Helping child find a "passion"

starbright
Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:06:35 +0000

Passion isn’t a necessity for super achievement. Sometimes students do very well on thins like math exams because their parents have forced them to do lots of extra study including the parents’ paying for extra tutoring.



True enough - one is looking for authenticity. But I don’t mean achievement per se, as in acing exams or perfect 2400 scores, but rather things like publishing books, winning national science awards, creating effective charities. Hence why I added ‘super’…achievements that are hard to imagine coming from external prodding or instrumental motives.



Meanwhile, most students who are applying to college get into their first choice school. Few fret over things like passion. It’s only a very small proportion of students who are fretting about passion



Agreed about most students…again 4000 colleges and all that…most students aren’t having to worrying about APs, retaking SATs, listing ECs, letter writers, essays and the like.In fact,all these CC discussions are probably pretty pointless to the majority of students.

But in the NE corridor, the private schools, the great publics, the million teens on CC, the NYTimes articles, those paying for tutoring/private counselors/expensive summer programs and people actually subscribing to USNWR and addicted to CC…lets face it, in the world of ‘college apps’ that you and I know, this passion thing is way overrated.