Summer vacation will be here soon, but first you’ve got to get through exams!

Many students are in the thick of final exams right now and others have exams coming up in the next few weeks. Here are four more tips for final exams and school in general:

1. Study alone, then with pals. Don’t arrive at a group study session unprepared and clueless. Study alone first so you come equipped with a list of questions plus some knowledge to contribute.
2. Use your textbook. It’s likely your teacher gave you a study guide and hand-outs. And maybe you’ve hardly used that textbook all year. Use it now! Most textbooks have chapter summaries and review questions, and many of the newer texts provide online tests, quizzes and flashcards.
3. Go to the library. Bring your textbooks and notes, and leave your laptop at home and your cellphone in the car (you can take breaks to check for texts, but not more often than every half hour). Find a quiet table or study carrel and study without distraction. Once you adjust to the weirdness of not having your electronics available, you’ll likely be amazed at how much information you can absorb and how clear a lot of the subject matter now seems.
4. Study morning, noon and night. In the morning, do an overview of a subject by reading through the study guide, a few pages of notes, or a chapter summary. In the afternoon, tackle some hard concept or figure out a tough math procedure. In the evening, flip flash cards or quiz yourself (studying before bedtime takes advantage of sleep learning, in which the mind processes facts and stores important material in memory while you sleep).

Study smart, and hang in there!

[photo taken at LisSurMer, Cape Cod, MA, May 2013]

Final exams can be stressful, but here are some tips that can help make exam season go smoothly:

1. Get started now! Anxiety builds as you worry and do nothing. It may feel very difficult to get started, but you will feel immediate relief.
2. Begin reviewing now. You need not wait until teachers hand out review guides. Get out your old tests and quizzes and begin reworking them. (Don’t merely reread the questions and answers; you need to cover up your old answers and actually rework /rewrite each question on paper).
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The reason math teachers assign homework is to give students the practice necessary for entrenching new concepts and skills in the brain.

Math homework is necessary for the same reason practicing the piano is necessary: it’s one thing to “get” what the teacher taught during the lesson, but it’s another thing to be able to perform that same skill independently and fluently.

Yet, all too many students practice math incorrectly, and they therefore gain little benefit, or even worse, they solidify misunderstandings and bad habits.

Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but enough practice does make permanent, which is why guitar teachers, ski instructors, and golf pros are all such sticklers for proper form; they know how hard it is to unlearn errors that have become ingrained.

Many students will do a whole page of math and never check their answers. How do they know they were doing the right procedures? (Answer: They don’t.)

Or, students check their answers after completing the entire assignment, and only then discover that their answers don’t match up with those in the back of the book. In both such cases students tend to declare: Oh, well, the teacher will go over it in class tomorrow.

But in each of these scenarios, the student has now thoroughly practiced BEING WRONG.

Here’s the right way to do math (or math-related) homework:

1. Locate the answer key. If it’s in the back of the textbook, insert a bookmark or Post-it note for easy back-and-forth flipping.
2. Do the first problem.
3. Check it on the answer key.
4. If you were correct, move on to the next problem.
5. If you were incorrect, figure out what you did wrong before you move on.
6. Check your arithmetic; did you make a careless mistake?
7. If you realize you don’t understand how to do the problem, go to your notebook or your textbook and page through until you find the topic and carefully follow the explanation.
8. Still stumped? You can get help on www.KhanAcademy.org. Or, ask a friend or parent or sibling for help.
9. Only as a last resort, put a star next to the problem and make sure and ask the teacher for help tomorrow.
10. Proceed to …
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At the first meeting of my new How to Talk to Your Kids class, parents took turns introducing themselves. Lo and behold, every parent had boys and only boys (except for one mom who also had a baby girl; she hastened to explain that her daughter was “easy” and it was her son she was concerned about).

Next time, I’ll call the class How to Talk to Your Sons.

The parents of boys report a common set of problems. Their sons are lazy. They procrastinate. They don’t talk and they don’t listen. They don’t ask for help and they resist advice.

The boys approach their studies with attitudes of defiance and bravado. They under-prepare for tests and then shrug off the poor grades.  School is stupid, reading is boring and why do we have to learn this math, anyway? They seem immune to learning from their mistakes. They study even less for the next test, not more.

