Readers have always read high and low, and to fight that urge is to fight the freedom inherent in the act of reading itself. The only arguments that have any traction, as best as I can see it, are about whether the genre classification of 'young adult' should exist at all.
You are literally never alone. While there are roughly 6.7 billion people on Earth, you may not feel that many of them at all care very much about your existence. But within your colon alone are living at least 1012 billion organisms, or roughly a thousand times the number of people on the planet. Stop your metabolic processes, and you stop theirs.
Elite private-school educations leave students unprepared for a standardized test with which their public school counterparts are innately familiar.
As someone who attended six different public schools across America, went to Harvard, and subsequently became a tutor in Manhattan's affluent Upper East Side, I've witnessed firsthand the differences in learning styles between public school educations and private.
Anguish over the loss of a loved one or feelings of helplessness have complex roots. But in the end, they make you feel bad because they adjust your brain's chemistry. Happiness and its opposite are both electro-chemical reactions; those reactions are temporary and ineffable and could even have hidden benefits.
When I was a teenager, what I most wanted to read were fantasy novels. Not Tolkien and Malory, but sword-and-sorcery pulp. I craved glowy blue magic, chainmail bikinis, dragons with unpronounceable names.
Higher SAT scores mean better college matriculation rates. So it's no wonder that private schools in ultra-competitive environments would grease the qualifying process as much as possible.
In my business - SAT tutoring - you get used to sighs. A client's mother frets over the sheer amount of work her daughter has to do to get her score up, until she reaches the resigned moment when she will sigh and observe that no one thought you could prepare for the SAT back when she took it - it was 'untutorable.'
At Horace Mann High School in affluent Riverdale, New York, one of the top schools in the country, those who receive double time on tests are plentiful enough to qualify as their own segment of the student body. Known to their peers as 2Ts, they participate in the same activities, get the same grades, and attend the same range of colleges.
