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What to learn from a poor test grade

We’re starting to get calls from parents about unexpectedly poor grades on a test or quiz. And while students and parents should be on the lookout for red flags like this that something isn’t going well in the student’s class, it isn’t time to panic! Any failure in life is an opportunity for learning, and a poor grade on a test is no exception to that.

The key, though, is this: the student must come away understanding

-why the missed questions were missed, and, more importantly

-in what ways was the test preparation process inadequate

Before we get into how to find the answers to the above questions, a warning:

Blaming the teacher is (usually) not productive.

It’s very easy for a student to blame a poor test grade on something the teacher didn’t teach (or teach well), or the teacher’s not giving the students the correct information about the test, and any number of other reasons that the teacher might be at fault.

And, these reasons MAY be right.

But here is the problem: even if the reasons ARE right, if the goal is a higher grade in the class, blaming the teacher is not helpful, because it’s very unlikely that the teacher is going to change. So a student who performed poorly on a test has a choice: blame the teacher, and let that be the excuse for not succeeding in the class, or look for the ways that the student can change, and make those the path to success, despite having a teacher that isn’t doing things the ideal way for the student.

For example:

Excuse: “I didn’t understand how the teacher explained that concept”

Solution: “When I don’t understand how the teacher explains a concept, I need to ask a question/get help from a tutor or a friend/watch a video on Khan Academy.

Excuse: “The teacher is so picky and marked me down for now showing my work/writing units/doing the problems the exact way she showed us.”

Solution: “I need to make sure that when I practice I am showing my work/writing my units/doing the problems exactly the way she showed us.”

Excuse: “The teacher asked questions that weren’t even in the book/review sheet/slides”

Solution: “Some of the questions came from sources I didn’t expect. I need to make sure I am reviewing all the sources, not just the book/review sheet/slides.”

Students need to look for what they can take control of, despite how they might feel about the teacher!

So, how do we make sure that the student learns the lessons and makes the changes in behavior so that the student learns how to succeed on future tests.

Step 1: Analyze the test.

The student needs to look over the test and work to understand why each question was missed. This doesn’t JUST mean understanding how to do the problem correctly. It also means understanding exactly what the student did wrong, and WHY the student did it incorrectly in the first place.

That is, it isn’t enough to say, “Oh I missed that question because I multiplied instead of adding the exponents.” Why did the student multiply instead of add? Was it because the student didn’t know that they should multiply? Was the student running low on time and rushed through, leading to the error? Did the student skip a step in their work? Each of these reasons for missing the question has its own solution.

In order to do this, the student needs direct access to the test. Ideally, the teacher will allow the student to take the test home. If not, the student should take detailed notes on their test, and/or request time to see the teacher before or after school to review the test in detail. If the student explains it as, “I’m not happy with my performance on this test, and I want to figure out what I did wrong so I can improve for my next test” the teacher should be accomodating!

Step 2: How did the student end up taking a test that he was unprepared for?

This is the more important, and oftentimes more overlooked question. To answer this question, think about the following:

-What was my test preparation timeline? Did I have a study plan that started at the beginning of the unit, or did I wait to do my studying until the day(s) before the test?

-Was there material on the test that I did not expect to see? If so, why? Was the material from a source I didn’t expect to be tested on (textbook, slides, lecture notes, worksheets, homework problems, practice exams, other sources on the teacher’s website)? If so, why didn’t I expect to be tested on it? Will I regularly be tested on material from this source?

-Did I feel confident going into the test? If so, why did I feel prepared when I was, in fact, unprepared? Did I test myself in a variety of different ways, or did I just “feel” ready? Did I use active (free response questions, solving problems start to finish, free recall) or passive (reviewing notes, re-reading the chapter, “looking over” problems) methods of study?

-If I didn’t feel confident, when did I realize I wasn’t confident? The day before the test? If so, why didn’t I know sooner? If I knew sooner, what did I do once I realized I wasn’t confident?

You can succeed on your next test…but not by approaching your next test the same way you approached your last test. Be determined to determine what went wrong and what you can do differently next time.

Does your son or daughter need help getting ready for their next test? Give us a call at 858.551.2650 or email help@wellsacademics.com!

The power of plugging numbers in

One of the biggest differences between studying for a math class and preparing for the SAT is that, in a math class students are expected to understand (or even just memorize) certain processes or algorithms. Success on a math test in a math class often feels like looking at a problem, recognizing that it is a problem very similar to problems you’ve repeatedly practiced in your homework, and repeating the process you’ve learned. In fact, on a math test, if you solved a problem by simply plugging numbers in (rather than using the process taught you you by your teacher) you’ll likely get the problem marked as wrong (even if you got the correct answer!)

And that is understandable. A math teacher is trying to teach students how to use a particular tool. If the student solves a problem by using a tool other than what the teacher taught, the student has not demonstrated mastery of the tool. If a student is being taught how to use a hammer, and the student connects two pieces of wood with a screw, the student really hasn’t demonstrated master of the hammer.

There is, though, a BIG problem with telling students that the only way to solve a problem is the “right” way: that is not how the real world works. Success in our personal and professional lives depends on our ability to look at a problem we do not know how to solve, and find a way to solve it with what we know at the time. If we wait until we remember the “right” way to solve a problem, we might be waiting a very long time. 

The result: students coming in for test prep and class support sessions with problems they could not solve, who haven’t tried anything to solve them, and who wait, with hands folded in lap, for instructors to teach them a process for them to memorize.

Waiting for someone to tell you what to do is not going to lead to success on the SAT, and it is not going to lead to success in life, personally or professionally. The SAT doesn’t care HOW you get the correct answer. They just care that you get the correct answer.

