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Funnily, in the midst of the Twilight hysteria that began what now seems like eons ago, I started hearing about a specific aspect of it from all my students. Incredibly, while all my adult girlfriends were thoroughly engrossed in the pure drama of the saga (full disclosure: the Twilight series is not a guilty pleasure in which I have yet indulged), my teen students were assaulting me with “Elizabeth! These books are serious and have so much vocabulary in them!”

Well, more kudos belong to Brian Leaf, a Massachusetts-based prep tutor who has taken on Twilight with an excellent challenge for its disciples: since the book is full of great vocabulary, let’s learn it. “Defining Twilight” is a great way to not only learn the vocab in Twilight (rather than just notice that it’s there and forget it), but also to spark a pattern of learning the vocabulary in other challenging texts as students move through high school. As an SAT, SSAT, and ISEE tutor who works with students with limited vocabularies on a daily basis, I’m so pleased that another useful product is available to help students get started early on–in a way that’s applicable and even possibly exciting.

While “Defining Twilight” (and the ensuing follow-up titles) shouldn’t be a student’s only path to increasing her vocabulary, this book is a great start and I hope a product that will encourage students to begin developing vocabulary for the SAT and PSAT long before their junior years.

Check out Brian’s book here:

Fact #1 In life you will find that there will be a number of things you don’t want to do. While you will be an adult and will have the freedom to make your own decisions, you’re still going to need to get a job, pay bills, mow the lawn, and do the dishes. (Read: you’re going to need to have a work ethic.)

Fact #2 When you have a job, whether you work for yourself or someone else, if you aren’t a self-starter—even when the project is sooooo boring—you’re going to either lose your job or stay in the same stinkin’ position until the end of time.

Fact #3 While your parents may pay attention to your grades and homework now, the only person who is going to notice the grades you make as an adult—as measured in your personal satisfaction with your career and the number of dollars in your bank account—will be you.

What does this have to do with test prep?

Fact #4 It’s not a big secret that preparing for a standardized test is not as fun as riding your bike, playing a video game, watching television, cooking dinner, mowing the lawn, cleaning the bathroom, changing the oil in your Grandma’s car…. Ok, you get the idea. Studying for these tests, while they do have their creative moments, isn’t usually going to be the activity you most look forward to during the day.

Fact #5 It doesn’t matter that it isn’t fun. Lots of things that aren’t necessarily fun lead to great things: sweating it out at the gym leads to great muscles, running sprints at practice means speed to outrun your opponent when you need it, and cleaning out the car means you won’t be mortified on your date on Friday night.

Fact #6 Sometimes, it’s not even the immediate result that is most important; instead, it’s the opportunity you create for yourself in the long run—opportunities you may not yet even realize exist. What does this mean? Well, to be direct, your SAT or ACT score is totally pointless if you don’t see it as a key to get you through the door of your dream school, even if you don’t yet know what your dream school is.

The moral here is that the amount of studying you do for the SAT or ACT today, that one extra vocabulary word you learn or the geometry rule you memorize, can directly influence the number of doors that will be opened to you after you send in those applications.

On those days where you’d rather give Fluffy a bath than do another flash card or practice test, just remember that drudgework today is just an investment in opportunity tomorrow.

This is my problem: since you all have been using your calculators since the 8^th grade—and sometimes even earlier, you’ve started thinking of your calculators as your outboard brains. As in, “if I can’t figure this out, maybe my calculator can.”

Moreover, I know you have all sorts of formulas and programs stuffed into those TI-89s that let you punch in a bunch of variables and then they spit out the answer for you, no thinking involved. I have students who read math problems with their calculators already in-hand, like weapons they’re about to draw or, worse, security blankets they can’t outgrow.

It’s a classic situation for me: I’m with a new student, he reaches for his calculator to solve some linear equation (or whatever), and I barge in.

Me: You don’t need your calculator.

Student: But I have the formula!

Me: I promise, it will actually be faster if you just do the problem on the page.

