Doctor, and Guy of Gisborne in Robin Hood. Also, new hair cut and glasses!