every mom wants to be an all-powerful wizard
Are your sweet kids starting to act like teenagers?
Does this sound familiar to you?
One winter I suddenly realized that the kids in our house were moody and broody. Every little request was a huge imposition on their time and space.
“Could you clear the table after supper?”
“But I have so much HOMEWORK to do.” <whine>
Everything was “impossible.”
Everything else was a crisis. (Yes, I realized you can’t have more than “everything,” but we’re talking about teenagers here.)…
In my last post about How Children Succeed, by Paul Tough, I covered how a student’s GPA is more a measure of self-discipline than IQ. The education system is set up to reward students with self-discipline and high GPAs with admission into college. In How Children Succeed, success of disadvantaged students was measured by whether or not they went on to graduate from college. In spite of this, Tough, surprisingly, concludes that the ability to perform well in the ways that school measures aren’t a good predictor of success, even though here success is measured by going on to college.
Specifically, good grades and lots of homework aren’t good predictors of success, and in fact can lead to stress that actually inhibits success….
A couple months ago I slipped on some water. I could tell you that I managed to catch all my weight with my right hand, so that I didn’t even get a bruise on any other part of my body.
Or I could tell you — that the over-achievement of my right arm and hand led to breaking my wrist.
Which has turned out to be more of a pain, in every possible definition of the word, than I thought it would be. Of course, I’m right handed. So this post, typed with one hand, will be short.
Related to the subject of this blog, I’ve been gathering information about education, job prospects, and entrepreneurship. This episode of the podcast Start Up, by Gimlet Media, shows an interesting connection between them. In this episode, the ADULT employees talk about the effects of their late hours and stress are having on their health and personal lives.
Their schedule sounds remarkably like high-achieving high school TEENS I know….
So after deciding that we thought the full advanced placement courses class load was a treadmill to no-where that was increasing in speed, we started out with recommending our kids take partial AP loads. But, we found that our kids weren’t getting as much out of their classes. Maybe the path the school was recommending for top students – a full AP load – was the right one after all.
The problem is that the standard advice – given by all high schools – is to take as many preAP/AP courses as you possibly can. This means that most of the serious students are in the preAP/AP classes….