Private School Teacher Recommendations

Private School Teacher Recommendations Teacher recommendations are an important part of the  private school admissions process. These assessments schools to hear from your teachers, the people who know you best in the classroom environment, in order to get a better idea of what you’re like as a student. The idea of asking a teacher to complete a recommendation may be intimidating to some, but with a little preparation, this part of the process should be a breeze. Here are some common questions, along with the information you need to prepare your recommendations:   How many teacher recommendations do I need? Most private schools will require three recommendations as part of the admission process, even if you complete one of the standard applications. Typically, one recommendation will be directed to your schools principal, head of school, or guidance counselor. The other two recommendations  are to be completed by your English and math teachers. Some schools will require additional recommendations, like science or a personal recommendation. If youre applying to a specialty school, like an art school or a sports-focused school, you may also be asked to have an art teacher or coach complete a recommendation. The admission office will have all of the details you need to ensure that you complete all the requirements.   What is a personal recommendation? A great characteristic of private school is that your experience goes beyond the classroom. From arts and athletics to living on dorm and being involved in the community, who you are as a person is just as important as who you are as a student. Teacher recommendations showcase your academic strengths and areas in need of improvement, as well as your personal learning style, while personal recommendations cover life beyond the classroom and share more information about you as an individual, a friend and a citizen. Remember that not every school requires these, so dont be concerned if its not an option when you apply.   Should my teachers complete my personal recommendations, too? Personal recommendations should be completed  by an adult who knows you well. You can ask another teacher (not the same teachers completing the academic recommendations), a coach, an advisor, or even a friend’s parent. The goal of these recommendations is to have someone who knows you on a personal level speak on your behalf. Perhaps you’re looking to play in a  private school athletics  program, have a strong passion for  art, or are regularly involved in community service activities. Personal recommendations can tell the admission committee more about these endeavors. In these cases, its a good idea to pick either a coach, art teacher, or volunteer supervisor to complete the personal recommendation. Personal recommendations can also be used to share information about areas in which you need personal growth, which isn’t a bad thing. We all have areas of our lives to improve, whether it’s your ability to get places on time, a need to not overcommit yourself to activities or the ability to keep your room clean that you need to work on, private  school  is the perfect environment in which to grow and gain a greater sense of maturity and responsibility. How do I ask my teacher or coach to complete a recommendation? Some students can get nervous when it comes to asking for a recommendation, but if you take the time to explain to your teachers why you’re  applying to private school,  your teachers will most likely be supportive of your new educational endeavor. The key is to ask nicely, make it easy for your teacher to complete the application (guide them through the process) and give your teachers plenty of advance notice and a set deadline to submit. If the school has a paper form to complete, be sure to print it out for your teacher and provide them with an addressed and stamped envelope to make it easier for them to return it to school. If the application is to be completed online, send your teachers an email with a direct link to access the recommendation form and, again, remind them of a deadline. It’s always nice to follow up with a thank-you note once they have completed the application.   What if my teacher doesnt know me well or doesnt like me? Can I ask my teacher from last year instead? The school to which you’re applying needs a recommendation from your current teacher, regardless of how well you think he or she knows you, or if you think they like you. The goal is for them to understand your mastery of the materials being taught this year, not what you learned last year or five years ago. If you have concerns, keep in mind that some schools will give you the option to submit personal recommendations, and you can ask another teacher to complete one of those. If you are still concerned, talk to the admission office at the school youre applying to in order to see what they recommend. Sometimes, they will let you submit two recommendations: one from this years teacher and one from last years teacher.   What if my teacher is late submitting the recommendation? This one is easy to answer: Don’t let this happen. As the applicant, it’s your responsibility to give your teacher plenty of notice, a friendly reminder of deadlines and to check in to see how its going and if they have completed it. Don’t pester them constantly, but definitely don’t wait until the day before the recommendation is due. When you ask your teacher to complete the recommendation, make sure they clearly know the deadline, and ask them to let you know when it’s done. If you haven’t heard from them and the deadline is approaching, about two weeks before it’s due, do another check in. Most schools today also have online portals where you can track the progress of your application, and you can see when your teachers and/or coaches have submitted their recommendations.   If your teacher recommendations are late, make sure you immediately contact the school to see if theres still time to submit. Some private schools are strict with deadlines and will not accept application materials after the deadline, while others will be more lenient, especially when it comes to teacher recommendations.   Can I read my recommendations? Most simply put, no. One reason why you have to work closely with your teachers to ensure they submit the recommendations on time is that teacher recommendations and personal recommendations are all typically confidential. That means, the teachers need to submit them themselves, and not give them to you to return. Some school even require recommendations to come from the teachers in a sealed and signed envelope or via a private online link in order to make sure the confidentiality of it is preserved. The goal is for the teacher to give a full and honest review of you as a student, including your strengths and areas in need of improvement. Schools want a true picture of your abilities and behavior, and your teachers honesty will help the admission team decide if you are a good fit for their  academic program, and in turn, if their academic program will meet your needs as a student. If teachers think youre going to read the recommendations, they might withhold important information that could help the admission committee better understand you as a scholar and a member of your community. And keep in mind that the areas in which you need to improve are things that the admission team expects to learn about you. No one has mastered every aspect of every subject, and there’s always room to improve. Should I submit more recommendations than requested? No. Plain and simple, no. Many applicants mistakenly think that stacking their applications with dozens of really strong personal recommendations and extra subject recommendations from past teachers is the best way to go. However, your admission officers don’t want to wade through dozens of pages of recommendations, especially not ones from teachers in elementary school when youre applying to high school (believe it or not, that happens!). Stick with the required recommendations from your current teachers, and if requested, choose the one or two individuals who best know you for your personal recommendations, and stop there.

