4 Sure-Fire Ways to Prep Your Child For High School

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Welcome back! Earlier this week, we wrote a post on the risks of students not being prepared for high school.

If you missed that post, you can find it here:

Prepping for high school

This post is intended to give you some concrete actions you can take today to make sure students are prepared for the challenges of high school.

But first, why does this really matter?

Part 1: Why preparation matters

We wrote in the previous article about how everything builds on itself. For example, Chemistry is built on Algebra 2, which is built on Algebra 1. Remove one part of the link, then everything that is built on top of it is shaky.

But that’s not the only reason preparation matters.

College admissions can be understood as three parts:

1. The setup (the focus of this article)

2. The sale (e.g., the creation of a college profile)

3. The close (e.g., submitting an application and getting acceptance)

The setup is what you do all the way up to the point that you work on your college application, including the coursework and extracurriculars you take. It is the substance of what you have actually done.

Without the setup, selling is nearly impossible. You can write the best essay in the world, but if you have terrible grades and nothing to show for your time in high school, you will end up at the bottom of the reject pile.

But what most families do not understand is that a key part of the setup is momentum. Every college admissions officer wants to read a good story. They want to see a beginning, middle, and end that makes sense. The student who excelled in the beginning and overcame every challenge as they went along. Or they want to see someone who struggled at the beginning but slowly moved in the right direction.

No admissions officer wants to see someone who started strong and sputtered out as they went on. The story that is told is that you need to be moving in the right direction.

Momentum.

And the key to momentum, as in physics, is to have the correct velocity.

Part 2: 4 ways to create the right momentum