Field Trip Permission Form I, , Give Permission To (Parents Name) (Students Name) To: Fill & Download for Free

“You can come early, you can leave late, you can take work home with you, but don’t try to do all three.” That’s the advice I was given early in my teaching career, and I found myself violating this rule several times a year. This is a sample:Preparing lessonsChanging lessons you just delivered in the hopes they will be more effective next time.Documenting, not just a percentage grade, but whether a student meets, exceeds, approaches, or is well below a few dozen learning standards or objectives.Differentiating lessons for different levels of readiness. For example, some of your 7th graders read on the same level as typical third graders, others read like high school or college students. Your lessons need to be meaningful for all of your students and encourage all students to grow. Good luck.Trying out various technologies, especially the free or inexpensive ones (or the ones your administrator bought in a panic at the end of a fiscal year, or the tech bought with a grant that somebody off campus decided your school needed) trying to find tech that will do what you need it to do and/or make your job easier. For example, designing a database to help you document mastery of learning objectives and print reports for parents. But it will only work on your home computer, so you have to export it as a pdf, email it to yourself, and print it at school.Trying to improve a child’s classroom behavior by communicating with parents who think their parental duty is to argue with you.Communicating with parents who do not want their bright child to be challenged, they just want their child to get A’s.Reviewing, discussing, changing, adding, removing, trying to implement, or documenting that you have implemented special measures for disabled students.Creating a template for students who are not doing well to create a plan to improve their grade, checking to see which students have finished writing their plans, which parental signatures you still need, then preparing grades for those students, so they can discuss with their parents whether their goals were realistic, and whether they took the steps required to bring up their grade.Meetings, endless meetings. Especially meetings where someone who used to be a teacher tells you that you should be doing the things that you would be doing, if you weren’t stuck in a meeting.Cleaning sunflower seed hulls out of desks.Partially filling out disciplinary forms with the names of the usual suspects and their usual disruptive behavior and photocopying the forms, so you can more quickly get back to teaching when the behaviors occur.Filling out forms to request necessary classroom equipment be repaired and unnecessary classroom equipment be removed, knowing full well that you’ll probably lose that battle.Throwing out 25 years of material that the last three or four teachers who had the classroom before you hoarded.Explaining how every expenditure of your classroom supply budget will directly impact student achievement, or giving up and ordering it from a non-approved vendor on your own credit card because it’s easier.Planning field trips. Counting field trip money, accounting for it, rolling the coins, noting the names and amounts of students who need change, contacting a bus company to reserve three buses, calling them back to cancel one of them. Taking ten late permission slips and explaining to the child who brings the 11th that there are no more seats on the bus.

You began applying for college, and your parents began preparing you, when you were somewhere between two and five years old. Did you ask "why?" Did they answer? Were you the six-year-old I was, spending a half hour slooowly opening and closing the refrigerator door until I found the switch that made the light go on and off? Were you the nine-year-old who got lost in the dictionary because you were foolish enough to look up "isopropyl alcohol" and each word led you to an equally unintelligible next word, until you gave up in defeat after an hour, knowing vaguely that there were lots of different kinds of alcohol out there, and only drink the one called ethanol?Then there was the educational system. Were you one of the kids I tutor every week or two, who can recite "seven plus seven equals fourteen," but if you ask them how much is seven and seven, they don't have any concept of what the words mean? (You should have seen the looks of utter sacrilege when I tore up a dollar bill to explain what a quarter was! Fortunately my statement that the bank would give me a new one was correct, so they have forgiven me.)Fast-forward to junior high. Do you look up the words you don't know? Do you read biographies, histories, science texts, even if you give up halfway through because "the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" is a bit much for a twelve year-old, and you gave up on "the Brothers Karamazov" when you couldn't tell how many brothers there were? Do you wonder what would happen if...? Do you ask? Do you get a satisfactory answer?If you learned how to think, read, and question before high school, you're ready to prepare for college. If you studied math from flash cards, learned exactly one definition for each word and that one's the Microsoft Word definition, and only read the assigned books for each grade, you're ready for community college -- maybe.And you need not have been a total nerd to learn how to think. In fact, as a crippled kid, I had to be way better at sports. I had to hit an over-the-wall-home run, because there was no way I was running bases. I had to know all the lyrics to all the hit songs, to compensate for my off-key voice. I think my negotiating skills were learned at the Monopoly board. Games teach skills. (I don't know what skills the current app games teach, I must admit.)Now that you're ready for high school and have basic learning and writing skills, and we hope some studying