4 Keys to College Admissions Success

Unlocking the Gate to the Right College for Your Teen

Pamela Donnelly

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630472122
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Higher Education

The #1 bestselling author and nationally recognized education specialist "helps parents like you and me optimize the futures of our sons and daughters" (Larry King). Parenting teenagers is hard enough without feeling locked out of knowing how to apply to and pay for college. With the right information to turn the key, moms and dads can open the gate so their sons and daughters enter successfully into the futures they deserve. Join Pamela Donnelly—founder and CEO of GATE College System—in her humorous, informative trainings on the four mission-critical strategies you must implement in order to position your teen for independence, not codependence. "This book needs to be on the shelves of every library and high school in America." —Larry King "As a mother of two, I can only imagine the trepidation that lies ahead when the time comes for me to help my daughters navigate their journey into college. When it does, there is no one I trust more than Pamela Donnelly to be our guide. Not only does she offer solid strategies and important information, but her intuition as a mother and her deep heart are invaluable." —Marcia Cross, professional actress ( Desperate Housewives, Melrose Place )/mom "Colleges are looking for well-rounded, fully dimensional human beings with the skills and knowledge outlined here. Pamela Donnelly provides invaluable guidance, which she has earned the old-fashioned way. Save yourself a steep learning curve by tapping into her wealth of knowledge." —Randall Balmer, PhD, Ivy League professor (Columbia, Dartmouth, Yale)

Key #1

COGNITIVE
INDEPENDENCE

Chapter 1

CHANGES

It takes courage to grow up and become who you really are.

—E. E. Cummings

If we were to try to summarize the entirety of the teenage experience, we could boil it down to one word: change. Physical changes are the most apparent, but others abound. Voices change. Attitudes change. Preferences change. And, necessarily, a parent’s relationship to his or her teenager must change as well. Navigating these changes from grade 7 onward means that by the time most folks reach the college applications process, the family dynamic has radically shifted.

These next several chapters provide the first and most obvious key as you prepare them for college—unlocking your teen’s independence as a thinker. Seek to encourage creativity in the way they approach what they are learning. Help them to see past the mere conformity of this thing we reductively call “school,” and celebrate them as they bring something new to the table beyond memorization and high test scores. The dialogue by the time they are approaching or in high school needs to truly ratchet up a notch. Here’s how.

Promote Question-Asking, Not Just Answering

Many of us who now parent teenagers remember a certain TV ad well—the egg in the sizzling hot pan. “This is your brain,” the voiceover explained. An image of a pristine raw egg in the shell filled the screen. “This is your brain on drugs,” we were told, as the egg was cracked and spilled into the heat that would change it. Let’s extrapolate this vivid image as we consider the gaps between teens and adults.

If we could imagine a similar ad, it might go something like this: “This is your brain,” showing a multi-cloverleaf interchange in a major US city with cars zooming along in complex patterns. “This is your teenager’s brain.” Image? A large orange Under Construction sign over an incomplete series of roads. This image underscores perhaps the single most important component of developing academic excellence: possessing enough innate curiosity to ask questions to lead to one’s own unique point of contact with the material. There is no highway to knowledge, only trails each student must blaze alone.

Curiosity hasn’t received good press over the centuries, but an active academic mind gives birth to new perspectives. Students today need to be like curious cats or they risk lazing around passively, being fed predigested bits of meat and dutifully regurgitating upon command. Although the mania for standardized testing offers predetermined answers residing between answers A and E, rarely does actual wisdom hide there.

Quest for the Right Questions

Confusion is a word we have invented for an order which is not yet understood.

—Henry Miller

The tricky thing about seeking answers to questions is in knowing the right ones to ask. According to many great writers throughout the ages, it is critical that people not only seek answers to the questions they are able to think of to ask, but also to consider the very real possibility that deeper, more meaningful questions exist. Some of these may not even be on their radar yet. Henry Miller, for instance, lived a decade of his life abroad, inspiring some of his greatest work. People often have to wander far from the familiar to discover their potential, whether that travel is geographic or metaphorical.

