The Perfect Score Project


Book Description

The Perfect Score Project is an indispensable guide to acing the SAT – as well as the affecting story of a single mom’s quest to light a fire under her teenage son. It all began as an attempt by Debbie Stier to help her high-school age son, Ethan, who would shortly be studying for the SAT. Aware that Ethan was a typical teenager (i.e., completely uninterested in any test) and that a mind-boggling menu of test-prep options existed, she decided – on his behalf -- to sample as many as she could to create the perfect SAT test-prep recipe. Debbie’s quest turned out to be an exercise in both hilarity and heartbreak as she took the SAT seven times in one year and in-between “went to school” on standardized testing. Here, she reveals why the SAT has become so important, the cottage industries it has spawned, what really works in preparing for the test and what is a waste of time. Both a toolbox of fresh tips and an amusing snapshot of parental love and wisdom colliding with teenage apathy, The Perfect Score Project rivets. In the book Debbie does it all: wrestles with Kaplan and Princeton Review, enrolls in Kumon, navigates khanacademy.org, meets regularly with a premier grammar coach, takes a battery of intelligence tests, and even cadges free lessons from the world’s most prestigious (and expensive) test prep company. Along the way she answers the questions that plague every test-prep rookie, including: “When do I start?”...”Do the brand-name test prep services really deliver?”...”Which should I go with: a tutor, an SAT class, or self study?”...”Does test location really matter?” … “How do I find the right tutor?”… “How do SAT scores affect merit aid?”... and “What’s the one thing I need to know?” The Perfect Score Project’s combination of charm, authority, and unexpected poignancy makes it one of the most compulsively readable guides to SAT test prep ever – and a book that will make you think hard about what really matters.




The Perfect Score


Book Description

From the beloved author of Because of Mr. Terupt and its sequels comes The Perfect Score, a new middle-grade school story with a very special cast of unforgettable characters who discover that getting the perfect score—both on the test and in life—is perhaps not so perfect after all. No one likes or wants to take the statewide assessment tests. Not the students in Mrs. Woods’s sixth-grade class. Not even Mrs. Woods. It’s not as if the kids don’t already have things to worry about. . . . Under pressure to be the top gymnast her mother expects her to be, RANDI starts to wonder what her destiny truly holds. Football-crazy GAVIN has always struggled with reading and feels as dumb as his high school–dropout father. TREVOR acts tough and mean, but as much as he hates school, he hates being home even more. SCOTT’s got a big brain and an even bigger heart, especially when it comes to his grandfather, but his good intentions always backfire in spectacular ways. NATALIE, know-it-all and aspiring lawyer, loves to follow the rules—only this year, she’s about to break them all. The whole school is in a frenzy with test time approaching—kids, teachers, the administration. Everyone is anxious. When one of the kids has a big idea for acing the tests, they’re all in. But things get ugly before they get better, and in the end, the real meaning of the perfect score surprises them all.




The Perfect Secret


Book Description

From the beloved author of Because of Mr. Terupt comes the sequel to The Perfect Score, about a lovable group of students at Lake View Middle School and the rewards and challenges of seventh grade. These students are in for a year of secrets, discoveries, and kid power! GAVIN finally joins the football team—a dream come true!—but Coach Holmes refuses to play him for reasons that also threaten to tear Gavin's family apart. When RANDI attends an elite gymnastics camp, she uncovers a startling family connection. SCOTT starts researching an article for the school newspaper and stumbles right into a hornet's nest of lies. With his loser older brother, Brian, out of the house, TREVOR's life is loads better—until he realizes that only he can save Brian from getting into deep trouble. NATALIE's top goals: (1) find out why Mrs. Woods and Mrs. Magenta no longer speak to each other—a mission shared by all the kids—and (2) teach a certain someone an important life skill without anyone knowing. It's tough keeping secrets. And tougher still to deal with the fallout when secrets spill out.




Thanks for the Feedback


Book Description

The coauthors of the New York Times–bestselling Difficult Conversations take on the toughest topic of all: how we see ourselves Douglas Stone and Sheila Heen have spent the past fifteen years working with corporations, nonprofits, governments, and families to determine what helps us learn and what gets in our way. In Thanks for the Feedback, they explain why receiving feedback is so crucial yet so challenging, offering a simple framework and powerful tools to help us take on life’s blizzard of offhand comments, annual evaluations, and unsolicited input with curiosity and grace. They blend the latest insights from neuroscience and psychology with practical, hard-headed advice. Thanks for the Feedback is destined to become a classic in the fields of leadership, organizational behavior, and education.




