Educational

If your adolescent has had learning difficulties or other school problems, then these usually have been recorded in some way in your teen’s school files. These school files follow your child from school to school, and may even accompany them when they enter the work force. Parents need to be careful about monitoring these files, …

School Records and Your Rights as a Parent Read More »

Is your teenager bored with school? If so, you may need to do something at home to help bring a little life into his various school subjects. Here are a few suggestions: • For boring textbook material, try acting out the work, creating a little skit or play to illustrate the concepts or facts covered. …

Making Any School Subject Come Alive for Your Adolescent Read More »

With high school dropout rates and teenage apathy running rampant through our schools, it may benefit many parents to consider other choices for educating their adolescents. One important option to look at is apprenticeships. Apprenticeships go back thousands of years and actually were the original schools of ancient times. • In an apprenticeship, your teenager …

Apprenticeships: An Important Teaching Tool Read More »

Recent books, such as Allen Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind and E.D. Hirsch’s Cultural Literacy have focused new attention on the issue of how little our kids really know about their own culture. Studies suggest that high school students don’t even know when the Civil War took place and can’t identify Stalin or …

Cultural Literacy: What is it and What Does it Have to do with Your Adolescent? Read More »

Tests, unfortunately, are becoming more and more widely used in our school, creating test anxiety and learning blocks in our teens that get in the way of school success. However, you can help your adolescent cope with the negative effects of testing by providing him with the necessary skills for coping with these stresses. Here …

Test Taking Skills Read More »

Textbooks represent one of the primary tools used by teachers to help high school students learn about a new subject. Yet research suggests that textbooks may be among the least effective approaches in helping your teen to learn. • First, textbooks generally lack a distinct point of view, since they are often written by committees …

Textbook Learning – Part 2 Read More »

Your teenager may have been labeled “learning disabled” but he may not actually be a disabled learner. Many, if not most, of the two million students who are labeled “LD” learn perfectly well, if they’re given instructional approaches tailored to their own unique ways of learning. If your son or daughter has been tested and …

The Myth of Learning Disabilities Read More »