Here’s a shocker: the SAT doesn’t give a rip what you think. They especially don’t care about your opinion about the critical reading passages. My students usually put their personal opinion smack in the middle of critical reading analyses: “Well, I don’t like dinosaurs, so I didn’t think that was important.” “I don’t think creative writing […]
Strategy
How do we remember?
John Medina, author of Brain Rules, recently talked about how we remember: 1) The more elaborately we encode information at the moment of learning, the stronger the memory. 2) Retrieval may best be improved by replicating the conditions surrounding the initial encoding. What does this mean for teaching and learning the SAT? Tell stories Yes, […]
Get Tough with the Critical Reading Answer Choices
I was working with a student today who, like many of my students, was being too nice with the Critical Reading answers. Her thought process went something like this: “Well, A could be right since they mention nature in the passage. B could be right since they mention mathematical forms. C could be right since […]
You don't need a fancy calculator
My calculator always makes my students laugh. It doesn’t even have an exponent button. And yet it has gotten me though each of the 40 or so SAT tests I’ve taken over the past 5 years. Thinking wins over pushing buttons. Every time. The calculating part of the math section is usually pretty straightforward. You really don’t […]
The Definitive SAT Critical Reading book
Want to ace the Critical Reading section? The Complete Guide to SAT Reading by Erica Meltzer will show you exactly how to do it. I *only* use the Official SAT Study Guide as a source for authentic SAT questions. However, I make two exceptions to this rule. And this is one of them. Erica has exhaustively […]
SAT Math Strategy: Use Speed Bumps to Slow Down
Often my students are so thrilled when they solve a math problem, they jump right to the answer choices to see if they can find the answer. Sometimes it’s not even a “mistake” – the question asks for x+1, my students solve for x, circle x in the answer choices and are dumbfounded when they […]