St. Paul’s School for Girls is located in Brooklandville, Maryland. At this amazing school, the hearts and minds of the students are educated in an inclusive, supportive community founded on the basic Episcopal principles and values of integrity, spiritual growth, and respect. The school aims to nurture creativity and intellectual curiosity, empower the student’s voice, and be an inspiration for confident and ambitious leaders who will be ready for serving their communities and the world.

The school draws vision and direction from this mission. All of the school’s employees are committed to the individual experiences and journeys in the school. The school wants all girls to challenge their learning process to ultimately be able to forge their particular and distinct future paths in the ever-changing world.

The school wants all students to understand and harness the process and the power of asking the right questions and to learn to feel comfortable with making mistakes, taking healthy or calculated risks, and uncertainty. All these elements are important for what the school considers a robust and healthy learning community.

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The Archer School for Girls was established by three visionary and bold women, From the beginning, some twenty years ago, the Archer School was meant to be a highly innovative school, a place where all programmatic decisions would be based on the most recent research and beliefs about how young women are learning, developing, and thriving.

The Archer School is a contemporary school for girls and it is the school’s mission to educate and shape this country’s future female leaders in a challenging environment that’s ambitious but in a joyful way.

That ambitious mission is clearly visible every day in the school’s classrooms and hallways. Visitors are often pleasantly surprised by how friendly and happy the girls at Archer are. They’re also often surprised by how stunningly confident and unusually poised Archer girls come across, and one of the key things is the girls’ competence that forms the basis for this confidence.

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It’s been more than four weeks now since I began my life without a fallback plan, and it’s been a pretty intense learning experience. Being on your own and working for yourself can be a lot more complicated than one might expect.  I thought in the beginning – “this will be great! I’m doing what I love and I get to make my own schedule and do whatever I want!”

Ha. How naive I was.

Well, I said that I would use this blog to hold myself accountable to document both my successes and my struggles, so here they are. Remember the list of goals that I made in that first post that outlined what I would strive to do every day? Remember that I said I wanted to earn my GED and follow the free GED Math prep at BestGEDClasses? Well, here’s my self-progress report for the first four weeks:

1. Follow the Map – C
Although I begin every day with a list of things to get finished for the day, there have only been one or two days where I follow and actually complete that list. I do a much better job of distracting myself following my path. Because of this, I’ve gotten a little behind, especially with my attempts to score a GED.

Continue reading “First Steps Without A Fallback”

I profess to being an absolute feedback junkie. Positive feedback tells me that what I’m already doing, I should keep doing. Negative tells me I need to take a step back, and evaluate whether alterations need to be made. The more constructive it is, the better. So, if this is what I believe, if this is what I know will help me improve, then why is negative feedback so hard to take?

All of this came to rise earlier this week when a friend of mine read this blog. He was the second person I told to check it out, off-handedly. Little did I expect him to check right away, then proceed with a list of all the reasons why nobody cares. It could have been an enormous bulleted list. It was a full frontal assault, and no sugar coating it at all. If you’d seen me in a bathing suit, then you’d realize I like my sugar about 5 pounds too much. It took me a moment to step back and take the advice and decide what I would use and what I would discard. Continue reading “How to Handle Negative Feedback”

No matter your profession, your level of education, or your income bracket, almost everyone has a story about a dreaded writing assignment or a fanatical teacher who bled red ink.

Our teachers were all well-intentioned and gave us some necessary tools for success, but in the process, many of us learned that there’s a right way and a wrong way to write and that more often than not, we were doing it wrong. In the new era of Internet marketing and social media buzz, writing well isn’t just a necessary evil to pass a class, it’s often the only way to reach short-attention-span consumers who have too many choices and too little time.
So, here are five lessons that the real world teaches us about how to write to engage our target market:

Lesson 1: Yes, you CAN!

Forget what anyone has ever told you before. If you can participate in a conversation, you can write. If you worry about your grammar, check what you know with these practice tests (GED and beyond) If you are passionate about what you do, you can write. If you can text or tweet or post on Facebook, you can write. If you can’t spell, aren’t sure about punctuation, and lack an impressive vocabulary, you can still write.