Student: But I can’t! I don’t know how! It’s in my calculator!

Usually, since I’m the boss in these situations, I win. (And that often means re-teaching students concepts long since forgotten, which is fine, since that’s my job.) But every now and then, even after the student has successfully solved the problem without a calculator, he retains some residual fear or frustration and thinks I am either insane, mean, or some sort of masochist.

The fact is that you can use your calculator on the SAT, and if you’re looking for a just-above-average SAT score, that’s fine. But if you’re looking to score with the top ten percent of kids, you have to get over it. Why?

Because your calculator isn’t any smarter than you are.

When I ask you to not use your calculator to solve a problem (and I don’t mean that I don’t want you to check your arithmetic on the calc’ if you’d like to), it’s not because I am mental and like things to be hard. Actually, training yourself to understand the simple concepts on the math section of the SAT (and ACT, frankly) will allow you to solve the most difficult questions on the section because you will understand how the math works instead of just how to punch it into your calculator.

The SAT people don’t care how well you use your calculator; they care how well you are able to apply math skills you learned in high school. Meaning you should have actually learned them. The most difficult math questions on the SAT test your ability to do math elegantly and quickly, which is–seriously—usually not done on your calculator. This is the same reason that I filled OUTSMARTING the SAT with math lessons rather than calculator tricks and shortcuts.

If you are so reliant on your calculator that you can’t do an entire SAT test without it, you need to challenge yourself to put it down while you practice and use it only for checking your arithmetic. Be brave. You can do it.

Your calculator will not help you. Seriously. Train your brain.

Our first conversation deals with the importance of mental preparation and what you can do to start preparing now for your test experience, whether you’re taking it in a few weeks or months down the line.

You can find the first part of our conversation here. 

As a millennial, you have some distinct advantages: you’ve grown up in a home with a computer, you’ve got access to information that used to take major trips to the library to discover, and you can stay connected wherever you are, twenty four hours a day.

The disadvantage: you’re blipped out. You’re the sound byte generation. You can’t focus. You bore easily. You’re antsy. You’re not very likely to read this article in its entirety.

This all puts you at a natural disadvantage for surviving the mega tests that are the SAT and ACT.

So what do you do? Well, I’ll tell you, but you’re probably not going to like it. The best thing you can do for your concentration is to get away from the computer. Seriously. Stop obsessively checking your friends’ Facebook statuses, leave Twitter alone for a while, and press the pause button on YouTube. Step away from the screen. Moreover, once you’ve done that, don’t head for the television; head outside.

Ride your bicycle. Play sports. Start a weekly yoga regimen and stick with it.

Read a book for fun, and don’t put it down when you notice your mind wandering. Go back and read the section you missed again. Keep it up! Work up to getting absorbed in a book for one to two hours at a time.

Seriously? Yes. Seriously.

You will probably also want to take a look at what you’re eating. While low carb eating was a big fad ten years ago, foods with a low glycemic index are definitely the way to go. If you’re loading up on sugar and refined carbohydrates (cheap sugars that make your blood sugar spike and plummet throughout the day), you’re certainly in the ruthless cycle of sugar rush and sugar coma.  I’ve got news for you: the words “coma” and “great test taking” aren’t used in tandem very often.

Specifically regarding studying: you’ll want to keep your desk area neat and clean. Turn off the radio. If you’re one of these people that can’t stand the quiet, you may want to check out Simply Noise, a web site that creates white noise to drown out distractions (I like the brown/red noise, personally).

Also, don’t wait until 11 o’clock to do your homework, because that’s when you’re tired. While you most likely would rather use your free energetic time after school to tool around hanging out with your friends, you’re far more likely to focus on and remember what you studied during those times. These are the harsh realities.

Concentration on Test Day

The thing about Test Day is that you’re not likely to turn into Captain Focus if you haven’t been training beforehand. Nevertheless, there are still a few things you can do:

1. Plan to take a mind clearing breath after a predetermined number of questions. If you know you’re someone that loses concentration or tends toward what I like to call the “I’m Never Getting Into College Freak Out,” you need to plan to take a deep breath every few minutes. It loosens you up and gets oxygen into your system. Yes, remembering to breathe helps.

