My advice for secondary school students (and older) is at EricMacKnight.com, here: http://ericmacknight.com/wordpress/?p=359.
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HundredPushups.com is a great exercise site. They have sister sites for sit-ups, squats, and pull-ups. Each site provides a simple program that takes about 30 minutes a week, and promises that over six weeks you can dramatically improve your fitness. The secret? A graduated sequence of repetitions in five sets. Each sequence is repeated three times (say, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday). HundredPushups.com can give your workouts a highly effective structure. The goal-setting is done for you. All you need to supply is a bit of will-power. Go check it out! (Thanks for the tip, Sean!) Apologize, fix it, and move on. What should you say if you’re caught doing something wrong? Apologize, first. Then, if you can do anything to repair the damage, do it. All of us make mistakes. The question is, how do we respond to them? If we try to weasel out of trouble, point the finger at others, and deny responsibility, all we do is make ourselves look bad and lose the respect of those around us. All we do is show the adults involved that we are still acting like little kids. So if you get caught, don’t say, “It wasn’t me.” Or, “Those other guys were doing it first.” Or, “I didn’t know.” If you make a mistake, have the courage to say, “I messed up, and I’m sorry. How can I fix it, or make up for it?” Then follow through. People are ready to forgive you—but only if you’re ready to take responsibility. Apologize, fix it, and move on. That kind of response will earn admiration and respect. I once saw two students sweeping the entranceway to their school after having been caught for a minor misdeed. One of them saw this task as a punishment, while the other saw it as doing service to the school. The first one was angry at being caught and still refused to accept responsibility for what he had done. The second had admitted his mistake, apologized, and asked what he could do to balance the scales. It wasn’t a big deal, but this incident spoke volumes about each of these two individuals. They were the same age, but one was still a boy, while the other was clearly a young man on the way to becoming a responsible adult. A few words about cheating Why do students cheat? First, because they are desperate. Bad habits have put them into a corner: their homework’s not done, they aren’t ready for the test, or they’ve put off writing the paper that’s almost due. Second, they’re still thinking like little kids instead of responsible young adults. They think that if they “get away” with cheating, they will be better off. They don’t realize that they are only cheating themselves. If they earn good grades for work they didn’t do, they aren’t learning what the work was supposed to teach them. And no matter who else believes them, they will look into the mirror and see a cheater. What’s the right thing to do if you find yourself in a corner and make the wrong choice? You already know: take responsibility. Apologize, fix it, and move on. Then when you look in the mirror, you won’t see a cheater. You’ll see someone who messed up but was courageous and smart enough to be honest about it. This is an excerpt from Good Habits, Good Students: A Complete Guide for Students Who Want to Succeed. Bob Duffin teaches in Mesa, Arizona. In April of this year he posted the following review of Good Habits, Good Students under the heading, “Advice that can really work”:
In May another Amazon reviewer who goes by the name “BookMaven” titled his or her review, “Every 9th grade student and parent should read this book!”:
Bob and BookMaven, I’m so glad that you and your students have found the book to be useful, and grateful to you for spreading the word. If you see this, please drop me an email message. Thanks! You can read both of these reviews here. This article from listified.com reviews eight online note-taking applications that you might find useful. Of course, an application you like will help. But you still need to know how to take notes—how to organize them, what to write down, what to leave out, how much detail to include—and that takes practice, whether with a pencil or with a computer. This article aimed at middle-school teachers actually applies pretty well to those teaching high school and upper elementary students as well. The ideal, of course, would be for all teachers in a school to teach good habits—teachers, talk to your colleagues and principals! If paper organizers, homeword diaries, etc., don’t seem helpful, you might give this new online organizer a try. MySchoolog.com is completely free and multilingual, including versions in several European languages as well as Chinese and Japanese. (If you are a Korean you might volunteer to help create a Korean version of the site.) I haven’t tried this myself, but the development team certainly looks like an interesting group of people. If you give it a try, leave a comment here and let us know what you think. If you are inspired, ambitious, and motivated, acquiring good habits is easy: follow the advice on this web site, and in my book. But if you lack inspiration, ambition, and motivation, you are unlikely to make the effort needed to acquire good habits. What to do? Talk to people who seem to be inspired, ambitious, and motivated. Find out what drives them. Read about people who have been inspired, ambitious, and motivated and have achieved great things as a result. Seek out people, especially, who are inspired about subjects that leave you bored: maybe they can show you something that will spark your interest. If math is not your thing, for example, find a really good math student, or teacher, and ask: what is it about math that interests and excites you? Today a colleague began talking about his Grade 11 students. “They don’t take notes”, he said in exasperation. “Not a single one of them.” Another colleague, overhearing us, joined in. “Isn’t that their problem?” he said. “By Grade 11 they should have figured this stuff out. We shouldn’t have to tell them to take notes and use their homework diaries.” I wrote Good Habits, Good Students primarily for students. Teachers, for a variety of reasons, rarely teach the habits needed to succeed in school. Students are left on their own to ‘figure it out’. Unfortunately a huge number don’t figure it out, and blame themselves for their academic disappointments: I’m lazy, I’m no good, I’m stupid. I wrote the book to help students acquire the good habits they need, and to convince them that they can be successful. But I also wrote the book hoping that teachers and schools would realize that they should be teaching habits. If they did, students would achieve much better results on the ‘material’ taught in school, and would believe in their ability to learn, and would be equipped to go on learning on their own when they are out of school. Grade 11, of course, is a bit late to begin. Imagine what my colleagues would be saying, though, if their students had been learning and practicing good habits for years. It’s a dream, but it would not be particularly difficult or expensive to make it come true. First: read every day! Second: use a homework diary in every class! And here’s a good list of online tools for students. It’s intended for university students but most of the items listed are equally useful for high school students. |
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