Can studying for the SAT enrich a student’s life, rather than be a necessary evil that must be endured?
If you’re going to invest a lot of time and money in SAT prep, the most important result you want to get is a high score. If you hire a tutor, you want the biggest score increase you can get, and you want the best score possible.
Of course you do, because when it comes to getting in to college, your SAT score counts for about 40% of the admissions process.
But when you’re all finished, when you’ve achieved your goal, I think you’d want to say of the experience, “I loved it.”
You don’t hear that too much. I don’t think you hear a lot of kids say, “I loved studying for the SATs. My tutor knew just how to coach me through the process so I not only got a great score but I also loved doing it.”
So how does that work?
I recently interviewed Samantha, one of my former students. The quote is from her, so I’ll let her tell you in her own words:
- “There was an element that was so personal… I think you got to know me really well and knew what I would take best, that way to get to my head and get things through my brain.”
- “Definitely having the confidence to know that I was going to do well. It just made it easier to perform because you said, you can do this so I just kind of did it.”
- “A large part of my learning process was to just be relaxed and attentive because I just kind of go all over the place in normal every day stuff.”
- “To be completely focused, because that was something that you definitely helped me with. To be completely focused on taking the test, answering the questions, one by one, kind of ruminating over them and just deciding and being done with it. I think that that was something I learned and helped me be more successful on the test.”
- “I think this is a more broad range of teaching, broader way of teaching the subject material… It was sort of a collaborative effort of learning exactly what was going to be on the test, also ways to approach the test, and mentality to have while taking the test, which all worked in conjunction to get me my score.”
- “I really think that visualization helped, and really for me it helped knowing that I could do it. And just concentrating on one thing at once.”
- “I think that you helped me with not just taking the SAT but relaxing in what I do and taking the approach that not necessarily takes less effort but is easiest for me and most conducive to learning without stress. Because I didn’t find myself being very stressed out. It was a way more easy going process than I would have imagined.”
- “When I went into it to the SAT… I knew exactly what was going to be on it because we’d done so many practices that I was comfortable with it. There was nothing foreign or unexpected.”
- “I loved it. And it’s true, I learned life lessons through the process of SAT tutoring, which was unexpected.”
That is so awesome. I love my students.
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