skills as well, you're ready to begin applying for college.Colleges like kids who challenge themselves, not only in the depth of courses, but also in the breadth. So learn the difference between Running Start (a bad idea), Honors and AP (it depends on your school and the program.) Unless it's required for graduation (American History -- yuck! More generals and dates to remember!) then take as broad a range of courses as you can enjoy. We didn't have electives when I went to high school -- our biggest choice was Spanish or French -- but Art, Poetry, and some form of sociology were mandatory, so we wound up "broad" perforce.Colleges like kids who challenge themselves. These can be done in more defined ways now than they could when I was in school, but when I wanted to stay after school through the "detention and club" period and do independent study in chemistry, my teacher was happy to oblige. When I told my English Lit teacher that I just Would Not read Hardy, but would trade her three Mark Twains, she accepted. As I mentioned elsewhere, I had a lot of chores at home, so "activities" weren't on my agenda, but I could study for the State Spanish contest, build a science project, win the math contest, show my ability and interest in whatever way I could. We didn't have AP Spanish, but when I finished the program through twelfth grade in tenth, I got permission to spend Spanish period in the library translating Don Quixote.The point of all this is you don't prepare by taking X, Y, and Z courses. You prepare by learning X, Y and Z however you can learn them, and the more you can learn them by yourself the more impressive you may seem to the schools.Someone asked me about preparing for the SAT starting in 9th grade, and I wrote: read anything from the list of periodicals I recommend, high-vocabulary magazines like [deleted because they violate a Quora policy] No matter what your intellectual or political leanings, one of those should suit you.You might also want to increase your knowledge of the "generally known" subjects of cultivated westerners: Broad General Knowledge.Also, as you take practice tests, note every word you're not sure of, and look them up in the next day or two, before you've forgotten the context.That list of books, journals, stray topics, is not intended to replace flash cards; it's intended to spark interests. Some of you will care enough to figure out who Georgia O'Keefe was; some will get so involved as to notice her name is spelled O'Keeffe. Some will limit their knowledge of Michelangelo to the Sistine Chapel, and others will learn that it was his most hated work. He thought all painting was inferior to sculpture, and had to be repeatedly captured by the Pope's army and put back to painting when he really wanted his hands on some good Carrara marble. [Wiki]You may think I haven't begun talking about applying to college, but you're wrong. You have the broad knowledge needed to get a good score on the SATs. You have some totally ace recommendations. And you have at least three or four awesome essay topics.In your junior year of high school, you need to register for the SATs and start looking at colleges, at least on their web sites, and every chance you get in person. If you live in Heber Springs Arkansas, or in New Delhi India, you may not have a lot of opportunities. But there are 22 colleges within a 50 mile radius of Philly, and at least that many in Boston. You may take a school field trip to DC to see the Washington Monument, but with a little wheedling I bet you can get Georgetown added to the list of sights.Your school guidance counselor should be really good at this part, and if not, the Princeton Review and College Board web sites will give you all the dates and deadlines you need. If you can't figure them out on your own, you're really not ready for a good college.Next, remember the First Caveat: You Can't All Go To Harvard -- or the Ivies plus the rest of the Top 20. To get into any of those schools and a dozen more, you have to be in the top 2% of the WORLDBetween 2002 and 2012, undergraduate enrollment rose 24 percent overall, from 14.3 million to 17.7 million; Page on ed.govSo, conservatively estimating 4,000,000 entering students, the top 1% is 40,000 people. Schools like Yale, Penn, Harvard, have an entering class of 2,000, more or less. So the top 20 schools can, if they choose, fill themselves with the top 1% of students from the United States. If you look at the top fifty schools you might have room for the top 2% from around the world who apply.Then all those other fine steps besides taking the SATs. All top schools, and many not-so-top- schools, look for the same things: ability, energy, interest, intelligence. But so many prep books and consultants give the same answers to everyone that I try to help you around the "same" as everyone else" rejection.First, try to avoid being a stereotype -- the same as every other top student, whether international or resident: The Overachiever Stereotype on Your Academic Evidence FileSecond, make sure you choose the right schools: You Don't Want the Ivy League! on Your Academic Evidence FileThird, understand how U.S. schools make decisions: "Holistic" File Evaluationsand A Note to South Asian Studentsand plan your activities accordingly: What Makes an Activity Important? on Your Academic Evidence FileFourth, spend an enormous amount of time writing clever, interesting essays that are fun to read and make you seem like a good student to talk to at dinner:Please, Not That Essay Again!And fifth, figure out how you're going to pay for this:Can I Afford U.S. Colleges?Finally, what are the specifics of the school you're interested in? Often, the school is quite specific in telling you what it wants; you're just not trained in reading what it said, but start by trying.And that's how you get from being a six-year-old playing with the refrigerator light bulb to being a student at an actual Ivy League School (Penn) on a full scholarship.

