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I was chatting with someone about schooling and I mentioned that I was a poor (Cs were my norm) student in the beginning of my academic school career (5th grade). I was lucky enough to have a teacher, Miss Hall, who could tell that I wasn't stupid and who cared that I wasn't doing well. I don't know how she could tell, but thank goodness she could.
Miss Hall kept me after school one day and literally went through doing the homework with me for every subject. She showed me how to take notes from my reading for social studies and science class. She told me how to study for math and showed me how that was different from studying for what she called "reading classes." She told me if I got to a problem I didn't know how to do, it was okay if I had to flip back through the chapter to see how they did the same thing and then keep flipping back and forth little by little until I figured it out.
She told me that when I was reading stories for English, if something crossed my mind - maybe I didn't understand why a character did something or said something - I should write it down in my notebook and ask about it in class the next day. She told me also that every time I saw a word I didn't know that I should look it up in the dictionary and then write down the word at the back of my notebook along with the definition and a sentence of my own using the word. I was a "page-flippin' fool" every time I had to do word problems, but eventually I figured out how to translate English into math and do them.
She also taught me how to do speed math. I really liked that part because she told me it was "our secret." That was really cool. Of course, she'd told other kids too, but it was still cool because I could do simple math faster than my parents. I loved that. (It turned out I actually wasn't faster than they, for they knew the same tricks, but they didn't let on about that until much later.)
Anyway, we sat there doing homework for three hours. That was in the fifth grade! She drove me home and had dinner with my family and told my parents what we'd done and asked them to do the same thing with me until I was doing it on my own and they could tell I knew what I was doing. It took a while, but as time went on, it took less and less time to do all my homework and I started getting good grades.
I know all that sounds obvious to you and me now. But when I was ten it wasn't obvious, and until I got good at studying, it seemed like a lot of work, especially when I Love Lucy, Batman, Star Trek, and playing with my friends were a lot more interesting to me. The thing is that what I needed to do to learn the material wasn't obvious to me at all.
Momma and Dad would tell me I had to study and I did what they told me. Or at least I called myself doing what I was supposed to be doing. I'd look at the books and not try to make sense of what I read, and I'd content myself with just not knowing how to do the math homework problems, and hope that whatever I did would be enough. Truth is it was rarely even barely enough. I no more knew what I was doing or what I should have been doing or how to do it than I knew how to fly to the moon.
That quarter that Miss Hall showed me how to study I didn't get great grades, but I earned reasonable marks, which was better (in ways other than just in class) than the poor marks I had been obtaining. The next quarter, I got straight As. You could have knocked me and my parents over with a feather. I still wasn't by that time a well-behaved student, but from then on, I always got good grades and I actually learned stuff, which actually was fun.
College professors/instructors, for their own classes, tell students how to study effectively. Teachers at my kids' schools did the same, and, like Miss Hall, they showed students how to prepare for class, how to study. Of course, I know that no one (other than someone who's rigorously researched the matter) can anecdotally attest to what's typical; however, given what one sometimes encounters in the popular press about performance decrements in schools'/school systems', I wonder, however, whether that practice is typical....
Miss Hall kept me after school one day and literally went through doing the homework with me for every subject. She showed me how to take notes from my reading for social studies and science class. She told me how to study for math and showed me how that was different from studying for what she called "reading classes." She told me if I got to a problem I didn't know how to do, it was okay if I had to flip back through the chapter to see how they did the same thing and then keep flipping back and forth little by little until I figured it out.
She told me that when I was reading stories for English, if something crossed my mind - maybe I didn't understand why a character did something or said something - I should write it down in my notebook and ask about it in class the next day. She told me also that every time I saw a word I didn't know that I should look it up in the dictionary and then write down the word at the back of my notebook along with the definition and a sentence of my own using the word. I was a "page-flippin' fool" every time I had to do word problems, but eventually I figured out how to translate English into math and do them.
She also taught me how to do speed math. I really liked that part because she told me it was "our secret." That was really cool. Of course, she'd told other kids too, but it was still cool because I could do simple math faster than my parents. I loved that. (It turned out I actually wasn't faster than they, for they knew the same tricks, but they didn't let on about that until much later.)
Anyway, we sat there doing homework for three hours. That was in the fifth grade! She drove me home and had dinner with my family and told my parents what we'd done and asked them to do the same thing with me until I was doing it on my own and they could tell I knew what I was doing. It took a while, but as time went on, it took less and less time to do all my homework and I started getting good grades.
I know all that sounds obvious to you and me now. But when I was ten it wasn't obvious, and until I got good at studying, it seemed like a lot of work, especially when I Love Lucy, Batman, Star Trek, and playing with my friends were a lot more interesting to me. The thing is that what I needed to do to learn the material wasn't obvious to me at all.
Momma and Dad would tell me I had to study and I did what they told me. Or at least I called myself doing what I was supposed to be doing. I'd look at the books and not try to make sense of what I read, and I'd content myself with just not knowing how to do the math homework problems, and hope that whatever I did would be enough. Truth is it was rarely even barely enough. I no more knew what I was doing or what I should have been doing or how to do it than I knew how to fly to the moon.
That quarter that Miss Hall showed me how to study I didn't get great grades, but I earned reasonable marks, which was better (in ways other than just in class) than the poor marks I had been obtaining. The next quarter, I got straight As. You could have knocked me and my parents over with a feather. I still wasn't by that time a well-behaved student, but from then on, I always got good grades and I actually learned stuff, which actually was fun.
College professors/instructors, for their own classes, tell students how to study effectively. Teachers at my kids' schools did the same, and, like Miss Hall, they showed students how to prepare for class, how to study. Of course, I know that no one (other than someone who's rigorously researched the matter) can anecdotally attest to what's typical; however, given what one sometimes encounters in the popular press about performance decrements in schools'/school systems', I wonder, however, whether that practice is typical....