Even without all the unique challenges of this year, January can put students in a rut when the weather is cold and the days are short. Yet this is actually a great time to start planning your summer. I'm optimistic that we'll see a lot...
In a typical year, many 10th graders would have taken the PSAT in October and gotten scores last week. This is just baseline diagnostic information to file away for future planning, so the fact that most students don't have it is not a problem. However,...
Report cards are out or on their way, and as your first set of sophomore grades arrives it’s a good time to take a step back and think about how the year is going so far. With all the challenges students are facing and the...
Did you get a mid-quarter progress report recently? I hope it gives you helpful feedback about how your classes are going. Many students are finding online education to be highly challenging, and not in a good way. I'm hearing from students who have a crushing...
Welcome back to school. In a normal year you'd be diving into your coursework and resuming your extracurricular activities, and I hope that's still true this year to some extent. I expect that while remote school may not be great it will be better than...
Your freshman year may have been cut short but I hope you had opportunities to explore your academic interests and extracurricular opportunities before school closed in March. While school-based activities will continue to be limited for a while longer, you have time this summer to...
Congratulations to those of you who completed AP exams in May. I hope as school winds down you can look at the year and feel positive about what you were able to accomplish, even though it’s probably quite different from what you had in mind...
At this time of year my advice for everyone starts off the same way: do as well as you can in your classes and on your finals. Of course this year looks a bit different, with many schools canceling exams and APs being taken at...
During this challenging and uncertain time, the top priority is to take care of yourself—your physical health and general well-being—and those around you. On the academic front, I have students who have a heavier workload than they did when they were going to school every day,...
Tenth grade is the perfect time to explore colleges, and meeting with admissions representatives locally is a great way to start. There are a couple of college fairs coming up in Maryland and one in Northern Virginia in the next few weeks, and college representatives...