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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 [...] 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, [...] 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 [...] The way in which we experience and interpret the world obviously depends very much indeed on the kind of ideas that fill our minds. If they are mainly small, weak, superficial, and incoherent, life will appear insipid, uninteresting, petty and chaotic. It is difficult to bear the resultant feeling of emptiness, and the vacuum [...] From Chapter 2 of Good Habits, Good Students: Here’s a good way to find out where you need the most improvement: check your report card. Don’t just look at the grades, though. Check the comments your teachers write about each subject. Far too often when students receive report cards, they check their marks and then stop reading. However, if your reports include comments from each teacher, these can be more useful than the grades when it comes to figuring out what you need to do to improve. Not all comments by teachers are useful in this way. Some consist mostly of a standard description of what the class has studied in the previous term. There may be only a brief comment on your own work, and sometimes such comments emphasize what is most positive—which is nice, but not helpful if you’re trying to identify your weaknesses. Sometimes, too, teachers’ comments are written in a kind of secret code I call “report-speak”. “George has a good understanding of blah blah blah”, you read. Sounds good. Actually, however, a “good” understanding may be the third– or fourth–best level, below other possibilities like “excellent” and “very good”. Once you realize this, “good understanding” doesn’t sound so good anymore. Because comments on reports don’t always include the information you’re looking for, and because they are sometimes written in report-speak, any attempt to use your report card to discover where you most need to improve must include this vital step: asking your teachers, in person. Before you speak with them, however, do a bit of preparatory work. Continue reading Where do you need to improve? When I was 14 I came home after school and ate enormous amounts of food. I remember eating, for example, an entire half-gallon bucket of vanilla ice cream (more than two litres). Despite this behaviour my tummy stayed slim and I never suffered any ill effects. By the time I was 30, however, the [...] Students can build good habits and break bad ones on their own, if they are determined. But success rates rise dramatically when they get support from teachers, parents, and friends. So what can teachers do to help? Require students to write their assignments in a homework diary. This simple act works wonders. The key [...] Joe Waters has good advice for young basketball players. Ryan at Learn4Liberty has a nice post about the importance of motivation when trying to break a bad habit or establish a good one. “Repetition helps,” he writes, “but repetition alone will not do it.” I would put this differently: repetition will form a new habit, but without motivation you are unlikely to repeat [...] Matt Furey, writing about exercise and fitness, echoes the advice found in Good Habits, Good Students about habits and goal-setting, but then goes on to assert that 28 days of effort can produce a new habit. Agree? Disagree? Post a comment! |
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