Definition and Examples of Anti-Rhetoric

Definition and Examples of Anti-Rhetoric In argumentative speech and  writing, anti-rhetoric is  the act of disparaging an opponents use of language by characterizing it as rhetoric or oratory, with the implication that eloquent language is inherently meaningless (mere words) or deceitful. Also called straight talk. As Sam Leith has observed, Being anti-rhetoric is, finally, just another rhetorical strategy. Rhetoric is what the other guy is doing- whereas you, youre just speaking the plain truth as you see it (Words Like Loaded Pistols: Rhetoric From Aristotle to Obama; Basic Books, 2012). Examples and Observations My opponent gives speeches. I offer solutions. (Hillary Rodham Clinton in a speech to General Motors employees in Warren, Ohio, Feb. 14, 2008) We think this journal may at least be justly commended for its comparative freedom from high-flown rhetoric. We recently rejected a somewhat elaborate paper on an important topic chiefly on account of its stilted and turgid style, and our pen often makes sad work with the fine passages which adorn (?) the contributions sent us by young writers. (E.E. White, editorial in The National Teacher, Volume 1, 1871) Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise,Three-piled hyperboles, spruce affectation,Figures pedantical; these summer-fliesHave blown me full of maggot ostentation:I do forswear them; and I here protest,By this white glove- how white the hand, God knows!- Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressdIn russet yeas and honest kersey noes.(Lord Berowne in William Shakespeares Loves Labours Lost, Act 5, scene 2) Palin vs. Obama: Cravin That Straight TalkBarack Obama has been denounced again and again as a privileged wordsmith, a man of mere words who has authored two books (to use Sarah Palin’s verb), and done little else. The leathery extremist Phyllis Schlafly had this to say, at the Republican Convention, about Palin: I like her because she’s a woman who’s worked with her hands, which Barack Obama never did, he was just an à ©litist who worked with words. The fresher-faced extremist Rick Santorum, a former Republican senator, called Obama just a person of words, adding, Words are everything to him. . . .†Sarah Palin . . . may claim, as she did in last Thursday’s Vice-Presidential debate, that Americans are cravin’ that straight talk, but they are sure not going to get it from the Governor- not with her peculiar habit of speaking only half a sentence and then moving on to another for spoliation, that strange, ghostly drifting through the haziest ph rases. (James Wood, Verbage. The New Yorker, October 13, 2008) The Anti-Rhetoric of Presidents and Prime Ministers   It is in their trenchant opposition to rhetoric, oratory, and their corresponding celebration of rhetorical simplicity that presidents have been most explicitly anti-intellectual. Here, the link between rhetorical simplicity and anti-intellectualism . . . is manifest. President Eisenhowers definition of an intellectual displays this link: the intellectual . . . [is] a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows, he once proposed. A Nixon speechwriter echoes this statement when he observes: the people who are most eloquent are often the least wise. As a Regan speechwriter observes, One of the great myths of the modern age in particular is that great speeches and effective leadership [are] about speaking cleverly. (Elvin T. Lim, The Anti-Intellectual Presidency: The Decline of Presidential Rhetoric from George Washington to George W. Bush. Oxford University Press, 2008)In October 1966, knowing that the Labour Minister (and one-time Fellow of New College, Oxford) Richard Crossman would be winding up a debate on prices and incomes, [Margaret Thatcher] took the opportunity to discredit her opponents eloquence in advance. We are all used to the right hon. Gentlemans ebullient, effervescent style, she said. It is always extremely attractive. It is often something of an Oxford Union style. Responding to some laughter in the Chamber, she went on: I assure hon. Members that I am making no blandishments. The right hon. Gentleman has the kind of style which sounds tremendously impressive and which is most agreeable to listen to, but I find that one never believes a word of what he says because one knows that he is quite capable of making just as attractive an ebullient and effervescent speech tomorrow entirely contradicting all he has said today. . . .Of course, her own plain speaking is as much a rhetorical construction as the grandest of styles, and it is a relatively simple task to show that, knowingly or not, many of her assertions of plain political sincerity are figuratively produced. We say what we mean and mean what we say, is one of many examples of her use of antimetabole, where, ironically, the circular and self-validating structure of the figure is asked to create an impression of straight talking. (Christopher Reid, Margaret Thatcher and the Gendering of Political Oratory. Oratory in Action, ed. by Michael Edwards and Christopher Reid. Manchester University Press, 2004) Anti-Rhetoric As a Strategic Act: Mark Antony,Silvio Berlusconi, and Donald Trump [T]he