michael's blog

Preventing the "Summer Slide"

As the school year winds down, summer break is on everyone's minds.   Most students and parents are thinking about upcoming vacations, time spent by the pool, and the logistics of not having school.  The last concern for students is whether they will lose some of the academic progress they made during the school year.

The “summer slide” is a  phenomenon well-known by teachers and parents.  In fact, many curriculums build in accommodations for it.  The first few chapters of textbooks are almost always a review from the prior year.  We believe that a better goal than helping students catch back up is to help them not lose any ground in the first place.  Here are some ways to help offset backslide this summer and set your student up for success come September:

Help Your Student Manage Stress

All students encounter stress at some point in their academic careers. How the stress is handled can determine how successfully he/she copes when faced with subsequent stressful events. LD students tend to experience more stress, anxiety, and failure compared with their non-LD. There can be a cumulative impact from repeated stressful experiences that can lead to negative emotions, depressed mood, and physical complaints such as upset stomach. Chronic stress can have a negative impact on one’s health and happiness, as well as one’s ability to learn and be productive in life. Despite all this, it is important to note that a little stress can sometimes be ok for improving performance.

Practice Like a Jazz Virtuoso

“Everyone has to practice, even the pros.” -- Wynton Marsalis.

Practicing is universal. Just as a professional musician needs to practice, an athlete needs to train, and a student needs to study.  Marsalis obviously knows something about practice.  This classical and jazz trumpet player has earned nine Grammy Awards and a Pulitzer Prize for Music, and he's also a musical educator.  His set of practice tips (in bold) for musical students (interpreted here with more school-focused application) works equally well for students of all disciplines.  

1.  Seek instruction

Whenever you're perplexed, ask a teacher for assistance to re-explain or clarify a concept or an assignment. If that doesn’t give you what you need, tutoring is always an option to enrich and enhance your understanding of the subject and the goal.

Reminder: One Goal, Many Paths

The students with whom we work are lucky to have parents who encourage them and make them aware of their future options, including the pursuit of higher education.  Still, having encountered third- and fourth-graders that talk about the importance of getting good grades so that they can go to a good college, leaves little doubt that things are different these days.  Most of us never thought like this when we were kids. We studied, did homework, and earned decent grades because that's what we were supposed to do, not because we had a glowing academic future in mind.  When we were that young, we weren’t burdened with such pressure. We couldn't imagine thinking about our academic futures in those terms when we were barely old enough to hold a pencil.

Promoting Active Learning

All too often, students simply want to “get the work done” without recognizing that active learning is essential to building a lasting foundation for excellent work in school.  For example, in our work with students in mathematics, one of the simple, yet critical things we do is emphasize the “logic” of an answer to a problem.  We label that process with names like “the logic test” or “the smell test,” i.e. “Does that ‘smell’ like a reasonable answer?” The goal is singular: engage students beyond the simple read problem/provide answer dynamic in order to help them develop a sense of reasonableness and involve them in a way which makes them pause and reflect.  By doing this, we help students to strengthen their confidence in relying on their “gut,” and we also help them to take pause, thus better cementing the bigger lesson concepts of the problem(s) into memory. 

To Retain or Not to Retain: A Seasonal Question

Every year, parents of children who are not quite meeting grade-based standards are faced with the dilemma of choosing to hold their child back or promote them on to the next grade. School districts often have one set of perspectives while parents have another. With No Child Left Behind, a greater number of children are being retained, despite consistent research that demonstrates the lack of evidence to support the effectiveness of repeating a grade. Although some students may initially demonstrate academic improvement, over time, those “gains” are not maintained and in fact, it would seem that they often perform worse when compared to similar students who were not retained. The negative effects of grade retention range from poor social adjustment and difficulty with peer relationships to a higher high school dropout rate compared with other groups and often, long-term problems with adjustment, employment and at risk behavior.

Stanford University Studies Math Anxiety

When most of us think of common fears, we jump to stage fright, arachnophobia, and the fear of heights.  Just as real, and just as common, however, is the fear of math.  Math anxiety is the uncontrollable feeling of intense helplessness or frustration when asked to do math.

For those who have it, children and adults alike, math anxiety is a huge problem that can impact daily living.  Contrary to the belief of those who experience math anxiety, their actual math abilities are usually quite average, and it is their fear that debilitates them and interferes with their performance.

Math anxiety was first identified over fifty years ago and the first rating scale to measure it was developed in 1976.  It is only now, however, that researchers have begun looking at the brain of people with math anxiety.

Reading With Your Children - Part 3

Koreen Paterson is QWERTY’s licensed educational psychologist.  She has written a 3-part series on reading with children, the final of which we present here.  She writes from the perspective of not only being an LEP, but also from that of a mother who has made the decision to home school her children.

Reading With Your Children - Part 2

Koreen Paterson is QWERTY’s licensed educational psychologist.  She has written a 3-part series on reading with children, the second of which we present here.  She writes from the perspective of not only being an LEP, but also from that of a mother who has made the decision to home school her children.

In choosing to home school my kids and help them learn to read, another important thing I learned is not to be concerned with the reading level of the books my children are reading.  A friend posted the following NY Times article to her Facebook page:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/08/us/08picture.html?_r=1

It discusses how parents, eager to boost their children’s reading levels, push their kids to read only more and more advanced chapter books. 

Reading With Your Children - Part 1

Koreen Paterson is QWERTY’s licensed educational psychologist (LEP).  She has written a 3-part series on reading with children, the first of which we present here.  She writes from the perspective of not only being an LEP, but also from that of a mother who has made the decision to home school her children.

Home-schooling my daughters, now in kindergarten and first grade respectively, has taught me more about learning to read, reading instruction and what is important in encouraging a love of reading than anything I learned in graduate school.

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