<p>So glad. Now she has a chance in hell to show what she can do. Just in time for the December sitting. She'd just begun test prep for real after messing about with it for the past summer. Can't wait for a year from now when all this will be over. I wonder how to help keep her positive and steady about testing. I should ask her, eh? </p>
<p>Yay! I’m so glad to hear that. Here’s the keys to the right mindset:</p>
<p>1) She will go to college if she wants to go to college. She will not end up homeless and living in a cardboard with her parents if she doesn’t hit a 32 or get accepted to an Ivy :)</p>
<p>2) Getting confused by a question does not mean she’s going to be confused by every other question on the test. If stuck, skip and come back. If still stuck, guess and move on.</p>
<p>3) Don’t let stress get out of control. Learn some easy stress management techniques and recognize the physical signs of stress so you can nip it in the bud.</p>
<p>4) Preparation eases a lot of fear. Know your stuff, practice and go in a kill it.</p>
<p>Best of luck to her!</p>
<p>Thanks! She’s lucky that she has somewhat of a laid-back attitude (stress peeks through every so often, but she’s got lots of supports and coping mechanisms for that), we have a wide-ranging list of colleges from low-stat to middling-stat (not aiming for selective or Ivy here), and she started test prep recently but is planning for her last-of-three ACTs in June 2015 (so, there’s “time” to prep). </p>
<p>While she’s a typically “booked” junior with a full array of activities and school work, we take a very “balanced” approach and aren’t pushing any kind of super-achievement — just “do your best.” We do share our expectation that she take her education seriously, and so far, she’s in sync with that. </p>
<p>Her three LDs and ADHD and a sub-par education prior to her new school does get in the way, but it’s all OK, ultimately. </p>
<p>I’d like other parents of SWDs to gain hope from her story. There was a time, starting eight years ago to as recently as two years ago, that we were not confident she would eventually land in the world of the independent adults able to thrive. With the blood, sweat, and tears that’s recognizable among parents of SWDs, she had landed on the track toward a independent, “typical” adult life. That wasn’t always a guarantee. While we helped, I put so much of that in her lap. She’s doing it, and brava!</p>
<p>Congratulations for all of your patience and support and caring and sacrifices that must have been a part of your life to get to this point. I do not know what the SWD acronym stands for, but this is an inspirational story!</p>
<p>dyiu13, that’s great news! We keep stressing to our schizophrenic son that it’s NOT A RACE! If he needs six or seven years to get his college diploma, that is fine. I think the message has gotten through to him at least.</p>
<p>I used to say to my kids, per @MaineLonghorn, “Life is not a race.” With our gifted, severely dyslexic kid, we proposed finishing HS in five years. He didn’t want to. But, he did not take SAT/ACTs at all until his gap year. He applied to college during his gap year. So that the test prep and college applications didn’t interfere with his performance during that year. Worked out very well.</p>
<p>The real point that my son took away is that there are two separate things that he needed to exceed at: 1) learning useful things; and 2) playing the game of college admissions, corporate admissions (getting a job) and grad school admissions. In those three things, the admitters look for short-hand signals of underlying ability/drive. So, you figure out what symbols they need to see and then work hard (in his case intensely) to deliver. Getting good grades (all As in his case) senior year helped with the signal. Note that grades and learning are correlated but separate things. Taking the SATs the next year did not reduce their value. He used his gap year to do a number of interesting things that made him interesting to adcoms (at the college he attended, the dean of admissions welcome the fascinating incoming class with brief descriptions of some interesting kids including my son). Given his learning issues, we concentrated his college search on schools with distribution requirements that were unlikely to force him to take lots of courses with 400 pages of reading a week or a foreign language.</p>