Atomic Habits


Book Description

The #1 New York Times bestseller. Over 20 million copies sold! Translated into 60+ languages! Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results No matter your goals, Atomic Habits offers a proven framework for improving--every day. James Clear, one of the world's leading experts on habit formation, reveals practical strategies that will teach you exactly how to form good habits, break bad ones, and master the tiny behaviors that lead to remarkable results. If you're having trouble changing your habits, the problem isn't you. The problem is your system. Bad habits repeat themselves again and again not because you don't want to change, but because you have the wrong system for change. You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems. Here, you'll get a proven system that can take you to new heights. Clear is known for his ability to distill complex topics into simple behaviors that can be easily applied to daily life and work. Here, he draws on the most proven ideas from biology, psychology, and neuroscience to create an easy-to-understand guide for making good habits inevitable and bad habits impossible. Along the way, readers will be inspired and entertained with true stories from Olympic gold medalists, award-winning artists, business leaders, life-saving physicians, and star comedians who have used the science of small habits to master their craft and vault to the top of their field. Learn how to: make time for new habits (even when life gets crazy); overcome a lack of motivation and willpower; design your environment to make success easier; get back on track when you fall off course; ...and much more. Atomic Habits will reshape the way you think about progress and success, and give you the tools and strategies you need to transform your habits--whether you are a team looking to win a championship, an organization hoping to redefine an industry, or simply an individual who wishes to quit smoking, lose weight, reduce stress, or achieve any other goal.




Standardized Minds


Book Description

"Standardized Minds" dramatically shows how an unhealthy and enduring obsession with intelligence testing affects everyone. Drawing creative solutions from the headlines and front lines, Sacks demonstrates proven alternatives to such testing, and details a plan to make the American meritocracy legitimate and fair.




The Cult of Smart


Book Description

Named one of Vulture’s Top 10 Best Books of 2020! Leftist firebrand Fredrik deBoer exposes the lie at the heart of our educational system and demands top-to-bottom reform. Everyone agrees that education is the key to creating a more just and equal world, and that our schools are broken and failing. Proposed reforms variously target incompetent teachers, corrupt union practices, or outdated curricula, but no one acknowledges a scientifically-proven fact that we all understand intuitively: Academic potential varies between individuals, and cannot be dramatically improved. In The Cult of Smart, educator and outspoken leftist Fredrik deBoer exposes this omission as the central flaw of our entire society, which has created and perpetuated an unjust class structure based on intellectual ability. Since cognitive talent varies from person to person, our education system can never create equal opportunity for all. Instead, it teaches our children that hierarchy and competition are natural, and that human value should be based on intelligence. These ideas are counter to everything that the left believes, but until they acknowledge the existence of individual cognitive differences, progressives remain complicit in keeping the status quo in place. This passionate, voice-driven manifesto demands that we embrace a new goal for education: equality of outcomes. We must create a world that has a place for everyone, not just the academically talented. But we’ll never achieve this dream until the Cult of Smart is destroyed.




How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students, Second Edition


Book Description

Properly crafted and individually tailored feedback on student work boosts student achievement across subjects and grades. In this updated and expanded second edition of her best-selling book, Susan M. Brookhart offers enhanced guidance and three lenses for considering the effectiveness of feedback: (1) does it conform to the research, (2) does it offer an episode of learning for the student and teacher, and (3) does the student use the feedback to extend learning? In this comprehensive guide for teachers at all levels, you will find information on every aspect of feedback, including • Strategies to uplift and encourage students to persevere in their work. • How to formulate and deliver feedback that both assesses learning and extends instruction. • When and how to use oral, written, and visual as well as individual, group, or whole-class feedback. • A concise and updated overview of the research findings on feedback and how they apply to today's classrooms. In addition, the book is replete with examples of good and bad feedback as well as rubrics that you can use to construct feedback tailored to different learners, including successful students, struggling students, and English language learners. The vast majority of students will respond positively to feedback that shows you care about them and their learning. Whether you teach young students or teens, this book is an invaluable resource for guaranteeing that the feedback you give students is engaging, informative, and, above all, effective.




