Study Skills: What are we NOT teaching our students?

Last week my 3 1/2 year old daughter, Maddie, came home from school very upset. She climbed onto my lap and kept her head down. In a calm, meek voice, she explained, “Mom, I don’t like school. I don’t like the gym… Miss H. growled at me. She says I can’t touch liars farm.”

Me: “You mean the fire alarm?”

Maddie: “Yeah, liar farm. Miss H scared me!”

Me: “Oh honey, I bet you were scared! But you have to be very careful with the fire alarm. You can only touch it if there’s…a what?”

Maddie: “A farm.”

Well uh no. Not a farm. Oh, how do I explain…?

I see both sides of this situation. Miss H certainly didn’t want the entire school evacuated because Maddie rang the fire alarm. Maddie, on the other hand, was legitimately freaked out by Miss H’s reaction.

If children had been taught to avoid the fire alarm when there is no emergency, this may never have been a problem for Maddie. But, it’s so hard to identify all that we should be explicitly teaching our students.

Our fabulous Operations Manager, Chrystal, learned a different lesson the hard way. As a junior in high school, she had a hard time passing classes. In the middle of the year, she left the school. Fortunately, the minimum wage jobs convinced her to return as a senior. Determined to graduate with her class, she faced a double load of courses. Overwhelmed, she knew that she had to do something different to pass her class.

His instinct told him to try the agenda that the school gives out every year. After three years, she still didn’t know how to use it. “My friends and I thought they were just for bathroom passes!” She explained. “Seriously, we didn’t know what else to do with them!”

Chrystal’s instincts proved correct. She taught herself how to use a planner to keep track of assignments and test dates. Before she knew it, she had earned straight A’s that year…and graduated with her class.

Obviously, I’m proud for her and very grateful that she found a path that led her to SOAR®. But it would have been good for her if she didn’t have to enroll in Hard Knocking School before learning what to do with that planner.

What Plus We lack?

My eight year old son likes to think that cleaning his room is throwing out everything in his closet. Our educational system does the same thing with our students… shovel nothing but glad in students

However, like my son, students cannot “find” information when they need it. They do not know What to organize that information or retrieve it for later use. In fact, the required K-12 content affects students as much; they never learn most of it in the first place.
No one has taught students to…

· Read a textbook strategically.

(Hint: reading the actual text in a textbook is *not* the way to do it.)

· To learn something, instead of memorizing it.

(Learning is much easier… and more fun!)

· In fact Organize notes for a research paper.

(It’s actually quite easy… when you know how to do it.)

· Use “texting” language and an extra fold on your paper to help you take good notes in class.

(Texting is the best thing that can happen to you when it comes to taking notes!)

· Pay attention in class.

(If possible!)

Organize your papers properly.

(A separate folder and separate notebook for each class only makes the problem worse!)

set goals for themselves.

(Compared to the goals that are set for them).

These skills refer to: accessing information, organizing it, keeping track of responsibilities, and retrieving information later, when needed. These are study skills and they are needed to be successful in school now. They are the study skills needed to succeed in college. And, these study skills translate into “should have“workplace skills.

how about I teach you What to learn? As our information age doubles the amount of new information every 48 hours, much of the content we deliver to our students will be out of date even before they graduate.

Don’t let your kids and students get caught up like poor Maddie, with her hand on the fire alarm, about to cause all kinds of mayhem. Provide them with the skills they need to bring order out of life’s chaos, so they can grow up to be happy, successful adults.