(View entire post here)

Elizabeth Wissner-Gross is our guest blogger for the week of October 22nd. If you have any questions for Elizabeth Wissner-Gross, add a comment to any of her posts. Here is some brief information about What High Schools Don't Tell You - 300+ Secrets to Make Your Kid Irresistible to Colleges by Senior Year: 

The headlines prove it: Competition for admission to America's top colleges is more cutthroat than ever. Gone are the days when parents could afford to let high school guidance counselors handle the admissions process alone-gone, also, are the days when a student could wait until senior year to prepare for it. As Elizabeth Wissner-Gross, a highly successful educational strategist, knows from working for over a decade with hundreds of middle- and high school students and their parents, if you want to raise a kid colleges will compete for, you must act, early and aggressively, as opportunity scout, coach, tutor, manager, and publicist-or be willing to watch that acceptance letter go to someone whose parents did.

What High Schools Don't Tell You reveals 250 strategies to help parents stack the admissions deck in their kid's favor, gleaned from Wissner-Gross's expertise and from interviews with parents of outstandingly high achievers-strategies that most high school guidance counselors, principals, and teachers simply don't know to share. From identifying exactly which academic credentials will wow an admissions committee to which summer programs and extra-curriculars can turn an ordinary applicant into a must-have, What High Schools Don't Tell You demonstrates how hands-on parental involvement early in a child's high school career is essential to achieving college admissions success.

(View entire post here)

As soon as the protests had been violently quashed by the army, the regime set about making everything look normal again. At the UN General Assembly, the Burmese junta’s Foreign Minister, Nyan Win, even went so far as to declare, “Normalcy has now returned to Myanmar [Burma].”

But Rangoon felt to me like a movie set. I imagined an invisible director ordering a cluster of fruit vendors to set up their stalls at the edge of a market, calling for a crowd of pedestrians to surge across a busy street, and hanging billboard advertisements for the latest cinema releases.

On my first day in Rangoon I telephoned an old friend who had a merry greeting: “Welcome to my wonderful country where nothing has just happened!” Later that same day I bumped into another friend who was visibly agitated by events: “Everyone is just pretending,” she told me.

Things might look normal on the surface but, in the diary I kept while I was there, the adjectives I used to describe the moods of the various people I spoke to are repeated over and over again: angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed, angry, scared, depressed…