Baseball Hacks


Book Description

Baseball Hacks isn't your typical baseball book--it's a book about how to watch, research, and understand baseball. It's an instruction manual for the free baseball databases. It's a cookbook for baseball research. Every part of this book is designed to teach baseball fans how to do something. In short, it's a how-to book--one that will increase your enjoyment and knowledge of the game. So much of the way baseball is played today hinges upon interpreting statistical data. Players are acquired based on their performance in statistical categories that ownership deems most important. Managers make in-game decisions based not on instincts, but on probability - how a particular batter might fare against left-handedpitching, for instance. The goal of this unique book is to show fans all the baseball-related stuff that they can do for free (or close to free). Just as open source projects have made great software freely available, collaborative projects such as Retrosheet and Baseball DataBank have made great data freely available. You can use these data sources to research your favorite players, win your fantasy league, or appreciate the game of baseball even more than you do now. Baseball Hacks shows how easy it is to get data, process it, and use it to truly understand baseball. The book lists a number of sources for current and historical baseball data, and explains how to load it into a database for analysis. It then introduces several powerful statistical tools for understanding data and forecasting results. For the uninitiated baseball fan, author Joseph Adler walks readers through the core statistical categories for hitters (batting average, on-base percentage, etc.), pitchers (earned run average, strikeout-to-walk ratio, etc.), and fielders (putouts, errors, etc.). He then extrapolates upon these numbers to examine more advanced data groups like career averages, team stats, season-by-season comparisons, and more. Whether you're a mathematician, scientist, or season-ticket holder to your favorite team, Baseball Hacks is sure to have something for you. Advance praise for Baseball Hacks: "Baseball Hacks is the best book ever written for understanding and practicing baseball analytics. A must-read for baseball professionals and enthusiasts alike." -- Ari Kaplan, database consultant to the Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, and Baltimore Orioles "The game was born in the 19th century, but the passion for its analysis continues to grow into the 21st. In Baseball Hacks, Joe Adler not only demonstrates thatthe latest data-mining technologies have useful application to the study of baseball statistics, he also teaches the reader how to do the analysis himself, arming the dedicated baseball fan with tools to take his understanding of the game to a higher level." -- Mark E. Johnson, Ph.D., Founder, SportMetrika, Inc. and Baseball Analyst for the 2004 St. Louis Cardinals




Power Score


Book Description

ghSMART, the bestselling team behind Who: The A Method for Hiring, returns with a breakthrough formula for how the best leaders and teams deliver results. “ghSMART is the world’s top firm for helping leaders hire talented teams and run them at full power. Nothing is more important.”—Marshall Goldsmith, bestselling author of Mojo and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There “The most useful book about leadership.” That is what we hope you and your team will say after finishing Power Score. Is your team running at full power? Only 10 percent of leaders run their teams at full power. The formula you are about to learn is based on the most extensive research of its kind, spanning more than 15,000 careers with over 9 million data points. The idea has been battle-tested for more than two decades by leaders in every major industry. It works. Successful leadership starts with three key questions: 1. Priorities—Do we have the right priorities? (Only 24 percent of leaders do.) 2. Who—Do we have the right people on the team? (Only 14 percent of leaders do.) 3. Relationships—Do we have the right relationships that deliver results? (Only 47 percent of leaders do.) Learn how to calculate your team’s Power Score, and how to improve each of the three key areas of leadership. Learn what to do, and what not do, from compelling statistics and inspiring stories of those leaders who have succeeded and those who have failed. You may be surprised how easy it is to read this little book. And you may be even more surprised by how fast this approach will boost your team’s results. When you dial up your team’s Power Score, you will make a greater impact as a leader, help your team earn more money for your cause (whatever your cause may be), and enjoy greater career success. Praise for Power Score “Shaking distrust out of an organization is hard. But the payoff is immense. Bravo to Smart, Street and Foster for sharing their ideas about how to make that happen.”—Forbes “[Power Score] offers insights on improving in each dimension and inspiration. It’s written briskly, in a question-and-answer format that keeps ideas clear and concise. The book’s a winner and maybe you will be too if you try its approach.”—The Globe and Mail “The power score is the secret sauce that gives the group the information needed to fix problems. The authors provide plenty of guidance presented in an accessible Q&A format.”—Success “I wouldn’t be surprised if Power Score became the new go-to guide for leadership. Effective teams are key in everything from healthcare to business to government to nonprofits, and this book will help organizations change the conversation about getting results.”—Atul Gawande, New York Times bestselling author of Being Mortal and The Checklist Manifesto “Smart, Street, and Foster have turned more than twenty years of research on leadership into a practical, systematic approach for getting results.”—Frederick W. Smith, chairman and chief executive officer of FedEx Corporation “My entire team applied the principles of Power Score and has enjoyed explosive growth as a result. Even better, I am having more fun as a leader than ever before.”—Jeff Booth, chief executive officer and founder of BuildDirect