Summer vacations and what to do for the August 22nd SAT

My wife and I just got back from a couple of weeks in a cabin in Mentone, Alabama. It's where I grew up on Little River in the northeast corner of the state where the Appalachians run out. We were there for the weeks surrounding the Fourth of July. It was quiet, it was cooler than Florida, and it was exactly the kind of break that makes you appreciate stillness.

Now that we're back, the stories are rolling in. One student just returned from Paris and India. There are internships, family trips, summer programs, and a hundred other good things happening. I love hearing about all of it, and I hope every one of you has had at least a stretch of summer that felt like yours.

But here's the other half of the message.

Five weeks to the August SAT

We're about five weeks out from the August test. That's not a lot of time, and it's also plenty of time if you use it well.

Right now is the window. Your school semester hasn't started yet. You don't have four AP classes, a sport, and a club officer position all pulling at you at once. In September, that changes. The students who wait until the school year to get serious about test prep are trying to do their hardest work at the moment they have the least room for it.

The students who succeed are the ones who push through and do the hard work of preparing. That's not a motivational poster. It's what I've watched happen for more than thirty years. There's no shortcut, no trick, no single strategy that substitutes for putting in the reps.

The real predictor

People ask me all the time what predicts a score increase. Is it starting score? Yes, to some extent. Math ability? Reading speed?

It's motivation. Every time.

The student who wants something specific badly enough to sit down on a Tuesday in July and work through a set of hard questions is the student whose score moves. The student who's going through the motions because a parent signed them up is the student whose score stays flat. I can teach method. I can't manufacture desire.

So the questions I'd ask you to sit with are these: What do you want to achieve? Where do you want to go?

Not what school sounds impressive. Not what your friend is applying to. What do you want? Get specific about it. Write it down if that helps. Because once you have a real answer, the work stops feeling like a chore someone assigned you and starts feeling like the thing standing between you and where you're headed.

Use the downtime

You have a few weeks of relative quiet left. Use them. Push through your ceiling in August and September, before the school year closes in around you.

The trip stories are great. Keep them coming. Just don't let the summer end without also having something to show for it on the score report.

Let's get to work.

Mr. John