Here is an example from an SAT practice exam on the college board website:

Now, a student might look at this problem and say “Wow, this looks really complicated. I’ve got no idea how to do this…oh well.” That’s the thinking of a student who is looking for the “right” want to do the question.

Watch how asking questions and “trying something” can lead to the correct answer, even if the student doesn’t understand the “right way” to solve the problem.

First question: what concepts is this problem dealing with?

This problem is dealing with variables, right? Well, what is a variable? You might answer something like “It’s a letter that can be replaced with different numbers.” What does that suggest we can do with these variables?

Replace them with numbers of course! So let’s try plugging numbers in for m and p,

What numbers should we plug in?

“I don’t know.”

And again, we have an opportunity for a student who doesn’t know the “right” numbers to plug in to throw up their hands in exasperation. How about trying…any numbers? Let’s try m=3 and p=7.

Now the problem turns into something simpler:

Armand sent 3 text messages per hour for 5 hours. What can we determine here? Oh, he sent 15 text messages!

Tyrone sent 7 text messages per hour for 4 hours. What can we determine here? Oh, he sent 28 text messages!

So it looks like he sent a total of 43 text messages.

Ok, so what? None of the answers say 43.

Well, what DO you know about the answers? They have variables. What can we do with variables? Plug in numbers. What numbers?

Oh, m=3 and p=7!

We plug those numbers in to each answer choice and we find that C gives us 43! C is the answer.

A discerning student might notice that answer C also used the same operations we did. But the more important point is this: we did not need to understand the algebra behind this problem to solve it by plugging in numbers. All we had to understand is that if you send 3 text messages per hour for 5 hours, that’s 15 text messages.

Too often, we see students leave points on the table on their SAT exams, practice tests, and homework assignments that could be solved very simply if only they asked questions about the problem and tried something!

This is not to say that learning the algebraic way to solve this problem is not valuable. It absolutely is! Ideally, when you see a problem like this on your SAT, you’ve mastered the algebraic method of solving it. If so, great! Solve it using algebra. But if you haven’t, and you solve this problem “the long way”, yes, you should absolutely go back and review the necessary algebra. But, because you WILL see math problems on your test you don’t recognize, you MUST practice doing something, anything, with a problem to learn about it. Otherwise, you’ll be throwing away potentially easy points like these!

Here is another example:

This is one of the problems students miss the most on the diagnostic test, in my experience

Maybe you look at this problem and say “Ugh there are fractions within fractions. This looks so confusing. There is no way I’ll be able to simplify this”

Maybe you say, “I have never seen this before in my life.”

So you move on, because you “don’t know how to solve” the problem.

What if, instead, you said, “Hmm, these equations have variables. Maybe I can try plugging in numbers to the answer choices?”

What number should we try plugging into the answer choices? It says x > 3 How about 4?

And we see that if we plug in x = 4, the value of this expression is 42/13.

OK, but none of our answers are 42/13, so how does that help?

Look at the answers. What do you see? Variables. What can you do with variable? Plug in numbers. What number? x=4…the same number we plugged in a minute ago!

Is that going “to work”? No idea…let’s try it and see!

Even as you were plugging numbers in, you might have been saying to yourself, “I have no idea if this if going to work”. But when you plug 4 into the answer choices and you see 42/13 pop out of answer choice B, you’ll realize that, even if you didn’t feel like you knew what you were doing, plugging in numbers was enough to find the answer.

Now, if you looked closer are the answer choices, you might have also realized the following:

-C and D were not going to give a fractional value from plugging in x=4, s, so we probably don’t need to try those ones.

-If you did A first and got 13/42, you might have noticed that B was the reciprocal of A, which means B must be correct (since the reciprobal of 13/42 is 42/13, which was our answers)

Even if you didn’t notice those things, though, you can still get this question 100% correct by doing nothing more than plugging numbers in.

YES, after solving this problem by plugging in numbers, you need to go back and review complex fractions if that was a concept you were not comfortable with. 

That said, in your test prep, you ALSO need to be practicing “what do I do when I don’t know the answer?” And waiting until the internet or a teacher/tutor gives you the knowledge you “need” is not practicing that.

In conclusion:

Big idea: when you are faced with an SAT problem that deals with variables, and you have no idea how to proceed, try plugging in numbers to see if you can learn something about the problem. You will surprise yourself with how often doing this alone will solve the problem!

Bigger idea: When you “don’t know how” to solve a problem in your practice, you MUST practice doing as much as you can. Try anything you can think of to learn something about the problem. This will be an invaluable skill if you want to squeeze more points out of the math section.

Before Chapter One

In a previous article, I discussed how much you can learn from even just the name of a textbook. The point is not that you can read the title of the book and be done with it, but simply that there is information of value to you everywhere in a book, if you are hunting it down. This is why starting your pre-reading by looking at the titles of the chapter and subsections can help prime your mind for what is to come

But there is so much more information in your book that you can find if you look for it! Information that most students take for granted, but that can be invaluable. Let’s take a look at the Art History textbook and see what we can find before first chapter.

About the Cover Art

You are going to be looking at the cover art many times over the course of the school year. Why not know something about it?

Reading through this, we get a sense of the kind of things we are going to learn about a piece of art:
-the type of art (movement) and how the piece exemplifies it.
-the time period and location, and how the they influences the piece
-the medium and technique
-history of the artist

Maybe this will be a pattern throughout the book. Perhaps it will be an expectation that we understand these things about each piece of art.

