http://blog.parentella.com/2010/10-tedx-talks-that-teachers-should-watch/

Sitting at dinner with my best friends, I observe a classic family of four — son, daughter, mother, father— all four texting frantically, looking up every so often only to mumble the obligatory “How was your day?” to the group. Later, I come home and log onto Facebook only to find that my ex-babysitter, now a mom of three, has encroached upon my newsfeed yet again. She’s taken the whole technology mom thing a little too far and is keeping the world fully updated, all the way down to her son’s latest diaper change. This technology obsession is not acceptable.

Now I’m not just an on-looker. If Blackberry messaging were an Olympic sport, I could undoubtedly get a bronze medal for my typing speed and efficient response time. But I realize that the technology monster is lurking behind me each and every time that I sit in a snooze-fest class, yearning to check my buzzing Blackberry. Sometimes, I just want to throw my cell phone out the window, unplug my computer chords and go back to the days of getting information from text books, not Mac Books.
Being the realist that I am, I know that our society is far too addicted to the neon and glitz of the technology craze to suddenly disband all iphones and obliterate all Facebook and Twitter accounts; texting and Internet use have become our major vices. A recent article in the Sun-Sentinel gave some ideal rules for family survival in the technological era; here are my own revised rules for the teenagers of the house!

1. Do not post any secrets on Facebook!
My friend once uploaded a photo from an excursion to our local yogurt shop; of course, she failed to ask her parents’ permission before leaving on said yogurt outing, and the photo led to three solid weeks of grounding. Moral of the story, Facebook and sites like it are public and, therefore, you never know who is watching you.

2. Please don’t cyber bully!
The click of a mouse can lead to a world of emotional pain for a peer! And bullying a peer online only makes the bully appear lackluster in the confidence department. If you see someone being bullied online, tell a trusted adult or try to keep the situation from spiraling into a huge problem.

3. Comply with the rules your parents make about social networking and technology use.
I know, I know. It’s a little absurd for your parents to limit your computer usage to one hour a day, and the 3000 text monthly plan is totally irrational, but in the long run, you will actually accomplish a ton more schoolwork and thus have a ton more face time with your friends if you don’t sit in front of the computer like a blob all day. There’s a method to your parents’ madness.

My junior year of high school has come to a whirring end, yet the comfortable feeling of summer sun on my face ceases to melt away my school year stresses. As I lounge on the beach with my senior-to-be colleagues, the opaque shielding of an AP-loaded education keeps me from chit-chatting about nothing and feeling totally carefree. As a beach read, Gossip Girl has been replaced by Camus. I’m forever an AP nerd.

Let’s be realistic. I’m forever a drama queen, too. Where my year was comprised of US history cram sessions and monotonous essay readings in the “Norton Reader”, I managed to find time for friendship, leadership, and of course, Glee watching. My meager two AP courses were a cakewalk in comparison to the three or four that many of my friends conquered. And my mere four all-nighters are nothing when I juxtapose them to the nonexistent sleep schedules of my AP Calculus-obsessing acquaintances.

“There were a lot of nights where I did not go to bed until 3 am,” incoming Cypress Bay senior, Max Kushner, informed me despairingly. Max took four AP courses on the block scheduling system while balancing dual-enrollment at Broward College this past semester. The stress that APs place upon the shoulders of students today is overwhelming and detrimental to our health. Kira Helman, a shining survivor of four AP classes, informed me that stress and lack of sleep from her workload led her to become “irritable, lethargic, and stressed.” With three to four hours of sleep nightly and mounds of homework to plow through, Kira tells me, “I got headaches, dark circles under my eyes, a decreased appetite, and a caffeine addiction.” Similar conditions for fellow AP scholar, Joelle Garcia, led her pediatrician to lecture her sternly on the evils of “over-doing it” in school.

AP courses are quite the Catch-22. Health and social life are put into jeopardy, yet an extra AP is the GPA inflation device that will save a student from drowning in the dream school admissions office. And despite late nights and meltdowns, many teens (including myself) find the experience gained from Advanced Placement classes to be worth the while. In theory, AP classes are both vital and necessary for the success of students. “AP English was life-changing for me,” Garcia claims. And Kushner feels that being consumed by AP’s was worth his while because, as he puts it, “I earned college credits, surrounded myself with intellectual people, (and) was challenged to think outside the box.” On another note, Helman says, “I spread myself too thin. While I did achieve academic success, I feel that I would have been a lot healthier and happier had I only taken one or two (AP courses) as opposed to four.”

