Last week my 3.5 year old daughter Maddie came home from school upset. He climbed onto my lap and lowered his head. In a calm and meek voice she explained, “Mom, I don’t like school. I don’t like the gym … Miss H. said yes. She says I can’t touch the liars’ farm.”
Me: “You mean the fire alarm?”
Maddie: “Yeah, the liar’s farm. Miss H scared me!”
Me: “Oh honey, I bet you were scared! But you have to be very careful with the fire alarm. You can only touch it if there is iii … a what?”
Maddie: “A farm.”
Well, no. It is not a farm. Oh, how do I explain …?
I see both sides of this situation. Miss H certainly didn’t want the entire school evacuated because Maddie sounded the fire alarm. Maddie, on the other hand, was legitimately freaked out by Miss H.
If children had been taught to avoid the fire alarm when there is no emergency, this may never have been a problem for Maddie. But it’s so hard to identify everything that we should be explicitly teaching our students.
Our fabulous Operations Manager Chrystal learned a different lesson the hard way. When I was in the third year of high school, I was struggling to pass classes. In the middle of the year, he dropped out of school. Fortunately, the minimum wage jobs convinced her to return as a senior. Determined to graduate with her class, she faced a double load of courses. Overwhelmed, she knew she had to do something different to pass her classes.
Her instincts told her to try the planner the school gave her each year. After three years, he still didn’t know how to use it. “My friends and I thought they were just for bathroom passes!” She explained. “We really didn’t know what else to do with them!”
Chrystal’s instincts proved correct. She taught herself to use an agenda to keep track of assignments and test dates. Before she knew it, she earned straight like that year … and graduated with her class.
Obviously, I am proud of her and very grateful that she found a path that led to SOAR®. But it would have been nice for her not to have to enroll in Hard Hit School before learning what to do with that planner.
What The rest Are we getting lost?
My eight-year-old son likes to think that cleaning his room is putting everything in his closet. Our educational system does the same with our students … shoveling nothing but happy to the students.
However, like my son, students cannot “find” information when they need it. They do not know as to organize that information or retrieve it for later use. In fact, the required K-12 content comes as a huge surprise to students; they never learn most of it in the first place.
No one has taught students how …
· Read a textbook strategically.
(Hint: reading the actual text in a textbook is * not * the way to do it.)
· Learn something, instead of memorizing it.
(Learning is so much easier … and more fun!)
· Actually organize notes for a research paper.
(Actually, it’s pretty easy … when you know how to do it.)
· Use “texting” language and an extra fold in your paper to take great notes in class.
(Texting is the best thing that can happen to note-taking!)
· Pay attention in class.
(If possible!)
· Organize your work properly.
(A separate binder and notebook for each class only makes the problem worse!)
Set goals for themselves.
(Against the goals that are set for them).
These skills refer to: accessing information, organizing it, tracking responsibilities, and retrieving information later, when necessary. These are study skills and they are necessary to be successful in school now. They are the study skills necessary to be successful in college. And these study skills translate into “should have“skills in the workplace.
How about teaching them as learn? Since our information age doubles the amount of new information every 48 hours, much of the content we present to our students will be out of date even before they graduate.
Don’t let your kids and students get caught like poor Maddie, hand on the fire alarm, about to cause all sorts of chaos. Arm them with the skills they need to bring order out of the chaos of life so they can grow into happy and successful adults.