I just want to tell it like it is maneuver is a familiar one in the annals of rhetoric. It’s what Mark Antony is up to when he says to the Roman crowd in Julius Caesar, I am no orator, as Brutus is; / But, as you know me all, a plain, blunt man,† in the midst of his â€Å"Friends, Romans and countrymen† speech, one of the most cunning displays of technical rhetoric, not only in Shakespeare, but in the English language. Rhetoric  is the language Rome’s elite used to debate; by denying that he knows the first thing about it, Mark Antony is in effect tearing up his gold membership card and reassuring his plebeian audience that, though he may look rich and powerful, he is really one of them. Nearly four centuries after Shakespeare wrote those words, Silvio Berlusconi successfully struck the same pose in modern Italy. If there’s one thing I can’t abide it’s  rhetoric, he told the Italian public. All I’m interested in is what needs to get done.But for all its protests,  anti-rhetoric  is just another form of rhetoric and, whether Mr. [Donald]  Trump is conscious of it or not, it has its own  rhetorical  markers. Short sentences (We have to build a wall, folks!) that pummel the listener in a series of sharp jabs. . . .Anti-rhetoric  also uses I and you  constantly, because its central goal is not to lay out an argument but to assert a relationship, and a story about us and our struggle against them. It says the things society has deemed unsayable, at least in part to demonstrate contempt for the  rhetorical  conventions imposed by the elite- and if that elite then cries out in horror, so much the better.(Mark Thompson, Trump a nd the Dark History of Straight Talk. The New York Times, August 27, 2016) The term rhetoric of anti-rhetoric refers to the fact that many public speakers, in politics and law courts, self-consciously distance themselves from perverse uses of deceitful rhetoric, while presenting themselves as courageous truth-tellers. They use this topos in their self-presentation to align themselves squarely with public interest, and that would obviously give them an edge in a competitive environment. Speakers demonstrate in this way that they are aware of the importance of speeches as a vehicle for deliberation and of the dangers posed by deceptive communication [Jon Hesk, 2000:pp. 4-5]. The topos not only functions as a strategic act of self-authorisation, it is also inherently antagonistic in that one distances oneself from ones adversaries, who are, it is implied, likely to engage in illicit rhetorical maneuvering (ibid. pp. 169, 208). (Ineke Sluiter, Deliberation, Free Speech and the Marketplace of Ideas. Bending Opinion: Essays on Persuasion in the Public Domain, ed. by Ton Van Haaften, Henrike Jansen, Jaap De Jong, and Willem De Koetsenruijter. Leiden University Press, 2011) Anti-Rhetoric in the Human Sciences Where is rhetoric to be found in the development of the human sciences? Boeckhs Enzklopadie includes rhetoric in the chapter on the empirical human sciences and understands it as a theory of stylistic speech form . . .. According to Boeckh, . . . [rhetoric] finally relapsed into insubstantial and affected verbosity. In the modern period, however, the theory of rhetoric made no progress, indeed it had been neglected and almost forgotten because attention is directed more towards intellectual substance than to form. Boeckhs statement indicates the three-fold aspects of anti-rhetoric apparent in the human sciences. First, form is considered as external, as something imposed upon the intellectual content; second, rhetoric is devalued as an unphilosophical artistic skill; and third, as a persuasive art it is subordinated to the dialectical theory of knowledge.(Walter Rà ¼egg, Rhetoric and Anti-Rhetoric in the 19th and 20th Century Human Sciences in Germany. The Recovery of Rhetoric: Persuasive Discourse and Disciplinarity in the Human Sciences, ed. by R.H. Roberts and J.M.M. Good. University  Press of Virginia, 1993) Anti-Anti-Rhetoric The invitation to rhetoric is not, I emphasize, an invitation to replace careful analysis with rhetoric, or to abandon mathematics in favor of name-calling or flowery language. The good rhetorician loves care, precision, explicitness, and economy in argument as much as the next person. . . . The suspicion of rhetoric is as old as philosophy itself: we cannot use mere plausibility because an eloquent speaker could fool us: Socrates: And he who possesses the art [of rhetoric] can make the same thing appear to the same people just, now unjust, at will?Phaedrus: To be sure.( Phaedrus 261d) We need something, it has been said, besides the mere social fact that an argument proved persuasive.To such an objection the answers, then, are two. Science and other epistemologically pure methods can also be used to lie. Our defense must be to discourage lying, not to discourage a certain class of talk. Secondly, talk against talk is self-refuting. The person making it appeals to Anti-Anti-Rhetoric a social, nonepistemological standard of persuasiveness by the very act of trying to persuade someone that mere persuasion is not enough. (Deirdre N. McCloskey, The Rhetoric of Economics, 2nd ed. University  of Wisconsin Press, 1998)