A Teacher's Survival Guide for Writing College Recommendations

By Bill Hiatt

Are you a high school teacher facing a pile of college recommendations? Do you find the process frustrating? Then this booklet might be just what you need.

Bill Hiatt, who taught high school (and wrote recommendations) for thirty-six years, explains how you can take a potentially unmanageable situation and make it work for you. He discusses in detail the writing process itself, but more than half the booklet is devoted to developing a system that gives you enough time and enough good information to do the job effectively without making yourself crazy.

This booklet was written with teachers in mind, particularly those who have less experience with the process and haven't yet found a way of approaching it that works well for them. However, a student or parent trying to understand the process from a teacher's point of view might also benefit from reading this booklet, if only to understand how to interact with teachers who may be asked to write recommendations later on.

This booklet is written based on the author's experience with the educational system in the United States and may not be applicable in other countries.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bill Hiatt
• Release date: Oct 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781386023975

Bill Hiatt

As far back as he can remember, Bill Hiatt had a love for reading so intense that he eventually ended up owning over eight thousand books--not counting ebooks! He has also loved to write for almost that long. As an English teacher, he had little time to write, though he always felt there were stories within him that longed to get out, and he did manage to publish a few books near the end of his teaching career. Now that he is retired from teaching, the stories are even more anxious to get out into the world, and they will not be denied!

Book preview

Section 1: What Makes Recommendation Writing Such a Challenge?

My third teaching job, where I spent the last thirty-four years of my career, was at a high school at which many students applied to colleges that required or encouraged the submission of teacher recommendations. When I first arrived, I had been teaching for only two years. A year and a half of that experience had been at another high school, but I don’t remember being asked to do a single recommendation there. Then I switched schools, and suddenly it was snowing in California—well, snowing recommendations, anyway. A large number of the seniors I had that first year had been in the classes of teachers who retired at the end of the previous year, and somehow I inherited the recommendation writing duties for many of them.

At that point I discovered something interesting: I had absolutely no idea how to write a letter of recommendation. Unless the situation has changed, recommendation writing is not a skill taught in teacher training programs. Nor is there a lot of inservice training during one’s career. Aside from the training provided by our newly hired college counselor during my last year of teaching, I remember exactly two short sessions on recommendation writing—and the advice given by the presenters at those two sessions often conflicted.

Nor is the actual writing the only problem. In my experience even very sophisticated students have no concept of the etiquette or logistics of the recommendation process. If you have ever had a student pop up wanting a recommendation by the next day, you know exactly what I’m talking about. I gathered enough information from colleagues to do a decent job with the content of recommendations, even my very first year, and these days you can also find a great deal of useful material on the Internet. What took me years to figure out, and what you can’t find easily on the Internet, is a method for coping with the haphazard way that students often deal with the process. It is that kind of problem that inspired this booklet.

Over the years I have run across practically every scenario. Eventually I figured out a good way to handle the process, both for myself and for my students. I offer the following material in hopes that it will help you develop a solution that works for you without having to take the years I took doing it.

(Please note that you may not be able to implement all of the suggestions until the next school year. The system I’m suggesting presupposes that you have started training students to do their part the year before. That said, at least some of the ideas can be implemented during the current school year.)

Section 2: Understand What Your Students Are Going Through

I don’t intend this section as an attempt to justify student carelessness during the recommendation process. However, I found I could deal with their lapses in a more professional way once I realized just how complicated being a teenager is these days—particularly if that teenager wants to go to a highly selective institution.

When I was applying to college, the level of competition was much lower than it is right now. As the valedictorian of my high school, I could safely