Of course, not all boys are like this, and plenty of girls fit the profile. Still, this constellation of typically male character traits and attitudes plays less and less well in our evolving economy and culture. David Brooks wrote:

To succeed today, you have to be able to sit still and focus attention in school at an early age. You have to be emotionally sensitive and aware of context. You have to communicate smoothly. For genetic and cultural reasons, many men stink at these tasks.

In elementary and high school, male academic performance is lagging. Boys earn three-quarters of the D’s and F’s. By college, men are clearly behind. Only 40 percent of bachelor’s degrees go to men, along with 40 percent of master’s degrees.

Thanks to their lower skills, men are dropping out of the labor force. In 1954, 96 percent of the American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today, that number is down to 80 percent.

Brooks was responding to Hannah Rosin’s new book, The End of Men, in which she suggests that men are suffering from a lack of adaptability.

Women, Rosin argues, are like immigrants who have moved to …

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And how often do you ask them?

Elena is a beautiful 16-year-old who blithely drifted in and out of my English II classroom this year without any materials…. Over the course of eight months, Elena continued to leave assignments incomplete and did little class work… She lost study guides, lost materials, and lost interest in editing and revising her work. 

So writes Colette Marie Bennett, veteran teacher and department chair, in a very good article for Education Week Teacher entitled To Pass or Not to Pass? The End-of-Year Moral Dilemma.

….On the rare occasion when Elena turned in work, she demonstrated that she was capable of writing on grade level. Numerous common assessments taken in class indicated that her reading comprehension was also on grade level…

Now, as the grades are totaled in June, I wonder: Do I hold her accountable for work left incomplete? …If I exempt her from less important assignments, am I reinforcing her lack of responsibility? Finally, is passing her fair to the students who did complete the assigned work?…Will re-enrolling her in 10th grade English bare a different result? Is she prepared or unprepared to meet the rigors of 11th grade English?

It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.

-Albert Einstein

I’m sitting with 14-year-old Emma; we’re doing her algebra homework side by side. We started at the same time, but I’m on problem #3 and she’s already on #8.

Does that surprise you? After all, I’m the math tutor who has been doing this stuff for decades. And I’m not purposely trying to work slowly. Emma really is mentally faster than me.

I’m used to this by now. I work with many teens with super-high IQs who process information at lightening speed. Why on earth do they need a tutor?

Emma glances over at my paper. My work is in neat columns. All the steps are written out. Emma sees that her answers differ from mine on problems #1 and #3. She notices that she’s dropped a negative sign in problem #1. And she left out part of the equation in problem #3 because she didn’t bother to write it down; she was “doing it in her head.”

She goes back and fixes her errors; by now I’m on problem #6.

[I'm devoting my Monday blog posts to the topic of Learners with Special Needs, which, I find, describes us all in some way or another.] 

I work part time at a school for students with all kinds of special needs. In addition to the usual academic subjects, kids also take classes in such topics as executive function, sensory integration and behavior therapy.

I’ve been fascinated by how simple and useful a lot of the instruction is, and how applicable it is to all of us!

[I'm going to devote my Thursday blog posts to the topic of All Things Academic: reading, writing, 'rithmetic and the other school subjects.]

Last week I said that I see value in having kids (and all learners) memorize a certain amount of factual information.

I also said that I’m not a fan of rote memorization of multiplication “facts.” Kids should also be learning when and how to apply all of the four operations to various situations.

I’m going to try devoting my Thursday blog posts to the topic of All Things Academic: reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and the other school subjects.

A home school mom of four writes:

The learning material that I struggle with is just that: motivation verses memorization. I have a hard time wrapping my mind around alternative methods to memorizing times tables and science facts and history dates. It just seems like there should be better ways to learn/teach.

Kids (and all people) learn best when information is relevant and interesting. Random facts that don’t connect with anything the student finds familiar or meaningful are tedious to memorize and soon forgotten.

I just finished doing a talk at one of my local libraries, called Tons of Tips to Help Your Child Learn Better!

My favorite tip is the simplest: HELP THEM.

It’s pretty amazing how parents hesitate to just sit down next to their child and offer some basic assistance. It’s usually for one of two reasons: