Jim's Blog

Jim's Blog

So You Want Your Kid to be the Smartest in the Class?

May 5, 2010

Being in the non-profit world, it is not often that I get to actually put money or value into the hands of our supporters. Instead we rely upon you to sacrificially give in order to put value into the hands of others whom many times you’ve never met. If you think about that fact, it makes what you all do that much more amazing. I am often broken by the genuine caring of our friends. But now, I get to feel like a real business guy and help you. Yea!

Summer is a great chance for parents to make sure that a student’s skills have been shored up, to see them prepare for next year’s work, and to enrich them in areas that they may have missed all together in school. Last month, I left you with a little teaser about some things that you can do with your child this summer. I am going to follow up with these tips on how to help your son or daughter become one of the strongest students in his or her class in an hour a day five days a week.

Yes, you too can be a homeschooler.

Okay, maybe you aren’t going to keep your kids home all year and have three or four hours of school per day, but if you have them at home for the summer anyway, why not use the time for an hour a days worth of strengthening and enrichment?

1) Your student can benefit from going back over the basics – especially in math. Use this great free website http://www.math-drills.com/ to download math worksheets for everything from the most elemental addition and subtraction problems all the way up to Algebra and Geometry. These really shouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes a day. We’re just keeping sharp here.

2) For Kindergarteners through sixth graders, make the economical purchase of the Core Knowledge Series’ of What Your____ Grader Needs to Know by E.D. Hirsch, Jr. www.coreknowledge.org. The series consist of 8 books and begins with the things that your pre-schooler should know and goes through what your 6th grader should know. The books are only $15 each, and you can buy one per year to grow along with your child, or get them all at once in order to shore up things that perhaps your older student didn’t know from previous years. The Core Knowledge books are excellent comprehensive liberal arts type texts, covering things like what math problems and formulas and skills the student should know - with explanations and practice sets, important Natural Sciences facts, Physical Science principles and biographies of famous scientists. The series also contains sections on the arts; music theory and famous composers as well as art theory, history and famous artists are covered. The Language Arts section goes over the English grammar and parts of speech that a student should have mastered, explaining the elements in detail, so that both the parent and child can understand the ideas. It also covers many of the stories, tales and myths that a child should know in order to understand other classic literature.

Perhaps the most valuable, is the series’ sections on Geography and World and American Civilization. This covers ancient civilizations such as Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece and Rome, Europe in the Middle Ages and Renaissance and U.S. History. It also covers much of the missed world geography that is important to being a sound student. These sections along with those dealing with the Fine Arts and Language Arts, alone, make this series worth its cost many times over. Use the Core knowledge books for 40 minutes a day. The books are conveniently broken up into five disciplines. One for each day, but do math and science each day. Older students can use the books on their own to learn the things that will likely be missed in school, or to reinforce those things already learned. You, the parent, can follow up with questions or check their work. Don’t forget to go back over materials learned on previous days.

Skip some of the week long camps and devote time to mastering one thing

It may sound nice to tell others that your child attended a week long language camp, a week long music camp and a two week science camp. However, unless they are older and are going to learn advanced materials, a week is likely to be forgotten, and your child has learned dilettantism rather than commitment and mastery. If you want your child to experience something, then you should commit to it whole heartedly, and expect them to do so too. This will likely mean a whole summer of one special discipline such as learning to play a musical instrument or to speak a foreign language.

Music lessons can be inexpensive and comprehensive. Here at The Bessemer Classical School, we have a great relationship with The Music Opportunity Program of Birmingham. They offer individual beginner’s stringed instrument lessons during June and July on a 4 to 8 lesson schedule. These private lessons are once a week for a thirty for only $100 per month. The beauty of this set up is that your child commits to a month or two of study, and has to practice all week between lessons. The student will learn more than simply how to hold the instrument and some rudimentary moves, but will actually learn to play the violin, cello, viola or bass. The student can then continue to take lessons from there if desired. For more information on this program go to http://www.musicop.org/ws/ or call 231-9509.

As far as languages, why not handle the elementary stuff yourself? You can pick up a book and begin teaching them vocabulary and basic phrases. Who knows, maybe you will enjoy learning a language too. Later on they can go to advanced camps when they want to learn the future perfect tense of “to go”. The key is committing to it regularly – perhaps 3 days a week for thirty minutes.

High school students

• Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World is a great way for even older students to gain a firmer grasp of history from its very beginnings all the way through Egypt, Greece, the middle ages, early American History and modern history. Read this 4 book series ($22 each) once per summer to make college Western Civ. a breeze.
• Try Vocabulary from Classical Roots to help build a SAT busting vocabulary (15 minutes a day).
• Begin strengthening your student’s knowledge of the faith and how to defend it. Brandon Robbins of the Apologetics Resource Center in Birmingham, notes that 70% of 18 year olds are leaving the church when they leave home. The ARC is conducting its Jericho Project this summer, and it is a great way to prepare your high school or early college student to deal with things that they WILL encounter on ANY college campus, such as naturalism, atheism, agnosticism, postmodern relativism, pluralism, attacks on the Bible, homosexuality and same – sex marriage, the problem of evil, and more. The ten week course will be conducted on Tuesday evenings from 7-9 at the ARC’s offices. At $50 for ten weeks, this is an easy recommendation for me to make to you. You may find out more by contacting the Apologetics Resource Center www.arcapologetics.org. Jericho is good for interested adults too.

