[On Saturdays my topic of focus is A Small, Good Thing, inspired by one of my favorite Raymond Carver stories.]

A big part of my identity is rooted in thinking of myself as a kind, caring, gentle and optimistic person…one who says supportive, positive things…a Tigger, not an Eeyore.

I’m uncomfortable saying anything that might come across as negative or unnice.  I hate the thought of hurting someone’s feelings or having them get angry at me.

Several factors have thrown me off my nice, comfortable writing routine, including some extra part-time work and then a freak snowstorm that left us without power or Internet access for a week.

I stopped blogging because my routine had been disrupted. My morning writing time was no longer available, and that’s when my head was in “writing mode.”

Do you practice mindfulness? I try to live “in the moment” as much as possible, every day. There’s something about focusing on the present that keeps me feeling stronger, more grounded, happier, more able to cope. Yet, a big part of being human involves being aware of the past with all its traumas, and the future with all its worries.

In her memoir, The Next Fifteen Minutes, Kim Kircher presents an intriguing and useful version of mindfulness. Kim is a ski area patroller and emergency medical technician. Part of her training involved learning how to cope with crises fifteen minutes at a time, which strikes me as a perfectly practical “chunk” of mindfulness.

I just finished doing a talk at one of my local libraries, called Tons of Tips to Help Your Child Learn Better!

My favorite tip is the simplest: HELP THEM.

It’s pretty amazing how parents hesitate to just sit down next to their child and offer some basic assistance. It’s usually for one of two reasons:

For Mental Health Awareness Day, I’ve picked out five of the most amazingly informative, life-changing mental health books I’ve ever read:

Loneliness; Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
by John Cacioppo and William Patrick

The Noonday Demon; an Atlas of Depression
by Andrew Solomon

Against Depression
by Peter D. Kramer

Woman; an Intimate Geography
by Natalie Angiers

Test preparation is big business these days, and I’m part of it.

I’ve been prepping kids for the SAT, ACT, PSAT, SSAT, ISEE and other tests, for decades now.

Is test prep a plus? Or does it do more harm than good?

In my opinion, it depends on how the preparation is done.

Is the goal merely to achieve a higher score? One common approach is to teach tricks and shortcuts, which supposedly produces higher scores quickly. JenBee wrote about how harmful this sort of coaching was for her:

I’ve wanted to visit Nunhead Cemetery ever since I discovered Charlotte Mew‘s poem (printed below) about a man struggling with issues of death and lost faith and unfulfilled dreams and lost love.

On this latest trip to London I made sure to go there. Now, I want to share with you a few of my reflections and also encourage you to read the poem itself and share your reactions.

Here’s what happens when a bookworm like me gets to thinking.

Reading three books at once sparked some connections for me, which I began talking about in a recent post.

The three books are:

• Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabakov
• Against Depression by Peter Kramer

Nafisi forms  a study group of young Iranian college women. Lolita is their first selection.

Lolita is a twelve-year-old girl whose real name is Dolores Haze. The narrator, who calls himself Humbert Humbert, kidnaps Dolores and keeps her as his sexual slave for two years.

Here’s the book’s famous beginning:

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.

She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.

In my last two posts I said that the “learning styles” philosophy is misguided, and that catering to students’ “learning modalities” (visual? auditory? kinesthetic?) is a waste of educational resources.

Here’s why:

The learning styles model is grounded in old ways of thinking about knowledge and about learning. Its assumption is that knowledge needs to enter the head through some sensory route and that people have some sensory pathways that work better than others.

This illusion of better and worse learning pathways is understandable but incorrect. I’m going to begin to try and refute it by using myself as an example.

An assessment of my learning modalities would identify me as a strongly visual learner. I read with good comprehension, I remember what I read, and I can analyze and synthesize material I’ve read at a high level.

In contrast, I struggle with auditory material. I often listen to lectures-on-CD, yet my mind wanders as I listen; I’ll hear one interesting little fact and my thoughts will stray off onto some tangent, and then ten minutes later I’ll realize I’ve tuned out everything that was said since. I can listen to a half-hour lecture and at the end I’ll hardly remember a thing. I play the same CD over and over and over before I “get it.”

Clearly I am a visual learner and auditory is not my modality, right?

Well, no. Because, I actually read in the same way as I listen. When I read a chapter in a textbook, I don’t read it straight through; I read a sentence or two, stop to ponder, then skim forward, then jump back…I reread some sentences ten times, skip others, read the whole chapter through again the next day….and so on.

As I learn, my thoughts jump all over the place, making predictions and connections, looking for clarifications, revisiting concepts I feel fuzzy about, etc, etc. It’s harder to do this when the material is being spoken to me than when I can use my own eyes to jump around however my brain desires. That’s what makes it seem like I’m a better reader than I am a listener.

It also points out how learning …

There are three subtests on the SAT.  The Critical Reading subtest has sentence completion questions which test your vocabulary, and critical reading passages which test your ability to read closely and accurately.

1. Know your Vocabulary

Your review book (purchase one at a bookstore) may contain a list of the most common SAT vocab words, or you may want to purchase a set of flash cards. Vocabulary needs to be studied over time, so begin now and pace your studying to learn a new word every day.

Sometimes words are hard to “wrap your head around,” and even the definitions don’t seem to help. Another person may help you by describing the word in a way you can understand or by putting it in a sentence or painting a mental image you can retain.

Some families practice vocab flash cards at the dinner table or in the car. This is geeky, yes, but it’s a really good idea. Vocabulary is truly best learned with other people, as an interactive, social experience. Maybe you can get a vocab study group organized.

Vocab study may seem tedious, but the SAT vocabulary words are wonderful, useful words you’ll be seeing and using your entire life. You’ll be happy you learned them

2. Know your Critical Reading

The key here is to read carefully. Move through the text as quickly as you can, but don’t rush and fail to understand the material. Read EVERYTHING, including any introduction or notes that come before or after the passages. At the end of each paragraph, stop and ask yourself: What did I just read? What was the main idea?

Make sure you read ALL the answer choices before you select one. Cross off the choices that are clearly wrong and then choose among the rest.

Often you will be referred back to specific lines or words in the text. Underline those words so you don’t waste time searching for them over and over as you refer back to them.

SAT reading is very detail-oriented and precise. Don’t allow your own interpretations to sway your thinking. Just answer the question exactly the …