My advice? APs are inevitable. Therefore, you may as well take higher level courses in areas of interest. And by this I mean, don’t overload your schedule just to inflate a GPA; take the Advanced Placement courses that you won’t mind devoting a good chunk of your year to. And don’t get too overwhelmed. You will survive your schedule!

By: Alli Weiss

2. Read for clues!
Don’t just skim, but read with care to see what information supports the blank.

3. Read with your pencil!
Circle the words, colons, dashes, commas that provide a trail of clues. Words like ‘but’, ‘however’, and ‘although’ (there are others, too) signal a u-turn in the principal idea that the sentence contains. Conjunctions like ‘and’ and ‘so’ indicate no change in the principal idea.

4. Positively or Negatively Charged?
Write a plus or minus sign to show the ‘value’ of the word you’re searching for—does it have negative or positive connotations?

5. With your pencil, connect a key word or phrase to the blank(s)
The definition(s) of the word(s) you’re after are often enough right there in front of your nose, printed in black and white in the “stem sentence” (the stem sentence is another way of saying the question sentence with the blank(s)). Your pencil connection (line or arrow) calls out connections and clarifies your search for the answer.

6. PREDICT using your own word or phrase
If you already have an arrow from a word or words in the sentence, that’s enough of a prediction. If not, then write a simple word that captures the ‘charge’

7. NOW, Compare your word(s) with the answer options
Eliminate what doesn’t match your ‘charged’ attempt. An unknown word among the choices? Mark it with a “?”

8. Go Back to your Roots!
If you’re initially stumped by some words, try eliminating prefixes like im-, il-, dis-, and common English suffixes like –ate, -ious, -ent, in order to get to the heart of the matter. Prefixes will also help in identifying the direction some definitions will go in, for example the word prescient.

9. Plug in the remaining options and test your discriminating “ear”

10. Removed 2 of 5? Choose your answer.
Educated guess means eliminating at least 2 out of 5—except for the last two questions in any section, always the hardest. You may have to eliminate at least 3 or pass over them completely.

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With many of the nation’s most selective colleges and universities scheduled to inform applicants of their decisions on Thursday, The Choice has been reaching out to those institutions in pursuit of some statistical context.

Though the figures so far are the equivalent of early returns on election night, one trend already appears to be emerging: applications to elite private colleges rose again this academic year, despite the economic constraints on many families, and admission rates often fell to record lows.

Harvard University, Brown, the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth, Cornell, Stanford, M.I.T. and Duke are each reporting sharp increases in applications this year in comparison to last year.

Albright
American
American U of Paris
Amherst
Auburn
BC
Brandeis
Brown *
BU *
Case Western
Catholic
Chicago
Clark
College of Charleston
Curry
Dartmouth
Depaul
Drexel
Duke
Elon
Embry Riddle
Emmanuel
Emory
Fairfield
FAU
FGCU
Flagler
Fordham
FSU
Georgetown
GW *
Hamilton
Harvard
High Point
Indiana U
Iona
Ithaca
James Madison
Johns Hopkins
Lafayette
Lake Forest
Lasell
Lesley
Loyola
Lynn
Manhattanville
Marymount Manhattan
Maryville
Menlo
MIT
Muhlenberg
New College
Northeastern
Northwestern *
NYU
NYU Poly
Oklahoma State
Ole Miss
Otterbein
Providence College
Quinnipiac
Reed
Rice
Rollins
Sacred Heart
SCAD
SMU
Spring Hill
St Andrew’s Presbyter
St Joseph’s
St. Leo’s
Stetson
Suffolk
Susquehanna
Syracuse
Syracuse - Newhouse
Tulane
U Alabama (Tuscaloosa)
U Arizona
U Cincinnati
U Colorado (Boulder)
U Conn
U Denver
U Hartford
U Miami *
U Michigan
U Penn
U Tampa
UCF
UCLA
UF
UF
UNF
USF
VA Commonwealth
Vanderbilt
Villanova
WashU
Western New England

* Includes double-degree undergraduate-med school programs

http://blogs.trb.com/features/family/parenting/blog/2010/03/fcats_we_are_trying_not_to_obs.html