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Thinking — A Lost Art? C OLLEGE RECRUITINGTIPS by Jennifer Noonan 2003 Class (Seniors) * College applications, college essays, SAT Exam dates & deadlines * College recruiting, contacting coaches, visiting schools, scholarship offers * Recruiting rules, dates and deadlines, * New! NCAA Clearinghouse - registration * If you have a grip on all of the above, chances are, you are well on your way, good luck! * For the seniors who may be getting a late start in the recruiting game, there is time left! * Check out the Senior Acceleration Program, see ad pg? * If you are serious about playing next year in college... be proactive! * You need to get involved in the college recruiting process NOW! * College coaches are looking for good, solid student-athletes, not necessarily the best player on the team. 2004 Class (Juniors) * September, correspondence begins per NCAA bylaws. Your junior year is the most critical time in college recruiting. * When a college coach sends you a letter, respond and be prompt! * If you receive letters early in your junior year, chances are, coaches are interested in finding out more about you... keep in mind, coaches are also sending information to other prospective-athletes. * What does a form letter mean to you? Perhaps, the end result is a scholarship offer. * Our recommendation - do NOT take letters lightly! Every letter that you receive has some meaning. * If you have been receiving information from colleges, continue to update them on your progress. * Make Academics your #1 Priority * Be proactive, be persistent and be prepared . 2005 & 2006 Grads * Attend college nights at your high school - collect information on different colleges. * Commit to your work in the classroom - good grades matter the most. * Become involved in extracurricular activities. * Multi sports versus Club teams? Play all sports, coaches are looking for great athletes. A BOUT THE A UTHOR : Jennifer Noonan is the owner of College Athletic Recruiting. Reach her at (949) 673-6322 or at jnoonan@collegeathleticrecruiting.com reparing for college begins long before students reach eleventh or twelfth grade. I would never suggest that 12-year-olds should scrutinize college catalogues or take practice SAT exams, but they do need to begin developing academic habits of mind. Discipline with homework is a good start but no more than a basis for university studies. Young people need to know how to think. Faculty from California's community colleges, state university system, and the University of California recently published a statement of competencies for entering students. As a high school English teacher, I was immediately suspicious that this would one more study from the ivory towers telling me what I'm doing wrong. It is nothing of the kind. This document describes the "foundational dispositions well-prepared students have for academic reading, writing, and critical thinking." I cannot imagine any college in the country would disagree with their findings. College faculty expect students to • have an appetite to experiment with new ideas, challenge their own beliefs, seek out other points of view, and contribute to intellectual discussions. • apply analytical abilities to their own endeavors as well as to the work of others. • generate critical responses to what they read, see, and hear, and develop a healthy skepticism toward their world. • assume a measure of responsibility for their own learning Professors reported that while students are more diligent than in the past, many seem unwilling to engage in the hard work of thinking or analyzing unless it is directed to their immediate interests. Forty percent of the professors interviewed for this study said that their students' ability to tackle complex, analytical work has declined over the course of their teaching years. One commented that students' thought processes "seem shallow, like sound bites." In our effort to insure that children P have the basic skills they need to be academically competitive, we may have shortchanged the most basic skill of all – thinking. It is too easy to assign blame to popular culture and news programs. Their penchant for sound bites is duly recorded and deplored. They encourage a superficial analysis of issues. What we need to examine are the kinds of conversations occurring in classrooms. Do young people see models of intellectual discourse? Do they participate? Are they taken to task for faulty reasoning or shabby evidence? Have they experienced the pleasurable give and take of academic argument? I fear that such classroom discussions are all too rare. In my experience, the most common cause of poor writing is weak thinking. If a student cannot marshal the evidence to support a point of view in his head, he will find it difficult to do so on paper. University professors do not walk students through a writing process to help them construct their essays. Papers are assigned. Entering college students are expected to be able to • analyze the ideas or arguments of others critically • summarize ideas or information contained in a text • synthesize ideas from several sources • report facts or narrate events For most of these assignments, students need to be able to generate an effective thesis, develop this these convincingly with well-chosen examples, good reasons, and logical arguments; and structure their writing so by Carol Jago that it moves beyond formulaic patterns. I fully understand teenagers' reluctance to think about academic topics. If my tenth grade students put half the energy they invest in planning Saturday night to literary analysis, their essays would improve dramatically. We need to help kids see that such an investment pays enormous dividends. Thinking matters. We must help them do it more often. You can find the full report, Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies Expected of Students Entering California's Public Colleges and Universities at: http://www.academicsenate.cc.ca.us / P u b l i c a tions/Papers/AcademicLiteracy/main .htm. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Carol Jago teaches English at Santa Monica High School and directs the California Reading and Literature Project at UCLA. She can be reached at jago@gseis.ucla.edu. W HAT A RE YOU D OING TO M AKE YOURSELF VISIBLEO C OLLEGE T C OACHES ? T T UST I DOESN ? J H APPEN. . BE PRO -ACTIVE

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