Irina Lutsenko

I am thrilled to present a guest post by my student Alisa Chernikova. In this post, she talks about determination to succeed and recommends three great books that will help you get started on your success journey. The post was inspired by the TED talk we watched in class "Grit: The power of passion and perseverance." You, in turn, will be inspired by the post. Macmillan dictionary defines grit as ‘determination to succeed, even in very difficult situations’. Before we dive deeper into how and why, let me ask you this question: Do people really need grit? Personally, I would go with yes. Still, some might say: “Just find your passion in life, and you won’t ever need to bother yourself with such things as grit in the first place!” But in my experience, it’s not that simple. No matter how much you like what you do, you need to be able to do it well. You need to be passionate, perseverant, strong. You need to be gritty! So how does one become gritty? I assume there’s ...

Most people get the lowest score for the writing component of the IELTS test. My experience as an IELTS trainer and the official statistics completely agree on this. In this post, I want to look at the reasons why and at the ways how not to. Here is why you might get your lowest score for writing too: 1 You don’t write enough. Tell me if that sounds familiar. The teacher gives you task after task, but you just can’t muster the willpower to write them. Finally, you become overcome with guilt, write one or two tasks, pat yourself on the shoulder and stop writing until the next fit of guilt occurs in a week or two. That’s not enough and you know it. I usually give my students two writing tasks 1 and two writing tasks 2 per week if the test is 3 months away. Two W1 and two W2 over 12 weeks add up to 24 of each. This is about the number I think is necessary to get the score you will be happy with. Now think about your last IELTS test - how many tasks did you write? 2 You don...