So, now The Bessemer Classical School has given back to you. Boy, do I feel better! Most of these suggestions will cost you less than $100 for a summer, but I trust that through a modicum of effort, you will see amazing improvements in your child from year to year, and you will be more likely to see a young adult who is well informed and prepared to take on everything from physics to the smart-aleck philosophy professor with confidence and skill. This only really takes an hour a day, but you very well may find a student that becomes highly interested and wants to do more. This is when you know the program you’ve instituted has been successful.

Best wishes to you in your work.

Last Updated (Wednesday, 05 May 2010 20:24)

What Constitutes a Good Education?

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March 9, 2010

So You Want Your Child to be Well Educated

What constitutes a good education? Is it attending a respected school system? Is it getting all ‘A’s? Is it eventually getting into college?
Consider this, researchers report that forty percent (40%) or more of high school graduates today are required to take remedial classes when entering college; many of these students were ‘A’ students in high school.

In years past, students, even those making ‘B’s and ‘C’s, were at least prepared to do college work. Today, that is clearly not the case. Nevertheless, colleges haven’t changed their expectations. Colleges are not waiting up for those who aren’t prepared. Instead, those students, regardless of their grades in high school, are being required to take remedial courses – at the expense of extra time spent trying to receive a diploma, and extra tuition dollars. Such students are also reported to have increased difficulty keeping up in the classroom.

This recent phenomenon of remediation in college affects students graduating from school systems all across America. In fact, one research group says that, nationwide, only thirty three percent (33%) of students leave high school at least minimally prepared for college. A huge number of American high school students are simply undereducated. So, where does the problem lie? Believe it or not, it mostly lies at home.

You, as a parent, help set the standard for you schools.

I once spoke to a person whose child attended one of the best public schools around. This person was complaining to me that his child’s homework was too difficult. I thought to myself, “are you complaining that your student is being challenged and having his mind stretched? How do you expect the student to get better if he isn’t? It’s just like with exercise or in training for a sport, if you aren’t forced to grow, you don’t get better.

If, as Joseph de Maistre said in essence, “we get the government we deserve,” then the same certainly holds true for education. In cases were parents have been quick to run to school administrators and complain that the school’s workload is too much or course work too difficult the school systems have been basically forced to water down their programs to make parents happier. Did you know that some schools can’t even send homework home with students because their parents won’t bother check to see that it gets done, much less done correctly? What are the academic expectations for a student at such a school, even if they get all ‘A’s?

It is your job to differentiate between your student getting all ‘A’s and ‘B’s on their report card and getting a good education.

The landscape is riddled with families who once proudly displayed bumper stickers saying, “My child is an honor roll student,” but now are shocked that little Johnny or Jane can’t get into college. Don’t be fooled by a nice looking report card. Many schools will scale grades, and those students who do a bit better than their peers will get higher grades. As we saw from the statistics earlier, these grades don’t, necessarily reflect that they are well prepared. If your child makes the honor roll, and neither you nor she is particularly challenged by the work, you need to be questioning your school’s quality of education.

Truly make education a priority.

I’m not talking lip service here. Everyone will say that their child’s education is important. Show it! Take an account of how much time is spent with your child in extra-curricular type activities like, music, dance or sports, both playing and practicing with the team or at home. How does that measure up to the amount of time that you spend doing homework, studying or reading with them? You might be surprised at the discrepancy. Also, you can spend extra time in doing little non-school related projects. When they ask about humming birds, look up information together on the internet and learn. Quiz your student about things he or she learned in the past and show them that you expect it to be retained. Finally, make your summers productive. Week long “experience” camps are expensive and aren’t really that beneficial. Most children forget the tertiary information within days. Time spent at home working during the summer to keep skills strong and to build your child’s knowledge base will pay far greater dividends in the future.

Would you like some good ideas for summer work? Check back here next month for good information on how to make your kid smarter in the time that everybody else’s kids are getting…not smarter.

Last Updated (Tuesday, 09 March 2010 16:48)

The Power of Expectations

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January 21, 2010

It’s called that Pygmalion Effect, named after Ovid’s character, Pygmalion, King of Cyprus, who fell in love with one of his own sculptures to have it later brought to life by Aphrodite. This is the common name for the results found in a classic study performed by Harvard psychologist Robert Rosenthal and San Francisco elementary school principal Lenore Jacobson.

Ms. Jacobson had become concerned that unrealized expectations communicated from elementary school teachers to their students might have the effect of self-fulfilling prophesy, thereby raising the performances of those perceived to be good students, and hampering that of students seen to be inferior. In their study, Rosenthal and Jacobson wished to show that one’s reality can be influenced by the expectations of others, whether positively or negatively. Experimentation involved labeling a random 20 percent of students in eighteen classrooms as “spurters” per a fictional IQ test that the researchers claimed had been administered. At the end of the year, those students who had been labeled as “spurters” had significantly greater gains in IQ scores than their control group counterparts, especially first and second graders.

The simple fact is, what we expect from young people is exactly what they will come to expect from themselves. Students recognize when a teacher fails to challenge them, and while momentarily that may enjoy the ease they soon enough come to resent this bare minimum mentality while respecting those who have demanded more. At The Bessemer Classical School we are dedicated to teaching each student as though he or she is one of Birmingham’s best and brightest. We will stop and wait for a student to answer a question, rather than rushing by them as though they have little to offer. We have standards. And we consistently enforce them. They aren’t lowered; students are brought up. Students are given enough work to challenge their minds and force growth. Perhaps most importantly, we do not allow students to believe that they can’t. Students must believe that they can achieve whatever they set their minds to and that solid effort is to always be given.

Our staff of excellent teachers is a huge part of the process of developing top notch students and people here at The Bessemer Classical School. Their efforts to see and bring out the best in students will pay lifelong dividends to our students.

Last Updated (Tuesday, 09 March 2010 16:49)