Brief Contents

This is “just” a list of chapter titles. What can we learn from this?

Skimming over the titles, we can make a few observations:
-”Introduction: What Is Art History” seems like it might be a pretty darn important chapter to read!
-The book seems to be largely in chronological order, with chapter devoted to particular regions at a given period of time.
-It is largely focussed on Europe and the near East (and later North America, with only 10 of 37 chapters devoted to Asia/Africa/Americas.
-Chapters 1-19 seem to be about “early periods” and chapters 20-37 about “late periods” (Chapters 15-19 are about “other” areas in earlier periods, chapter 20 gets back to Europe, and chapters 32-37 are about “other” areas in later periods)
-It looks like Europe and the Near East are going to be vastly more important for this class than other areas of the world (Africa, Americas, and Asia). In each half of the book, only about 25% of the chapters are about areas outside Europe/Near East. Why that is might be a good question for us to think about as we go through the school year.

Contents

The table of contents can do a couple of things for us. First, it can give us a sense of the patterns that we’ll come across in the chapters. Secondly, it can give us more ideas about what the important ideas are that we’ll come across again and again. So first off, what patterns do we see in each chapter?

-Each chapter starts with a “Framing the Era” section. I went ahead to chapter 1 and 2 to see what these sections were about. It looks like these sections give some background about the period of time and a piece or pieces of art that exemplify that period of time. They have some vocabulary that will be important for that chapter as well.

-The chapter is divided up into 2-6 sections that deal with different locations, time periods, or style of art.

-Each chapter has several boxed essays that highlight different aspects of history, culture, techniques that give insight into the broader ideas within a chapter by looking at specific examples and case-studies. Understanding how these connect to the chapter as a whole could be a useful way to test ourselves, and seeing case studies could be a good way for us to see examples of concepts we might not fully understand.

-Each chapter has a timeline (showing important dates) and a map (showing important places). These could be a very useful way for use to test ourselves, or for us to having important dates and places highlighted (probably we’ll want to study and understand these maps and timelines well).

-Each chapter ends with THE BIG PICTURE (all in caps!). These are bullet point lists of the most important people, events, and concepts of the time period. These often include non-art items. These ideas should probably be mastered!

Preface

In general, a preface is a section about the book, What better person to tell us about the book than the author! There is lots of great information in the preface to Gardner’s “Art through the Ages”.

-There is an online component of the textbook that has more images, and videos, giving more examples of the art from each time period. It seems that a lot of time and effort went into these online resources!

-There is a “backpack” edition of this textbook that divides the book up into six smaller paperback books. Might be worth it so you don’t have to lug this huge book around all year!

-The author mentions “Framing the Era”, “THE BIG PICTURE”, timelines, and maps specifically, saying that students find these useful when preparing for examinations. I wonder if these could be valuable or important to pay attention to?

-The author discusses the purpose of each of the types of boxed essays found throughout the chapters, noting that the material covered in these boxed essays is more closely related to the main text than it was in previous editions. This likely means that these boxed essays will be important examples of the things we are trying to learn in the text.

-The author explains why art from outside of Western Civilization seems to have been separated into its own group of chapters. It’s because it “interrupted” the continuous narrative of the western tradition. This suggests that understanding the connections between chapters is also going to be important (ex. How does what happened in the previous chapter affect what I’m seeing in this chapter?)

-The author discusses the purpose of an introductory art course: “to foster an appreciation and understanding of historically significant works of art of all kinds from all periods and from all parts of the globe.” He then discusses how the book is organized: according to civilizations and in chronological order so that the story of art history can best be told. He wants to make sure that we are not discussing “just” art, but are considering the art in the context of patronage, function, and history. So we also need to pay attention to relationship between art and history in a wider context (not just “art history”).

-The author mentions an “art canon” which suggest that there is number of pieces of art that are standard, must-know pieces for an art history class. A quick google search led me to:

https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/ap-art-history/introduction-ap-arthistory/a/required-works-of-art-for-ap-art-history

Wow! What a fantastic resource that we should probably bookmark and refer to as we go through this course!

About the Author

Learn something about the person whose book you are going to be spending a year reading. It will just take a minute…if you wrote a book wouldn’t you want people to know who YOU are?

Resources

More information about the online resources referred to in the preface (and where to find those resources.)

Introduction

If the preface is about the book, an introduction is about the course. Not every textbook has an introduction chapter: in many textbooks the introduction chapter is just called “Chapter 1”. But it often serves the same role.

It’s really a tragedy that many teachers skip the introduction. The introduction is going to introduce you to key ideas, learning objectives, definitions and terms, all of which are going to serve you throughout the course. The introduction for Gardner’s Art through the Ages is entitled, “What Is Art History?” Do you think that might be an important question to be able to answer if you want to succeed in the course?

The first section in the chapter is called “The Questions Art Historians Ask” and it may as well be titled “The Questions Art History Exams Ask” as it goes through what it purports to be the important things you need to know about a piece of art. Similarly, the next section, entitled, “Words Art Historians Use”, goes through art concepts that will surely be referenced again and again throughout the year.

Understanding your introduction well means that you have the perspective and mindset that the author intends for you to have. It means you’ll be thinking about the things the author intends and asking the questions the author intends.

In Summary

When you begin diving into the details of a course or chapter, having some ideas about the context of what you are reading can help you make sense of the details. Pre-reading a chapter can help you make sense of the big picture of a chapter, and taking advantage of what comes before chapter one in your textbook can help you make sense of the big picture of the course.

7 ways to get the most out of your SAT/ACT prep

Over the course of working with thousands of students the last 25 years, we’ve learned the  common threads among the students who see significant improvement in their SAT/ACT prep. A student can have the best education, but their success is about what THEY do with it.

What can students do, whatever path they’ve chosen for their test prep, to ensure that they are getting the most from the process, and you aren’t realizing, months later, that what they’ve been doing isn’t working?

Get interested

The stories we tell ourselves have a powerful influence on our perceptions. If one of the stories a student is telling himself is “The SAT/ACT is a pointless obstacle”, then what the student will find as he goes through the test prep process is many reasons he is right! That’s confirmation bias in action.

But students can put confirmation bias to work for them by creating new, positive stories about their test prep. What might a student find out about test prep if these are their stories?

“I’m building the grammar foundation I need to be an effective communicator.”

“I’m finding holes in my math foundation and filling them.”

“I’m learning how asking questions can help me find answers.”

“I’m learning active reading skills.”

“I’m practicing high quality of work.”

“I’m improving my discipline, determination, and grit.”

These are just some of the ways WE see students benefit from the test prep process (is it any wonder that we are so excited about test prep?). What a student who is actively searching for the value in the process finds might be something completely different. There is value in a reading passage and in a math problem beyond “improving SAT scores”: you just have to look for it. And a student who is looking for what is valuable, interesting, relevant, and positive about their test prep will be more active in their learning, will dig deeper, will ask more questions, and will show more determination. All things that lead to greater success on the SAT/ACT (and in life as an adult!)

Ask why, not what

A typical test prep book (or test prep course) follows a familiar pattern:

Student works through problem.

Student gets the incorrect answer.

Student is shown how to get the correct answer (via teacher, video, book, etc).

Student student nods along, and says, “Oh, I get it.” Maybe the student can now work through that problem on his or her own.

The problem with this process: THAT problem is not going to be on their SAT/ACT, so the student’s ability to answer THAT question is irrelevant.

What IS relevant is that student’s ability to demonstrate mastery of the underlying concept. The clearest way to demonstrate this is for a student to teach the concept to someone else.

What does 2^0 equal? (requires memorizing a fact, narrow application)

Why does 2^0 = 1? (requires understanding the underlying principles of exponents, wide application)

What is the correct word: “He gave the ball to [I/me]”? (uses intuition, how it “sounds”, narrow application)

Why do we say “He gave the ball to me” rather than “He gave the ball to I”? (requires understanding subject/object, parts of speech, and pronoun case; wide application)

Students should always strive to demonstrate the level of understanding in the second of these questions, because that level of mastery is needed to be able to apply the concept in a wide variety of problems.

Learn from every mistake, and capture the lesson.

Throughout a study session, a student may review many problems they struggled with. But if you ask that same student, at the end of their study session, “What did you learn?” they will struggle to answer the question. What good was the study session if the student can’t even articulate what they learned from it?

Every missed problem is an opportunity to avoid that error on the test, but if those takeaways are not made explicit and documented, they will be lost. This is especially true for execution errors (also called “careless errors”) Students should make a log of every error they make in their practice, and the lesson(s) they learned from that mistake. There is no mistake so trivial that it does not warrant analysis and documentation. Fail to log, fail to learn!

Have a goal, and work toward that goal every day.

It’s easy for test prep to drop down a list of student priorities. The student has a quiz tomorrow, an essay due on Wednesday, and a presentation on Thursday. The SAT/ACT is months away. Surely it’s fine to put practice off for a few days, right? Days turn into weeks and into months, and before you know it, a semester has been lost, and the student’s options for test dates have been narrowed.

This where goal setting comes in. Before a student begins their test-prep process, they should have a clear idea of:

Their test date, and score goals for that test date

What are the actions that need to be taken on a daily and weekly basis to achieve that goal.

A schedule that is going to ensure that they take those actions on a weekly basis.

A plan for how they will adjust when, inevitably, a week comes along and they they haven’t done the work they intended to do.

The best way to make sure that consistent progress is made is to make test prep a part of a student’s daily (yes, DAILY) routine. Even if, some days, it’s only 30 minutes, making consistent, daily progress prevents SAT prep from retreating from the front of the student’s mind.

High school students have busy schedules. What the student doesn’t schedule will not be done, and what is done will not be done well. Students should schedule their test prep in their planners. Setting a “what” and “when” intention on a daily basis is the key to consistent action.

Follow “I don’t know”s up with “I do know”s

First off, there is absolutely NOTHING wrong with saying “I don’t know”: it’s the correct answer to 99.99% of questions in the universe! It’s a fantastic answer that is at the start of ANY learning or discovery!

The problem is when the result of an “I don’t know” is a student, hands folded in lap, looking at the teacher expectantly, who waits knowledge to rain down on them. Their expectation is that they should know how to do a problem, start to finish, before they even begin. If they don’t, they need to see a teacher to get help.

Any “I don’t know” should be followed up by as many “I do know”s as the student can manage. Write those “I DO know”s down. Our experience is that, even on a problem a student feels completely lost on, the student knows a lot, and, with some encouragement, can often make much more progress than they thought possible.

Build your foundation

While students can improve their scores significantly by looking at their test-taking habits and their problem solving processes, there is no substitute for having a mastery of the tools of math and language they’ll need to use on the test.

Unfortunately, most schools in the US don’t teach grammar fundamentals (ask a high school graduate what an adverb is), they don’t teach HOW to read beyond basic literacy (which is why so many high school graduates have a tough time explaining the main idea of a newspaper article), and they move students on through math classes before students reach mastery of the concepts (if a student got a C on a math test back in 7th grade, for example, can we say that the concepts covered in that test are a strong foundation to build on?)