2. Have a mantra. While your mantra doesn’t have to be “I’m good enough, I’m smart enough, and…,” it certainly can be! Your mantra needs to be something special to you, something personal that reminds you that you are prepared and you are smarter than the SAT. Even “I AM prepared” works. Pick something useful.

3. Take a snack. Just like your brain needs oxygen, hence the breathing, your brain needs fuel too. Since we already talked about the horrors of sugar addiction, you probably know I don’t want you to take a donut along. Take a banana and some peanut crackers (or some version of that) that you can eat quickly that won’t upset your stomach. Think a balance of carbs and protein (for energy) and fat (so that you’ll feel full and not obsess about lunch while doing the double reading passage.

4. Don’t Drink a Red Bull…unless you drink Red Bull every day, in which case, please do. The point here is don’t eat or drink on test day that you wouldn’t normally have. I know those no-crash energy drinks seem alluring, but Test Day is not the day to experiment.

If you’d like more info on the low attention spans of the millennial generation in particular, please check out this great book review on Salon.com.

How many times have you thought to yourself, “I’m just not a good test-taker” or “This test is too hard”? Do you study for hours and then bomb on test day?  

To start, let’s watch a quick video by Patrick J. Cohn, Ph.D., a sports psychologist and founder of Peak Performance Sports, LLC in Orlando, Florida. 

Sports Psychology: Self-Confidence In Sports - Click here for more blooper videos

Let’s recap the major points that Dr. Cohn makes in this video and figure out how they apply to our SAT and ACT prep. 

First, Dr. Cohn explains that confidence, fundamentally, is “the belief in your ability to execute” or to get the job done effectively. He wisely narrows this down to general confidence, like “our team can win this” or “sure I can achieve my goal score”, and task-specific confidence, like “I know I can consistently make contact with the ball” or “I know everything I need to know about geometry to answer this triangle problem.” 

These concepts of general and specific confidence ask us to start prepping for a test really believing that we can achieve our goals and then following up by equipping ourselves with a vast vocabulary, a thorough understanding of grammar, and a super mathematical foundation. Obviously a lack of task-specific confidence is going to destroy your general confidence. 

The other important element of confidence that I think is so applicable to our test prep is the idea of the “confidence roller coaster.” Just like a tennis career or a basketball career, we don’t judge a player’s overall capability by a couple of bad games or even a bad season. In the same way, if you let a bad test destroy your confidence or a difficult month at school undermine your perspective of yourself as a great student, you get on the roller coaster. Your test prep and college application process should be a long term, carefully timed and administered process. 

According to Dr. Cohn, we build confidence on past successes, quality practice, and knowing that we are fundamentally able to achieve a task. What does that mean for you? Every time you learn a new skill, note it and get excited about it. Every new piece of information you learn is one more trick up your sleeve, just like a different pitch, and better pass, a more perfect spiral. Pay attention to your successes! Embrace them! Let every new word, fact, or test-specific fact become a building block to a more confident you.

Focus-building activities come wrapped in what may be surprising packages. While something as small as chewing gum can have an effect on focus/scoring, sometimes it’s worthwhile to invest in more significant and holistic treatment. In fact, Danielle Herb, a teen in Florida, has become an advocate for therapeutic horsemanship to address more significant forms of attention/focus problems, like ADD/ADHD and autism. She’s definitely worth checking out. 

Finding focus in a culture in which we are inundated with high-speed information has become increasingly more difficult. Take the time to consider why you may have trouble paying attention in school and get excited about the myriad ways to take control of the situation. You may be a couple pieces of Dentyne away from a higher test score and a more focused school experience. What a relief! 

If you have ways you cope with attention deficit–or even just tips on how you improve focus in your own study time–please comment!