The holidays are long past. Now that you’ve been back to schooling for a month, how’s that textbook or curriculum working- the one you found so frustrating and were ready to throw out around Christmas break? Did you decide to just stick with it, to just make it work somehow? Did the effort required to…
Years ago an investigative reporter presented a story in which some public school teachers had been caught “adjusting” the answers on some of their students’ achievement tests. In this particular school, bonuses were linked to high classroom scores on end-of-the-year achievement tests. The temptation to tweak the weaker students’ answer sheets to increase the overall class average…
Communicating achievement-test results to your children is a delicate task. If done well, it can have a positive impact and be very motivating. For most children who ask the question directly, “How did I do,” a deeper question often lies below the surface. Have you ever had one of these experiences, or one like them? The…
Achievement test scores are objective, black and white. Applying significance to the scores is subjective. I remember a private test I gave some time ago. It was scored and the results were ready to be presented to the parents. Normally the results are discussed apart from the student, but I made an exception. The student’s percentile rank…
I know that many children experience stress when it comes to taking an achievement test. Some with good reason. Years ago a primary-age student came to us to take her first achievement test. Her parents arranged for her to have a private exam. For the first half of the exam things seemed to progress normally….
The words open and closed, are descriptive of the way students often see themselves and approach difficulties. Closed: “I’m not good at math.” “I’ll never understand this!” “I’ll never improve.” Open: “OK, I’ll try this.” “I’ll ask questions if I don’t understand.” “I’m determined to get it even if it takes many ‘do-overs’.” What’s behind both kinds of thinking…
You might be saying to yourself, “Working backwards means what exactly?” The idea has been around for a while. It was popularized by time and task management expert, Stephen Covey. What he said was, “Begin with the end in mind.” When he used that phase, he was referring to a process he believed was helpful…
As I mentioned Wednesday, there’s potentially a downside to doing easy things first. If you put too many “easy things first” tasks back-to-back, it’s possible you won’t get around to doing the doing the hard things, especially that one hard thing. In other words, doing the easy things becomes the excuse for not doing the hard things. We…
Do some easy things first! When I was home schooling, I found that doing some short, easy things first at the beginning of the day provided a warm-up of sorts. If the subject was math, we had a “question or story problem of the day.” We often followed this with “mental math” drills. If we began with English, we…
I was thinking back to when I bought my first IPhone. As I left the Verizon store, I thought, internet, iTunes, email, weather, news, and way more, even a flashlight, all at my fingertips except…I didn’t know how to access all of them. I needed help to get up and running. There’s an ancient saying,…