Students come to school after the holidays with book bags bought last fall. This is not the fresh start of the school year. This has to be a new kind of fresh start, and it’s hard on students, teachers and parents. Everyone is seeing the same faces, using the same books and working on subjects in which a record, good or not so good, is already in place.
Some students start the school year strong and finish stronger. Some students start weaker and gain strength through the year. And then, there are students who are just trying to hang on.
January, February and March are tough school months. This was always the hardest time of the year for me as a teacher. These are especially hard on students who may not be doing all that great and for their parents, too. The eager anticipations from the fall have passed, and spring and summer are still a long way ahead. These are the times that demand we learn how to keep encouraged and keep going.
How do we nurture our abilities to keep persevering? As a teacher, I do it with a lot of talking to myself, identifying what I am doing right, even when I do some things wrong. I have learned to try to be as specific and practical as possible so that I can move forward and not keep looking back at what did not go well in the first half of the school year. That’s advice I strongly recommend for all of us teachers out there, parents included.
We’ve all been told to get involved with children’s education. That’s the big generality. Now for a specific: Midyear is a good time to identify at least one strength, one ability that each child possesses and to talk about it and to find ways to build on it.
It might be in a particular school subject or an out-of-school hobby.
Take a look at the home study corner. It probably started out in the fall clean and organized. What does it need now? Straightening, plus a colorful pillow or a picture, something special to make this again a special place for a child to study.
How about the household routine: for study, meals, for TV and computer use, for sleeping. Has it gotten out of whack and needs to be put back together again?
What about checking in with teachers about what’s happening at school. The big back-to- school nights are over, but now more than ever it’s time to talk about how children are doing, now that they have a report card and teachers know children’s strengths and needs. Don’t wait for the end of the year to find out that a child needs help in certain subjects.
Then there is the continuing need to talk about the importance of education. Some of our children are forgetting, in the fast ease of videos and computers, that education is slow and demanding. Yet, it is the most worthwhile investment we can make. Education, it’s been found, even extends our life span.
This is the time to find out the real situation at school. I talked with a sixth-grade girl the other night who told me about her difficulties in math with a teacher who never explains enough, who talked in almost the same breadth about the cliques at school who don’t let her in. This is what you can learn especially at the time of year. As parents and teachers, we can’t soothe away all of our children’s troubles, but we are wise to learn about them, as early as we can.
At the beginning of the school year, we tend to ask about the school day and what’s happening. This gets reduced until we often forget to ask. Try to go back to the autumn back-to-school frame of mind when almost everything seemed possible. Only in that way is there a possibility for making the rest of the school year a success.
Dorothy Rich is founder and president of the nonprofit Home and School Institute, MegaSkills Education Center in Washington. Readers may write her at the Home and School Institute, MegaSkills Education Center, 1500 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, D.C. 20005, Web site: www.MegaSkillsHSI.org.
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