Tag Archives: summer

Conquering Summer: Giving it the Old College Try

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Books and mortarboardJust back from an evening walk in the neighborhood. It’s a great night. Sunny. Slightly breezy. By Texas standards, reasonably cool. People are riding bikes, walking dogs, throwing Frisbees and playing soccer.

What a great summer!

Cicero’s Academy is having a great summer too. We are at the beginning of July, and about halfway through our summer workshop schedule. We are having fun, and if students aren’t careful, we will all learn something before we’re done.

We learned about the importance of asking “why” to add detail in the Developing the Intermediate Writer workshop. The story of Captain Why battling the evil Doctor Nottanuf (think about it) frames the central assignment of turning a paragraph’s worth of ideas into a five paragraph essay.

We learned the power of persuasion in the Essay Writing and Introduction to Persuasion workshop. We learned the essay structure and then put it to work crafting arguments about why Sherlock Holmes is a great detective and why O. Henry’s short stories parallel his life.

The summer schedule leads up to our college-bound workshops. On July 13, we begin Essay Writing for the College Bound, a workshop that focuses on the SAT/ACT and AP essay formats. The goal is to write a quality essay fast. We will drill students in writing essays in 25 minutes, or a set of essays in 2 hours in the case of the Advanced Placement exams. You might have heard that the testing services are no longer requiring these sections as part of the standard test, but don’t be fooled. The top colleges still require them.

We will follow that up on August 4 with a one-day workshop that covers the college application essay. It’s a slightly different beast and we will explain how to navigate its nuances. Students attending this workshop can submit for critique as many drafts of college application essays as they like until September 31.

College graduation ceremonies are still fresh in our recent memories and commencement speeches are still making the rounds on social media. Let’s see, what would we want to tell students heading out into life…

Don’t Write that Way

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Amphibious pitcher
Did you hear the one about the amphibious pitcher? No, it’s not a water vessel carried by a frog. It’s also not a baseball player with a long tongue that can snag flyballs.

Though you’re getting closer.

What good is the Internet if it can’t spread our worst mistakes around the world at the speed of light? In this case, a headline writer in Oregon misunderstood the word “ambidextrous” as it applied to a baseball pitcher who can throw with either arm. The headline proclaimed the first known “amphibious pitcher” was now playing in the majors. The Internet has reacted as only the Internet can:  heaps of derision, jokes and a variety of pseudo-scientific theories as to whether the pitcher’s tail will grow back if a line drive severs it.

At Cicero’s Academy, we sometimes use the sports pages as a source of questionable examples of writing. (Today’s edition: “Perhaps the refs are letting others get after him because he’s been pushing off with his off hand in the post, but either way, James is giving us a real treat against odds that don’t favor the Cavs to win the series.” Off-handedly, I’d say that gem is actually one run-on sentence that also constitutes its own paragraph.)

So, it was a coincidence that the pitcher grew legs and lungs crawling out of the primordial soup the same week that our summer workshop series began – OR WAS IT?  Perhaps things really do happen for a reason.

If you want to avoid your 15 minutes of Internet infamy, come to Cicero’s Academy: Write this way.

Sounds Like Learning

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The house is noisy today. It sounds like a bunch of things rattling around in bags and boxes.IMG_0003

If you want to entertain kids, noise helps. If you want kids to sit still for a writing workshop, noise helps. So, I’m making sure my bag of Lego® blocks shakes and jangles appropriately.
The blocks have words on them, though they didn’t come out of the factory in Denmark that way. In the Developing the Intermediate Writer Workshop we use the blocks as, well, building blocks to make sentences.

I’m also shaking some boxes. We use boxes to teach good paragraph structure. Each box has a collection of items with which students will write paragraphs.

So, the house really is noisy today with blocks and knick-knacks rattling around. Oh, there is also the din of people yelling for peace and quiet.

Register now for our summer workshops.

That Time Again

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IMG_1518To catch you up on things around Cicero’s Academy:

The bluebonnets are in blossom and so are summer plans. We have posted the summer workshop schedule. We begin the summer with the younger students and “Developing the Intermediate Writer,” a workshop designed to help students who have mastered core skills in sentences and paragraphs and help them transition to writing essays and working with bigger ideas of their own choosing. We then move to “Essay Writing and Introduction to Persuasion,” a workshop aimed at the advanced middle school and high school student that needs to sharpen the skills of making an argument. The schedule closes in late July with “Essay Writing for the College Bound,” a workshop aimed at timed writings in the style of the SAT test and Advanced Placement tests. While there is a bit of change afoot in whether the writing portions of the SAT will be required in the future, a quick Google shows that the top schools are still requiring those portions of the standard tests.

Assuming we survive all that, summer will lead to fall and we have some plans for fall as well. Learning to write requires writing consistently and internalizing all the basic parts of the writing process that we teach. We have had several students over the past few years come back for tutoring as a refresher course on the taxonomy and habits we teach. We will be offering some online lesson plans on a subscription basis, geared toward reinforcing the themes of the summer workshops. We have long wanted to move at least a portion of what we do online and this is the year to make that a reality. We will learn as we go and add more options and classes online over time.

Lastly, students have long referred to John as “Mr. T.” He warns them that he will not show up to class wearing a bad mohawk and 40 pounds of necklaces (he also worries that one day that pop culture reference will no longer work and he will be officially, hopelessly and irretrievably old). Students can now call him “Dr. T” as he finished his Ph.D. at the University of Texas in the fall. Did it feel like we went a bit silent in 2014? Writing a 200 page book on globalization and its impact on language habits will do that to you.

Getting to Know Me

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Business Handshake Before GlobeHello.  My name is <Brief and to the Point>. My friends call me <90 Characters>. Pleased to meet you.

Introductions are on my mind. I’ve been writing several recently. Each one had its own rules (which I’ll come to in a moment). The commonality, though, is that good introductions require us to communicate a great deal of information in just a few words.

In my day job, I write speeches for corporate executives. A certain speech was to be delivered as a conference keynote address in Taiwan. It is an international conference drawing executives from around the globe. To minimize language issues, the organizers asked that the executive supply the introduction. This particular executive is not one to dwell on past accomplishments so a lengthy reading of a resume was out of the question. I had about two short paragraphs to communicate the essence of the executive’s accomplishments, the connection to the conference theme and foreshadow the nature of the speech. Each word had to do a lot of work.

Yet, that seemed easy compared to a couple of social media situations in the last few days. I recently joined groups that encouraged introductions. The introduction would sit next to my picture on a website and communicate to potential business contacts who I am and why someone might want to know me. This is the way a lot of business starts today. The introduction’s goal is to position yourself in your field and explain why people should want to talk to you. You get about 90 characters to do that. Every letter has a lot of work to do.

Introducing yourself is a skill. For every person we meet, we get one chance to do it right. The amount of time and space we get to do it is shrinking. It is no exaggeration to suggest that those who introduce themselves well will have an advantage in life. That is why students in our Public Speaking workshop start by introducing themselves several times in slightly different situations. They start by shaking hands and introducing themselves casually and work their way up to making an introductory speech about a defining aspect of their lives.

As the ghost of Christmas present said to Scrooge, “Come and know me better, Man.”