Every missed question is an opportunity to identify weaknesses in the student’s foundation. Students should not be afraid to “go down the rabbit hole” when they discover, upon asking questions about a problem they missed, that they can’t explain what a pronoun is or what a ratio is. It’s easy for a student to be scared or turned off by a discovery like this, but remember, “I don’t know” is a fantastic answer! “I don’t know” is curiosity, exploration, learning, growth: all fantastic opportunities!

Show your work

Every time we don’t write something down, we are taking a chance that we will forget or make a mistake. Maybe, even without showing our work, we still get it right 19 out of 20 times. Take that 1/20 chance of making a mistake, compounded over multiple steps and and entire test worth of problems, and you have a lot of mistakes that are a result of not showing your work.

Students might say, “Yes, that’s true. But this is a timed test. I don’t have time to show my work on every problem.” Our answers to that are:

  • Showing work SAVES time
  • Practicing showing your work makes you faster and better at it.
  • Showing your work is a great way to start doing something on a problem you are unsure about.
  • Saving a few seconds on an earlier problem by not showing work to gain a few seconds on a much harder problem later in the test is not a good trade-off.
  • Showing your work allows you to learn much more from your mistakes.

There is no such thing as a problem that is so simple that it will not be missed if we don’t give our full attention and effort to it, and showing work is a great way to ensure you are doing just that.

Conclusion

A student who wants to significantly improve their test prep scores has to do more than go through the motions. Too many students prepping for the tests sit in classes and passively let information wash over (and past) them, mechanically work through problems without curiosity and creativity, studies inconsistently and procrastinates, and generally look at test prep practice as a thing to “get over with” so they can move on to the things they’d rather be doing. 

Success requires a student who actively engages with material, gets curious, has grit, practices regularly with consistently high quality, and who believes that the work they are doing is going to make a difference.

Looking to get some guidance about SAT/ACT? Call 858.551.2650 or email help@wellsacademics.com to schedule a free test prep consultation.

The Mighty Memo Pad!

I’m going to share with you a tool that can increase your effectiveness in all areas of your life. It’s a memory aid, a communication device, a distraction eliminator, and it’s small enough to fit in your pocket. You can find it at any drug store for a buck or less.

The MIGHTY memo pad

I’m not at all exaggerating when I say that these humble pieces of paper can change your life. How?

In a previous blog post, I talked about all the ways that writing more can help you. A memo pad is a way for you to take the advantages of writing more wherever you go. A memo pad can always be in a pocket or a bag, ready to do its job of being written on at any time.

A memo pad is a memory aid. Writing is a way to help you remember, both because you have a written record to refer back to if you forget and it forces you to pause and focus your attention on the information (making it more likely that you’ll remember it even if you don’t ever refer back to your written record.) By keeping a memo pad with you, you’ll be able to write down much more of the important information you’ll happen to come across on a day to day basis more readily, because you won’t need to go through the relative hassle of pulling a big notebook or a planner out of a backpack. Standing and writing in a memo pad is easy and convenient; writing in a bigger notebook on the go is more awkward, usually requiring a writing surface of some kind.

A memo pad is also a distraction eliminator. When you are trying to focus on something, and distracting ideas and thoughts keep trying to take you off task, take out your memo pad, and write them down. I know that texting a friend about something you just remembered or looking up who played Katniss’ sister in the Hunger Games seems REALLY important right now when your mind is desperate to take you off-task. Write it down, and trust you’ll get to that “important” distraction later without fear of not remembering.

A memo pad is also a communication device. If you want someone else to remember something, write it down, tear it out, and give it to them. They’re more likely to remember when they have a physical piece of paper as a reminder rather than having your reminder lost in a see of notifications on their phone.

Speaking of which, you can also use a memo pad to create “location based reminders” for yourself. Write a note for yourself, tear it out, and leave it in a place you’ll see it when you need it. Need to remember to bring something with you when you leave for school? Leave a note on your keys or your wallet. Need to remember to talk to a teacher about something? Leave a note in your notebook for that class.

By the way, when someone is giving you information, and you whip out a memo pad to write it down, you look super responsible. It’s a way to show the person you are speaking with that you actually care about and value what they are saying. Imagine the difference that kind of impression could make on your relationship with, for example, your teachers. And, by the way, by writing it down, you’ll end up BEING more responsible too.

You might say, “Why do I need a memo pad? I have a note app on my phone, which I already carry with me at all times?” There are many reasons, but the most important reason is that you phone is the ENEMY of focus. It’s true that your phone is a wonderful tool. But if you are like me, every time you unlock your phone, you are wading through a minefield of distraction. And if what you are trying to avoid is distraction, your phone is the LAST thing you should be reaching for.

A couple things to keep in mind:

Using your memo pad well means using it consistently. It has to occur to you to write something down, which will happen when you build the habit of using it. Build the habit of using your memo pad consistently by finding ways to use and look at it every day. Here are a few ideas:

Write down your schedule for the day every day

Write down your to-do list every day

Write down ten ideas every day

Using it every day means you’ll see what you’ve written every day. It doesn’t do any good to write something down you want to remember if you only look at your memo pad every three weeks. If you look at your memo pad every day (or multiple times per day) you’ll repeatedly see the things that you need to see repeatedly!

Your memo pad is a temporary storage. Things that go in your memo pad are things that either only need to be there for a short time (like a daily schedule or a reminder to do something today) or things that need to be transferred to somewhere more permanent (like a plan for a project would need to be transferred to a planner). Every day or so, you should process your memo pad. What that means is you are going to throw away the pages you’ve written things down in your notepad. Everything you need to keep for longer should be transferred to a more permanent place (planners, notebooks, apps, etc). Keeping your memo pad empty means it is easy to find the short-term, temporary things you are writing in it.

