Jessie's Blog
Choosing Resilience Under Unfortunate Circumstance
On a Sunday afternoon in January, I got the call from my husband who had been skiing with our youngest two kids.
“Aaron crashed,” my husband said. “Come quickly. I don’t know how bad it is.”
I sped to the ski area. By the time I arrived Aaron had been discharged from first-aid and was propped up in the passenger seat of my husband’s car. As his Dad carefully removed his ski boots and slid on his winter boots, he said, “It’s his right shoulder.”
Aaron sat, tears running down his face, right ar…
The Hot Potato Essay—How to Spot It, Fix It, and Cool It Down
During the Q&A at an NJACAC conference a few years back, a counselor asked, “What do you do with a student who has written about a particularly hard topic? Maybe they were abused, their dad died (or golden retriever) suddenly, their grandma is incarcerated, or they are dealing with a mental illness...and, well, it's just not written in a way that will serve them?" After a bit of back and forth, I added to the discussion, “Every student has something they absolutely need to write about. There ar…
Does the Drop-Off Get Any Easier?
Aaron and I. September 2017. Move in day at Stratton Mountain School. #gosms #skifastaaron Photo Credit: Dad
Does it get easier? clients and friends will ask, referring to the school drop-off. We have four children: boy (23), girl (20), boy (13), girl (11). We call them the "Bigs" and the "Littles." (But only one husband!) We’ve done the drop-off, the send-off, the lugging of rugs and small fridges and the fretting about bedding with three kids so far for a total of nine times.
And, did it g…
Challenge: My GPA Sucks. Now What?
Delia, a bright-eyed high school junior, sat in my office. “You saw my transcript?” she asked in a cringing tone. “I’m trying harder. I’m working on that.”
I had reviewed her transcript. She clearly had the best of intentions. Her freshman year, though, was killing her confidence, not to mention her GPA. One B, 3 Cs, and 2 Ds. She had a 2.3, brought up only by a solid B in an elective. Her sophomore year she had brought up her average to a 2.6. As Delia planned on applying to highly competitive…
Would you like to be paid $40,000 for turning off social media for an hour?
I leaned toward her and smiled. “You’ve been trying very hard. I can see that. I want you to try one thing. Would you be willing to be paid $40,000 for turning off social media for an hour?”
“Sure, I mean, it can’t hurt, right?” she responded, dubiously.
“Turn your phone and all social media off whil…
He did it. On purpose.
Photo by Mitchell Orr on Unsplash“He did it.” I don’t know about you, but when I was little, this was a go-to if I was trying to get out of the blame for something. Like eating the entire roll of refrigerated chocolate chip cookie dough or leaving my dirty mac and cheese bowl in the living room or not putting the hay out for the horses by 6 pm. It must have been somebody else. Except, as an only child, this got kind of tricky. So a lot of times I had to blame it on my dad; luckily for me, Mom b…
How Drinking with the Buddha Helped Me Survive This Year’s Back-To-School Churn
Image based on Lodro Rinzler's book and designed by Daniel Urban Brown of Lithographs.“Mom!!” rings from every corner of my small world. The couch, the top of the bunk bud, the bathroom, the kitchen table, and via Facetime and relentless texts.
The 10 year old: “We have two book reports. I thought we only had one book report, and I have only read fiction. I need to read a nonfiction. I like fiction. And my backpack is ripped. I found a new backpack on Amazon; would you look at it now?”
The 12 yea…
Please Change the Station…[Bitch]: Does Your Essay Pass the Tonal Rule?
Stop walking. Stop talking. Know your audience.A friend of mine has a house rule she developed for her kids when they were preschoolers. It all started over a heated dispute involving waffles, butter, and jam and the order in which the latter two should be applied and in what thickness. She calls it the Tonal Rule. Here is how it works. If you make a request or say something to a sibling, parent, sitter, teacher, the Uber driver, or for that matter, the dog and it is plausible that at the end o…
DON’T CALL ME AVERAGE!— Accepting Your Best, Unique, and Totally Awesome Average Self in a Culture of Extremes
Walmart or Harvard. All other high schoolers should just go home, settle in with their iPads, hide under the t-shirt quilt Aunt Donna had custom-made, and binge watch Game of Thrones. If these are the only options, then it’s winner take all—because stocking shelves doesn’t play well on Instagram.
My yoga instructor had a similar idea nearly a decade ago. “We are a nation of extremes; moderation is no longer respected. Sodas are bigger. SUVs are bigger. And some family named ‘Kardashian’ is on TV.…
Want to take the August SAT?
Register early.
College Board will be offering the SAT and SAT Subject Test exams on August 26, 2017. The word on the street is that seating may be limited.
The following Subject Tests will be available:
- Literature
- U.S. History
- World History
- Mathematics Level 1
- Mathematics Level 2
- Biology E/M
- Chemistry
- Physics
- French
- Spanish