Writing is nothing more than capturing those ideas swirling in your head and transmitting them to paper. Writing is the process of creating, or reflecting, or explaining, or persuading. Writing is nothing more than talking – on paper. Continue reading “Tips to improve writing techniques”

There are a lot of backpacks out there to choose from these days, from the very basic to rather expensive models with a lot of extra bells and whistles. Canvas backpacks have been around for decades now and not the most modern of options many of them still offer great storage and function as well as a classic look that never really goes out of style. The fact that they are very affordable should not be overlooked either.

A canvas backpack for school, if it is well made, is every bit as tough as some of its pricier counterparts. The fact that the canvas has a little bit of extra “give” can be helpful as well, especially if you have a lot of oddly shaped items to carry. Here are some great examples of a canvas backpack that are practical, stylish and whose price tag will not break the bank.

Continue reading “Stylish Alternative – A Canvas Backpack”

Suddenly, the heat’s on to stay cool

A couple of years ago, mesh trucker caps, the kind with the peaked foam facade screaming “John Deere” and other never-in-New York logos, perched on the pates of intrepid hipsters in such edgy haunts as Williamsburg, a Brooklyn neighborhood.

Now, guys who grace the cover of YM magazine, wear them. In other words, now they’re not exactly cool.

“As soon as Ashton Kutcher adopts a trend, that’s when you know it’s over,” says Robert Lanham, Williamsburg denizen and author of the recently published Hipster Handbook. Ditto Kutcher’s female counterpoint, Avril Lavigne, she of the erstwhile-edgy studded leather cuffs.

Out in a mall store in Massapequa, N.Y., a mere 30 miles from his neighborhood, Lanham spies a succinct illustration of his point: a red-and-white trucker hat with “Dork” slapped across the front in fuzzy black letters. When it makes it out to Massapequa — Jerry Seinfeld says it’s Indian for “near the mall” — the irony of appropriating something so antifashion as a scratchy nylon hat gets lost along the Long Island Expressway.

And guess who becomes the real dork.

Continue reading “‘Everything is so 5 minutes ago’”

There are endless lists on how to create that you just skim over and forget about. But you should really consider the opposite. How do you stifle your creativity? Not grow it? Or inspire an audience? Trust me. It’ll make a greater impact and slap you across the face. In the best way possible… Cheers!

1) Completely overwhelm yourself by what everyone else is doing in the blogosphere and keep at least 25 tabs open on your computer to see how you can compete. Consequently, decide you can’t and lock down into an epic state of paralysis. Might as well close up shop. At the prompt, “Are you sure you want to delete your blog?” Hit yes.

2) Procrastinate as an act of fierce rebellion. If the world really wanted you to create, it wouldn’t be so damn hard. So do nothing instead until the procrastination turns into a form of debilitating depression.

3) Exhaust yourself with office drama, gossip, and meaningless initiatives until you are emotionally drained by 6:30 pm and can do nothing but eat in front of the TV in comfort. Squash and mutilate the voice that wanted you to do work on a drawing tonight. Inform that voice it is dead to you.

Continue reading “How to Stifle Your Creativity And Underwhelm the Masses”

Wow, today has been hectic and I’ve not even been at work. Last night I went to bed fairly early because I had some sorting out to do with the bank. Why? Because I’m an idiot.

I managed to pay my monthly credit card bill twice for some reason and normally I wouldn’t care, because hey, that balance needs to be cleared. But it’s August people. I don’t have the money to be paying for things twice right now – places to go, people to see.

So being the idiot that I am, I groveled to the bank, and they told me to ring back first thing today to get the second payment recalled. And this is why I went to bed early last night so that I could be up at 9 am to beg the bank for my money back.

After 2 minutes on the phone, the cash was back in my account. OK, well that was easy. Now do my homework, I need to get that GED! Fortunately, I take these prep classes, thank God! But I still need to learn of course and it’s a lot, check it yourself.

Continue reading “Adult Education Sucks!”