In the end, writing things down is a way to be more conscious and more active with information coming in, which is the key to remembering and using information well. So pick up a memo pad today and use it every day for a couple of weeks. Let me know what it does for you!

Have you thought about the title of the book?

So, I imagine that all you eager students are getting ready to crack open that AP Biology book and get a jump start on the school year. What better way to be prepared for a challenging year ahead than by learning a lot of the material on your own this summer.

But the best way to go about teaching yourself the material is NOT to open the book, go to Chapter One, and start reading dutifully. Your objective is LEARNING, not READING. And while reading is certainly a tool you’ll need to employ, it is by no means enough. Simply moving your eyes down a page is not going to lead to learning.

So if our objective is learning, we need to figure out how to use the tool of reading to accomplish that objective. Here is a key principle of reading that we’re going to talk about how to apply to reading a textbook:

Not everything written is equally important.

If that is the case, then we’ve got two questions to answer

  1. How do I figure out what parts of the book and what ideas are the more/less important ones?
  2. Once I’ve figured out what is more/less important, how do I use that information?

Let’s start with question 1: How do I figure out what parts of the book are more/less important?

Well, if we need to know what parts of the book are the most important, we need to know what parts are in the book obviously! So we want to understand the structure of the book.

Let’s take a look at “Gardner’s Art through the Ages: a Global History”, which I’m choosing because I have little knowledge of art and art history. Those of you taking AP Art History will be reading this book this year. And boy, it’s a doozy!

Let’s take a look at the title. Reading and thinking about the title of a book, a chapter, or a section takes just a moment, but the title of what you are reading contains the most impactful and valuable words you read, because the title is connected to EVERYTHING you are going to read.

By spending a few moments thinking about what the title tells us about the book, we can learn a lot about the structure and purpose of the book, which will help us make sense of the book as we read it

“Garder’s”: It’s a person, seemingly. But not the author (who seems to be Fred S. Kleiner). He or she is probably an important person. To all of art? Hmmm…we probably need to figure out who this person is!

“Art” Ok, we expect that the book is going to be about art (the class is called Art History after all). What is art, exactly? That’s a hard word (for me) to define…I know it when I see it I guess. I’ll probably want to get a really clear definition of this word, since the entire class hinges on it. (Note: you would be surprised bow many times I work with students who believe they are ready for a test, or understand a concept, when they can’t even define the concept! This should be where you start!) My guess is that the book will cover that early on, but probably I’ll seek that out in the book before I even start reading the first chapter. Where do you think I can find the definition of “art”?

“Through the Ages” I know “ages” are periods of time, like the “Middle Ages” or “Age of Industrialization” So we’ll probably be grouping art by the period of time that it was created and seeing the connections between pieces of art created in contemporaneously.

“A global”: So we’ll be looking at art from all over the world (rather than just focussing on, say, western art traditions). Sometimes, time periods are also named for a place too, like “Classical Greece” or “Feudal Japan” so maybe the book will sort things through by discreet times and places. Probably the art happening in the Roman Empire was not very similar to the art being created in Ancient China at the same time. 

“Approach” an approach is HOW we do something or look at something. So, presumably we’ll be learning not just facts about art but HOW to think about and/or look at art. Or, maybe it’s just that the author’s approach was to look at art globally.

“14th Edition” Wow, this book has been around a LONG time. Maybe this Gardner person was the original author of the book.

We haven’t even opened the book yet, but we’ve already learned a LOT about this book, and got some ideas about what the content and structure of the book might be, spending no more than a couple minutes reading and thinking about the title. Since the title presumably deals with the purpose of the entire book, that’s important! We’ve also got a couple of good questions that we definitely should try to answer.

-Who is Gardner?

-What is art?

-Are we going to be simply learning facts about art, or are we going to learn ways of thinking about and investigating art?

These are very different types of questions. How would you try to find those answers? Are we ready to dive into Chapter 1? I’ll let you attempt to answer those questions on your own until the next article!

Looking for support with study skills? Sign up for our “Study Skills” workshop this summer!

Writing is doing

If you are like most students, you’ve had a teacher who took points off a test question because you didn’t show your work. It probably felt frustrating, especially if you got the question correct. “Why does it matter what I wrote down if I can do the problem correctly without writing it down?” you might have said to yourself.

I want to talk about “showing your work” a little more generally (that is, it isn’t just about math problems!) 

When you tell someone (or yourself!) that you are going to do something, we can presuppose a couple of things

  1. You intend to complete the task (you aren’t telling someone you’ll do it with the intention of not doing it)
  2. You intend to do the task as accurately and correctly as possible (you aren’t intending to perform poorly on the task).

This applies to math problems, studying history, meeting with a teacher, picking your brother up from practice, applying for colleges, and cleaning your room.

Any student who works with me will eventually hear me say “Writing is doing”. What I mean by this is that, when you say you are going to do something, the choice to write (or not) is often a determining factor in whether the thing you say you are going to do gets done (and well) or not.

How is that?

