Parents generally respond this way to my intake-form question, “Does your student read, and if so, what kind of material?” We know that many of today’s high school students often prefer media featuring snippets of image-based content and often, no words. It’s easy to consume and requires less thought. It’s the “thought” part that matters to me. While I wish that students would read books to derive the pleasure and knowledge from them that I always have, the form of media they

Last week’s post focused on the dip of the average ACT score to a 19.8 and the SAT to a 1050. The consistent dropping of scores indicates lower academic performance. Why are scores dropping? ACT CEO Janet Godwin said the decline can’t be blamed exclusively by learning disruptions from online learning and missed classes when schools were shuttered during the Covid-19 pandemic, but by “longtime systemic failures” that were “exacerbated by the pandemic.” “The magnitude of the de

The big news this week was the drop in ACT scores: “This year, the average ACT score was the lowest it’s been since 1991, the organization said in a news release. And it’s the fifth year in a row that average scores have been going down, ACT CEO Janet Godwin said in a statement.” Approximately 1.3 million students in the U.S. high school graduating class of 2022 took the ACT test, an estimated 36 percent of graduates nationwide. The national average Composite score for the gr

Hi!! I’m Tori Hoff and I graduated from the University of Miami in May 2021. I double majored in Public Relations and Media Management. I quickly found my passion for TV and entertainment through my classes and UMTV, the University of Miami TV station. I spent my summers during college interning at a public relations firm, a casting agency and doing career development programs with Endeavor and Warner Music Group. During my final semester at UM, I interned at NBC Universal i

I am sharing an important email I received from the Wow Writing Workshop this past week. I have completed their essay program along with several others and agree with this message wholeheartedly. Yes–it contradicts what many people believe, even some other essay specialists. However, in my experience, my students who write normal essays and stress less seem to do very well. I advise students to forego overdone topics (how social media makes them feels inadequate, sports injur