Series for the Week: Six ways to get the best education money can buy...without so much money.
1. Aptitude
2. Motivation
3. Attitude
4. Resources
5. Mentor
6. Portfolio
ONE-Understand your personal aptitude. Be a sponge in the areas of your strengths. Flex your strengths tirelessly. This sets the stage for play and creativity in your personal learning style.
Every day, go to the Offical SAT Question for the day. (SAT=Scholastic APTITUDE Test) See the archives at Cool Rocket School Tutor for some past articles relating to these questions. See notes about strategies for the Dec 26th and 27th questions here. The post is today, December 27th and has the title 'Aptitude.'
Notice how using these ways of 'solving' the questions applies to many more types of questions--giving you an aptitude boost in how to look at the problem and move to solving quickly and accurately. Be your own guide to using a multi-sensory approach to learn anything.
If you love to play sports, use kinesthetic approaches to learning. If you love to watch sports, make up charts, analyses, and games yourself using the concepts of the games.
If you favor mathematics, mysteries, or puzzles--make logic, including debate and argument, a cornerstone in your personal approach to life. Consider what follows, logically, when you consider the facts.
If you love music, include background music appropriate to your slideshows to study vocabulary, terminology, and any type of memory work--from presentations to multiplication tables to working with square roots.
If you like to draw, mix in architectural type drawing in your math study or characters, even animated versions, in your literature study.
Remember that the more areas of aptitude you have, the better.
When I taught Beowulf to two high school seniors, one of them spontaneously drew the warrior in chalk on the blackboard. His drawing literally 'drew us'--the teacher and some of my younger students--into a great discussion with this senior about the character of Beowulf and about the monster in the ancient story, believed to be the first one written in Old English.
You can make connections all of the time--especially if you are making slideshows, designing brochures about how to fix a flat tire, how to make a pizza, or how to compose a brochure!
If you recognize, for yourself, the way to use a multi-sensory approach, you will be providing yourself with the most expensive type of individualized educational experience.
Here's how to do this: Think of ways to learn more about what you are studying using all of your senses--your hearing, your vision, your physical touch, your sense of smell, your sense of taste.
Appraisers often rub pearls against their teeth to feel whether the pearl is rough, the sign that it is not a manufactured pearl, that it is real. The test is a combination of texture and taste, and not a safe one either. You do not need to taste things that could be dangerous or germ-covered to use this method of learning. You can appreciate what happens in chemical fusions of foods in a clean environment. You can learn about yeast while making bread for pizza crust, and about pasturization in relation to milk--in person at a local dairy--or on line. Plants teach us much about science and economics--from genetics to dependence on imports.Two books that are great for reading portions to get chunks of understanding and food for thought: the classic Silent Spring by Rachel Carson and the family-friendly Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.
Make posters, photographs, maps, charts, and images on PowerPoint displays about terminology, vocabulary, and different languages. Read the descriptions on the sides of everything; and, then, read some of the parallel translations in other languages.
For the rest of your life, keep thinking: What is a multi-sensory approach? How can I use visual assistance? What music or voice (pronunciation of vocabulary) helps to learn what I am studying? What shapes help me to learn? What forms can I make with other textures to teach and to learn these concepts? How can I use vision, sight, hearing, touch, smell to understand and to remember?
Make cards, maps, mobiles, and business plans.
Make powerpoint displays of vocabulary words, adding google images for every word; make board games about what you are studying--then translate at least part of the game into a computer version. Analyze lyrics from music you like to find poetic devices (repetition, rhyme, rhythm, beat, tone, similes, metaphors, hyperbole, understatement, symbolism, character, plot, suspense. Pretend you are teaching to a fifth grader and make an A-Z book with illustrations about literary terms: A is for allusion. English teachers love for you to use allusions to literature in your writing.
Make brochures teaching someone else how to do things: How to cook a pizza, how to fix a bike wheel, how to care for a turtle, how to begin an exercise program, how to make a brochure!
Come back tomorrow for links about NUMBER ONE: APTITUDE. Then, we will continue to explore the way to have an expensive education without paying money you don't have. When we get to 'resources,' we will cover ways to choose when to go ahead and pay for a tutor or a private school for a particular period or for a particular purpose.
If you cannot pay or wish to figure out a way to get the guidance to keep you on track for college, you will need to research some of the standards that private schools use to incorporate the best for their clients. Sometimes the way to do this is to take one type of course with a particular school or instructor, and this should be the area of your greatest aptitude. That work will transcend the confines of a particular area and shine on your life!
See you tomorrow. judiethcarol and rocketcat