There are a lot of things that writing things down can do for you:

  1. This one is obvious, but it creates a record you can refer back to. Your memory isn’t perfect, so if it’s important to you to do what you say you will, writing things means that forgetting does not equal failure (so long as it is written down in a place that you will look back at periodically!)
  2. Besides the fact that you CAN’T rely on memory, you don’t want to. Trying to keep track of all the important things you need to with your memory creates mental clutter which makes it tough to focus on the task at hand. If you’ve ever tried to go to sleep with your mind racing with all the things you need to do tomorrow, you’ve experienced this. Writing things down in a place that you can trust means that you are free up your mental RAM to focus on the task at hand, and makes it less likely you’ll be distracted with thoughts of all the other things you need to do/remember. So even thought it might not be necessary to write something down to successfully complete it, it might be necessary to write it down to successfully complete something else!
  3. When you are working on a complex task, it’s tough to keep all the parts in your mind all at once (think about a complicated word problem). Writing down what you know allows you to focus on one or two pieces at a time, rather than trying to juggle multiple complex ideas all at once.
  4. It brings consciousness to the process. Ideas can be “in one ear, and out the other”. Writing things down, even if you NEVER look at what you’ve written down, gives you a the opportunity to imprint the idea in your mind and take a moment to give your full attention to the thought or idea, making it more likely that you remember it even without having to refer back to it. This helps you to avoid mistakes as well, since mistakes are often the result of not fully thinking something through.
  5. Writing is a process of creation, and turning vague thoughts into concrete words can often help you notice when you don’t understand something as well as you thought you did. What makes sense in your head sometimes has clear flaws or errors when you put pen to paper.
  6. Writing is a “small first step”. When you have a complicated task to do, and it seems tough to even get started, writing down the steps can help you figure out how to get started. When you see the steps written out, the first step might not seem so hard, and it creates some momentum to get started. 
  7. And all of the above is ignoring the fact that what you’ve written can be read by other people! If the task you need to complete needs input or involvement from other people, writing down your part can help clear up possible misunderstandings (no “he said, she said”). Even if you don’t need any further involvement from anyone else, someone else’s seeing what you understand your task to be can be helpful in clearing up any confusion you might have.

Ok, so maybe you agree that writing a step in a math problem can help. But how can “writing things down” help you clean your room?

First, it can help you remember to do it. If you’ve got a lot to do, it might be easy to forget. The act of writing it down also makes it more likely you’ll remember to do it in the first place.

If your room is REALLY messy, such that cleaning it requires thinking…how to get started, deciding where things should go, maybe the job is so big you’ll need to do it over a couple days, etc, writing down what you want to do and the order in which you’ll do things can help you get started, especially if it feels overwhelming.

Having written down all the OTHER things you need to do and remember will free your mind for the thinking needed for cleaning your room (instead of constantly being distracted by other responsibilities as you try to stay on task).

There is one more benefit to writing something down, in my experience. Writing something down elevates the importance of the thing you are writing down, in your mind and in the minds of people around you. When you write things down, you are communicating something about yourself, to yourself and to other people: that you are a person who cares about getting things done and getting them done correctly. 

I’m sure you don’t do this(?!), but imagine that you are walking out the door of your class, and you teacher calls you to give you some instructions about how to complete an assignment, and you loudly sigh and say, “yea, yea, I’ll get to that.” Now, it could be that you have every intention of “[getting] to that”, but what are you communicating to your teacher (and your subconscious mind) about how important that thing is to you? What are you communicating to your teacher about how important your teacher is to you?

Compare that to stopping, facing the teacher, sitting down at a desk, pulling out your planner/notepad, and asking the teacher to repeat the instructions so that you can write it down. What does that communicate?

Here are two easy ways to “write more”.

Purchase a small steno pad (you can get one for $1 at a drug store) and carry it and a pen with you in your pocket or purse (somewhere it is readily accessible, so it isn’t annoying to search for it…making it easy to get to means it’s more likely that you’ll actually use it) Anytime you come across any information that you’ll want to remember, pull out your pad and write it down. Make this a habit.

Secondly, purchase a composition book and start journaling. Lots of people look at journaling and think, “what is the point?” or “what am I supposed to write about?” Best way to use a journal if you aren’t sure what to use it for is for a mind dump. Spend five minutes a day writing down anything that is in your mind. Don’t worry about complete thoughts. Don’t worry about grammar, spelling, punctuation, etc. Just write, for five minutes, anything that comes to your mind. Eventually, you’ll get to the thoughts that have been bogging you down, and getting them down on paper might give you some clarity about them. But it will definitely help you free up some mental space for the other things that need your attention.

The summer is the time to start developing these habits, so that by the time the school year comes around, you’ve got these tools well-developed to help you face the challenges of the school year!

Looking for help with planning and organization? Call to sign up for our “Getting Things Done for students workshop this summer!”

Habitica: The gamified to-do app

The best organization tool is the one you use.

Do you have an app on your phone that you can’t just seem to put down? App designers know how get you hooked on a game. To get you to open it up repeatedly throughout the day. To get you keep the app open and keep using it. This can be very distracting and damaging to your focus, which is why I recommend apps like Forest that help you bring mindfulness to how often you are using your phone.

But there is an app that uses “gamification” not to suck you into your phone and away from the outside world, but to help you accomplish the things you want to accomplish in the real world. It’s called “Habitica”.

Habitica is an app that does a few different things that many apps of this type do

-it manages your to-do list

-It tracks daily/weekly tasks

-it tracks habits you want to develop or eliminate.

Nothing out of the ordinary here, but it’s the way it does it that is unique. When you create your account you created an RPG style avatar. Here is mine:

Isn’t he cute? I’d never let any incomplete task hurt him!

Now, when you add your to-do’s to your list, completing them gives you experience to “level up” your avatar, and earns you gold you can spend on weapons, mounts, or pets. Failing to complete your to-do’s deals damage to you. Take enough damage, and your avatar dies (losing you experience, gold, and one of the items you’ve acquired.)