This means allowing for the mystical implications of the unknown (and unknowable) to be overtly incorporated into our discussions with our teenagers. Letting them see that we too have traveled far, wrestled with angels and demons, and had to seek and knock before finding and entering, can reposition us not as penultimate sources of wisdom but rather fellow-journeymen through life.

An example of this commonly arrives in the mid-high school years, when students ask their parents what they think they should select as a major for college. This question seems to beg a finite list of possibilities, and indeed there are limits to the actual majors various universities will offer them. But dig a little deeper for the question embedded inside the question, and you will find layer upon layer of stratified inquiries: How should I be positioning myself for future career success? What financial independence can you help me attain through my academic choices? And perhaps most basic (yet paradoxically elusive) of all: what is my purpose in life?

Another example of a question masking larger inquiries is the famous teen lament, “What’s the point?” Oftentimes, a discouraged high schooler—whether from a friendship gone awry or a failed exam—will spiral at what seems like a radical pace to the brink of desperation. When they ask questions like, “why should I care?” or “why does it even matter?” it is important for parents to move the conversation to physical action and engagement with the outside world. In truth, any human being—whether child, adult, or mercilessly straddling between the two—can be bitten by the despair bug.

Get them moving, get them talking, and redirect the conversation. What is the core of the matter? A little gentle probing usually reveals confusion about their appropriate role in one area of their lives or another. Hold emotional space; stand guard while helping them process the puzzles of life. Sometimes they don’t need a solution anyway, they just need an ear, a shoulder, and room to ponder. Scratch your head with them if you really don’t know. Nothing draws a teen closer to their parent than seeing the true humility of the human condition on display. Put away the super-hero cape. You’re not fooling anyone anyway, and maintaining honesty will help your teen much more than feigning omniscience.

Guide Them toward Bloom’s Taxonomy

The key to true cognitive independence paradoxically requires teens to see through the guise of the education system as it is currently organized. The corporate necessities of federal dollars, state mandates and local policies can all boil down to a race to nowhere, with students gathering information without necessarily benefitting from the process. They need help connecting the dots of the “what” and the “why.”

In other words, it’s not just that they know what happened in the Civil War, but why it matters, and by extension what its implications are for other situations and information they have considered. No, they probably won’t be able to escape the dreaded standardized tests that have the current education system in a stranglehold, but at least we can help them resurrect some joy in their learning process.

Bloom’s Taxonomy is a really helpful concept for students to know, as it provides a way of thinking about subject matter that describes levels of thought as resembling something like a staircase. Each stair describes a new level of comprehension of the material. All thinking, writing, and analysis are not the same.

Down on the lowest step is the “what?” As in: “What is being taught?” It’s important to understand what is being taught, for instance to be able to regurgitate the plot of a novel or play. In math, the ‘what’ would be something like being able to correctly restate the Pythagorean Theorem. As we go up the staircase of understanding, though, it’s not enough just to know the ‘what’. In history class, for example, we want to understand not just who does things, when they happen, and what is happening. On a higher level we want our teens to understand how things are happening.

“How” is a major question that separates the average student from the rock star. “How” demands an elevated way of thinking about complex things. How are the structures that that author is using conveying his or her theme and character development? Being able to analyze those sorts of inquiries is crucial for ambitious thinkers. With almost x-ray vision, look at each new concept you see as if it were the blueprint of a house. How is it structured?

Then, on an even more elevated level (careful not to get a nosebleed way up here in the stratosphere) we can encourage our students to look at “why.” Why is the theme what it is? The “why” is, in some cases, a rhetorical question, but it’s tremendously thought provoking to ponder the “why” in all academic endeavors. Here’s an example: why are all American students taught about the Civil War?

The Spielberg movie Lincoln boasts powerful performances by Daniel Day Lewis and Sally Field, but the real gem was a script that knew to ask the “why.” Maybe that’s why audiences and critics loved it so much. A topic we’ve all heard about so much it could have been boring, came to life. It’s interesting that so many students can tell you “what” happened in the Civil War, but few can explain the “how.”

How did the 13th amendment get passed? And, more importantly, why? In the film, Lincoln’s relationship to his youngest son and his son’s compassion for the African American people that were living under slavery were keys to answering this question of “why.” The “why” trumps the “what” every time, and you will find that’s true in most academic classes. Yes, you have to know the “what” first, but for heaven’s sake don’t let your teen just plop down on the bottom step and take a nap. Have them start climbing.

