Ana Homayoun

"What if a getting into top four-year college is no longer the holy grail of success that it once seemed to be? What if the key to kids achieving their potential in life has less to do with grades or test scores and more with critical skills overlooked in schools? Erasing the Finish Line directly addresses those points by highlighting a reality about our education system that we seem to hear about more and more these days--college acceptance is a faulty finish line to adolescent development, and this false finish line feeds a heightened level of anxiety and uncertainty. Erasing the Finish Line is a groundbreaking new way of thinking about education, for parents, teachers, administrators, and policymakers deeply invested in our children's well-being, happiness, and success. Academic counselor Ana Homayoun argues that we have to fundamentally change how we think about education and learning if we want to focus on eliminating barriers and helping students navigate systems in a way that helps students explore, discover and build in a way that allows interests and abilities to grow and thrive. She shows how to look beyond assessments, grades, and college acceptance as indicators of long-term success and shares new strategies, including, including how to: - Ask open-ended questions without judgment - Tie answers to those questions to the underlying foundational skills needed - Acting as a resource, connector, and sponsor as applicable - Suspend notions of disbelief, negativity, and general malaise - Convey compassion and empathy while having high expectations. With this new blueprint, we can focus on critical and undervalued executive functioning skills, social capital, sponsorship, shared experiences, and greater exposure to a broader range of opportunities. In her work across tens of thousands of miles, she's seen how these foundational skills allow kids to reflect, adapt, redirect, and thrive in a world so different from the one their parents grew up in."--