Making sure our high school graduates are prepared to take on the challenges of life should be one of our nation’s top priorities. After all, these graduates are the future of our society. Legislators and school boards have tried to develop guidelines to handle this challenge. These guidelines primarily list subjects to be studied…
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Grading a student’s work is such an accepted practice, that it’s rarely questioned. The grade given might be questioned (especially a “D” or “F”), but not the fact that grades are necessary. After all, it is human nature to categorize things. Therefore it’s not surprising that we have a grading system that labels students on…
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Nice teachers show children that life is a game and that games have freedoms and barriers. They teach strategies for winning “the game of school” by showing their students how to figure things out and by making learning fun. Really nice teachers insist that students have high moral standards, strong personal values and that…
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Can you teach your child to think like a genius? Yes, that’s capital Y-E-S. But before we push children into the realm of genius, it would be good to look at what it means to be a genius. Most people equate geniuses with high I.Q but that is the last definition in Webster’s college dictionary.…
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Susie is six and can’t count to thirty without missing a few numbers. Johnny has almost finished eighth grade but hasn’t started pre-algebra. “Oh dear, oh dear, my child is falling behind.” Just as one child can be given the label “Attention Deficit Disorder” because some adults cannot tolerate his activity level, so can another…
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Some teenagers seem to develop an attitude toward their high school studies. They may even view high school as a trial to test their endurance rather than a pleasurable opportunity for learning. Is this the way it should be? No – not really. The youthful joy of learning, so evident in Kindergarten, may have been…
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Christina took the plunge. She pulled her children out of the system and turned to home study. To do this, she had to beat off the doomsayers who predicted her kids would end-up social misfits. She had to convince her overworked husband who hadn’t yet noticed the decline in public education. And, she had to…
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The child tunes in to life and learns at breakneck speed. Mimicking what he sees and hears — he plays tribute to the old “Monkey See; Monkey Do” adage. If the child were raised by wolves, he would howl in the wind and walk on all fours. But unlike the monkey and wolf, children are…
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How do you like to go up in a swing, Up in the air so blue? Oh, I do think it the pleasantest thing Ever a child can do! Robert Louis Stevenson: A Child’s Garden of Verses I love this stanza from Stevenson’s poem; it brings memories of pumping so high I felt I was…
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“A loving heart is the beginning of all knowledge,” —words penned by Scottish Writer, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). Beautiful words, kind words, but is a “loving heart” truly the key to all learning? And if it is, then shouldn’t it be the first lesson we teach our children? And so it is: mother’s tender kiss, father’s…
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