College admissions staff members vet applicants. They seek essays written by students who have thoughtfully climbed those stairs. As the competition gets more and more challenging year by year, merely understanding the “what” (and “where” and “when”) is not going to cut it. Ask them how. How is that theory put together in math? How did things develop at a particular time in history? And then, when they’re really ready for the big leagues, ask the most important question of all: “Why?”

Teach Academic Advocacy

Not only do parents need to encourage their teens to be questions askers within the classroom environment, but they need to encourage their teens to advocate for themselves with teachers, administrators, and even bosses at work with assertiveness and charm. By learning to be proactive now, they develop skills that will help them throughout their lives. Teens who never learn this skill are hindered indeed. How can you help?

• Role play scenes with you as the teacher and them asking for extra-credit options after class.

• Help them plan a series of specific questions for a one-on-one conference that they set up for themselves (hint: teachers love it when these are not just about raising grades, but about expressing interest in the material and a desire to learn more through newly recommended books, articles, etc.).

• Help them to understand the fine line between appropriate subordination with a boss and being too fearful to speak up about concerns in the workplace.

• Brainstorm other opportunities with coaches, pastors, and other adults to find and showcase their voice, especially in situations where disagreement or conflict could arise.

Until teens become able to self-advocate in a world of adults, they will remain complicit or inadvertently silenced and disempowered. The time to help them practice these crucial skill sets is before they need them in college.

Raise Politically Conscious Teens

Parents should aim to get their kids involved in active American citizenship long before they turn 18. Although some colleges tend to lean more left or right, few espouse an ostrich approach to current events. Get them reading the news—even if just on Sundays or online. Help them notice the subjective slant of various news organizations. Ask them if they understand why Al Gore didn’t become president in 2000 despite winning the popular vote. By the time your son or daughter is of voting age, several years may have passed since they had government as part of their coursework at school. Help them remember, or teach them for the first time, how the Electoral College, caucuses, delegates, and other key factors work together in an American election. Depending on the intended major, some college admissions interviews may veer toward political topics. Be sure they’re aware.

As long as you and other key adults in their lives are engaged in the political process, they are more likely to follow suit. From infancy to 4th grade, I raised my firstborn in Manhattan. I vividly remember walking with her from our brownstone on West 88th Street on the Upper West Side to a church by the horse stables at Claremont on West 89th. The voting volunteers would often make jokes about the “little voter” and allow her to come into the booth with me. I would show her the index card on which I’d written my selected candidates and votes for resolutions in preparation to pull those cool levers she liked.

These days my firstborn isn’t politically active in an identical way to me, but I can tell you that around the time of Occupy Wall Street she was involved in a protest that shook me to my core. My precious little girl, who had so proudly worn her Mommy’s “I Voted” red, white, and blue sticker each election in New York City, was shoved to the concrete by a police officer when she and a group of her peers were peacefully protesting in Chapel Hill, much to my horror. It was on the evening news.

Thank goodness she wasn’t injured, but I have to believe that knowing she had the right to her voice, to be heard even in protest, came in some measure from seeing her mother active politically throughout her young life. Although it was a terrifying experience for me as a mother, I confess that I felt proud. She has never been a “monkey see, monkey do” kind of person, but if she learned not to stay silent by watching me express my voice, all I can say is hooray.

There is an important distinction between discussing political matters with a teen and forcing them to think the way we do. Just like they have the right to determine their own faith walk, or lack thereof (see Key #4, Spiritual Independence, later), they also have the right to join a different political party or see cultural issues through a unique lens. If you really want to anger or alienate them, be a bully.

Watching debates, press conferences, and inaugural speeches with your teen provides a great opportunity to share in the public discourse. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction: How to Not Screw It Up
• Key #1—Cognitive Independence
• Key #2—Emotional Independence
• Key #3—Physical Independence
• Key #4—Spiritual Independence
• Conclusion: Euphoria
• Addendum 1 Is College Necessary for Success Today?
• Addendum 2 Education Reform
• Addendum 3 A Call to Action