You can even join parties with your friends and tackle your to-do lists together!

Habitica has highlighted some important things for me that will be helpful for students:

  1. Incomplete to-do’s ARE damaging, in a couple of ways. First, when you tell someone you’ll do something, and you don’t, you are disrupting that person’s plans. It’s better to make sure that you don’t take on more things unless you are confident you can handle the things that you’ve already got, and Habitica will quickly teach you to pay attention to whether you are taking on more than you can handle when you take something new on. They are also damaging because they create open loops in your mind. It’s easier to stay focussed on the task at hand if you only have one task to complete. It’s harder when you have 5, and would be near impossible if you have 20. On other task manager apps, incomplete tasks can just sit there incomplete for weeks or months even. But it’s easy to overlook that damage. Seeing the damage done do your poor, defenseless character makes it easier to understand the negative impact incomplete to-do’s have.
  2. Thinking about whether you have time to take something new on gets you thinking about scheduling. How do you know if you have time for something if you don’t know what you are going to be spending the rest of the day working on? And scheduling gets you thinking about estimating how long it will take you to complete something (and learning how good you are at estimating!)
  3. Thinking about the habits you want to create gets you thinking about your longer term goals, and what you need to do to achieve them. It reminds you that long term goals are made up of small, daily steps that can start today (rather than some ill-defined future that never seems to show up.)

I don’t think I’ve ever said this, but this is a FUN habit-tracking/organization app. That alone is enough to make it valuable, but it is also full-featured and flexible. So check out Habitica on IOS, Android, and web-app.

Could your child use some support and guidance with planning and organization? Call 858.551.2650 or email help@wellsacademics.com to ask about our “Getting Things Done for students” workshop starting the first week of July!

Summer Reading Tips: Two “don’t”s of reading fiction

I just finished reading the classic “How To Read a Book” by Mortimer Adler, which, given the amount of time that students spend reading books for school, should be read by every student (and teacher). While I am going to do a longer write-up to review and discuss the takeaways for students, educators, and adults, I wanted to dive in to what I think might helps students right away as they dive into their summer reading assignments. (you are diving in, right?)

Adler lays out some general principles of what he calls analytic reading, and then separately discusses how to apply those principles to “imaginative literature” (novels, short stories, plays, etc). While those are valuable, he follows up with some “don’t”s that, because they are just shifts in mindset, are simple enough to apply to what you read today, and, I realize in my own experience, can have a big impact.

“Don’t try to resist the effect that a work of imaginative literature has on you.”

Be open to the experience. Recognize the possibility that the world that the author has created for you has value for you if you go into it with credulity. Try to see things through the eyes of people who live in this world. Immerse yourself into the world as fully as the characters are. Let the story trigger emotions rather than fighting or dismissing them. The more you try to empathize with the characters in the book and how the events in the book act on them, the more you’ll understand, and the more truthfully you’ll be able to criticise the book.

Another way to say this: try to feel or experience what the author intends you to feel or experience. Doing this sometimes requires asking yourself, “What does the author intend for me to feel or experience?”, which is a GREAT question to ask! Instead of “this part is boring” ask “why did the author include this part?”

Some of you will be reading “The Grapes of Wrath” this summer. What do you think that John Steinbeck intends you to feel and experience as you read the book? That’s a great question to ask yourself as you read.

“Don’t criticize fiction by the standards of truth and consistency that properly apply to communication of knowledge”

“Animal Farm? Yeah, it’s a book about talking pigs. Stupid, right?”

The author of a novel is creating a world for you. It could be completely made up (Wrinkle in Time, Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter), or it could be people who could very well live in the same world that we live in (Red Badge of Courage, Where the Red Fern Grows, The Count of Monte Cristo). The point is that the world the author creates isn’t real, and really, it’s not an act of good faith to treat that as a reason to dismiss the book. Be fair to the author. Accept the world that the author has created for you, and evaluate the book based on what he DOES with the talking pigs. Or tesserects. Or magic wands.

More broadly, it also means setting aside setting aside your lack of interest in the superficial plot of the book. That is, maybe you are about to read “The Red Badge of Courage” and you say to yourself, “I don’t like books about war.” But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value for you in this book? Do you like books about people experiencing and overcoming fear? That’s a motif you might have enjoyed in a book like “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “The Life of Pi” Maybe in those books it was a very satisfying experience for you. So maybe you can find the same satisfaction in “The Red Badge of Courage”, even if it wasn’t delivered to you in the ideal way. And maybe having it delivered to you in a different way will help you understand something you didn’t before.

These two “don’t”s, while seemingly obvious, are crucial to take into consideration, consciously, when you are going into a book you don’t want to read. I get it. When you are told to read a book you don’t want to read, it’s easy to have a negative attitude. If you do that, you’re sabotaging the possibility of your understanding (and enjoying?) the book. Whatever you are reading for your English class is a book that has been enjoyed by millions of people. You can be one of those people if you shake the attitude!

By the way, here is a third “don’t” courtesy of yours truly,

Don’t wait until the last minute to read it.

When you are rushing to finish a book, it’s hard to imagine, empathize, predict, feel, or do anything that isn’t decoding words. Get started on your reading now, doing a little at a time each day. Better yet, sit down and plan out how much you are going to read every day (writing is doing). It’s less stressful this way, and you have the opportunity to actually enjoy it!

Want to learn more about how to get the most out of fiction (and get a leg up on that AP English reading list?) Check out our Summer Reading for AP English workshop this summer, starting the week of July 1st!

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