The Texas academy of Math and Science is a two-year public magnet school located on campus at The University of North Texas in Denton. It’s unique in that it’s a boarding school on-site at a commuter university, in the relatively sleepy outskirts of the sprawling Dallas metroplex.My wife and I both attended TAMS ‘95–’98, overlapping one year. My brother went later, in the early ‘00’s. It cost our folks something $2.5k/semester for room and board. Need-based scholarships were made available to many.People came to TAMS from all corners of the state, most coming for the opportunity to escape constraint and grow in their own way.It was my ticket out of conservative small-town life in Texas. I left behind athletic pep rallies with the fervor of mega-church sermons, faith and the good book guiding all aspects of community life, and country club kids taking cotillion training to learn how to be proper plantation owners. That wasn’t my future.The commuter school backdrop of UNT made the campus and quiet town our giant playground. Friends and I roamed the campus nightly seeking adventure, pushing increasingly outward gaining confidence and thriving on independence. Campus buildings had lectures on wavelet theory and the Carnot cycle left on the chalkboards from the last classes of the day. Interesting equipment was sometimes available to play with in labs, left accidentally unlocked overnight (we did try to leave things better than we found them). And of course there were many great make-out spots to evade the usually watchful resident assistants. These RA’s were college students making a few extra bucks while going to school, and I assume got paid a premium to keep an eye on high schoolers too curious for their own good.Street cred at first was your SAT math score, with extra respect for scoring high or perfect on verbal, but these trifles fell away quickly as we learned real-world accomplishments some arrived at TAMS with already under their belts. There were 13-year-olds enrolled in differential equations and others running enterprise servers for bigcos bringing in adult salaries for 10 hr/wk of work. Everyone could get around Unix by the 3rd week and many were prolific in programming and hacking. Girls were building their own computers then. My birthday gift to my girlfriend — now-wife — was a 1.2 GIGABYTE hard drive that she quickly put to good use.We made day trips out to nearby parks to explore hydro dams and collected equipment at abandoned airports in the north Texas sticks at midnight. My favorite events were the First Saturday tech night markets in a parking lot in Dallas. These were school field trips where we’d get for a song the latest RAM upgrades or coprocessor that had fallen off the back of a truck. Dumpster diving in the corporate parks like at HP was also a regular occurrence. We’d recover coffee-stained vise grips or spools of perfectly usable RA solder and half-full resistor kits that we’d happily reorganize and use to spruce up our projects, like Night Rider LED strips we built spanning the hallway just off the stairwell which hid a LAN cable to bridge our 10Base2 network for gaming (this was long before the building got wired).Attendees were very multicultural, with a bias toward immigrants. We had a high percentage of gays and still-in-closet Baptists who found that one outlet from persecution in their small hometown communities was to be smart and techie.Some of us chose to start research a month or two after we arrived with capable professors in many fields — neuroscience, high energy physics, materials science, genetics. We could just walk in the door, and many profs were eager to draw on the effectively free slave labor who often worked harder and smarter than their own grad students.Many of our ranks placed top ten at national science and math competitions, consistently year after year. I obtained professional skills at 16 that I still use to this day, and published my first peer-reviewed paper and delivered presentations at professional conferences by my senior year. This was before the sensational science of today, back when it was not as easy to get something through review or publish in open-access. Unfortunately my grades left something to be desired, as compared to others who somehow exceeded my accomplishments while keeping 4.0 GPA’s and a clean rap sheet.We were all one-upping each other and making it look easy.UNT is a fabulous music school, especially in jazz, and the likes of Norah Jones trained there while we attended, giving us the privilege to see people professionally honing their craft who later became international stars. Some stars even from our own ranks in their respective fields.The university created special courses run by professors specifically for us, especially in math since many of the students were beyond the level of the typical college student. If you got permission, you could take graduate level courses like dislocation theory or overload courses on extra subjects like music performance. 7 classes per semester, 21–22 credit units, was not uncommon. Other friends worked with professors on accelerator physics and took advanced physics courses.Just being at TAMS saved me a year of expensive private undergrad schooling, and my brother was able to shave off two. Our ranks carried on to Stanford, MIT, Harvard, Princeton, and many other great schools, and some have gone on to win prestigious national and international awards and fellowships, and accomplish amazing things professionally such as starting companies or inventing technologies that are now household names.The character of each class is different and the stories of previous generations of TAMSters are legend. I still can't believe the stories of TAMSters rappelling off the roof of the dorm building to pop into significant others’ rooms late in the night to avoid the monitors. The rule list when I attended was hundreds of items long, each one in place because of some legendary incident. And of course most everyone knew exactly where the lines were and where to creatively test them because.. why not? The administration would escalate and counter, trying to stay one step ahead; this was evidence-based policy-making.We were scheduled to go home one weekend a month, and would have what my kids call nowadays extended playdates. These were great because we’d get a whole weekend at home to build a project with friends, or if you were brave and had slightly less conservative parents, you could bring your new SO to meet your folks -- and of course stay in “separate” rooms. Some TAMSters whose folks skipped town once the chicks were out of the nest were appreciative when friends’ parents fostered them during these weekends.Because of the incredibly tight bonds that form over those two years, several of my close friends at TAMS have gone on to successful careers that intertwine with mine, and we continue to work together on projects today over two decades later. We worked out the kinks, having built and tested potato cannon trajectories at Lake Ray Roberts, or played musical gigs for frat house parties for $25 while flinging French bread loaves into the house pool with homebuilt trebuchets.It’s a special place for me, and I don't think there's any other school in the country quite like it. To me it’s a shining example that combines the best of what both public and private schooling offer in this country.