Confusion in school is normal. Without confusion, there is no learning.

Confusion = unfinished Sudoku board!

Have you ever done a crossword puzzle or a word scramble game? Personally, I like cryptograms and Sudoku. People who haven’t tried Sudoku look at it as a math game because it has numbers, but it really isn’t about mathematics at all. It is a logic game. In the easy levels of Sudoku, you learn a simple set of rules and, through a process of elimination, you fill in the empty squares with numbers until all the squares are filled.

When you get to the medium-difficulty level the task becomes more difficult. You have to deal with confusion. You have to add special rules to help you fill in the squares. Many people don’t want to go the extra steps to learn the more difficult rules, but learning them is no harder than it was to learn the original rules. It’s just that the game asks more of you, keeps you in the state of confusion for a longer period, and in the process it weeds out those who don’t like to think that hard.

At 9:30 in the morning, December 15, 2012, 20 year old Adam Lanza walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He was fully armed–the most powerful person on campus. I don’t know what motivated him. From what I have read so far, no one else does either. There is plenty of speculation, but we have no clear statement from Adam himself as to why he carried his terrible actions against innocent children and adults. We do know that he killed his mother before he went to the school. Whether she was innocent or not, we may never know.

Innocence is an interesting characteristic. Was Adam innocent years before, when the now-famous picture was taken of him as a young teenager? Or was he already on the path to Sandy Hook Elementary, with guns, ammunition, and a desire to kill as many people as he could? Was he innocent one year ago, or even one month ago? When did he turn from being innocent child to being a man with a gun–the most powerful person on campus?

Caught in a mental fog

This morning I woke up in a state of mumbleheadedness. I was unable to speak clearly. My thoughts were caught in a mental fog, and I was stumbling around getting ready for the day. The inability means that I slur my words a bit and have trouble spitting out full sentences. No, there’s nothing deeply wrong. I didn’t have a stroke or anything terrible like that. I just woke up with a less than perfect brain. It happens to all of us sometimes. It’s like waking up sick. A cup of coffee was all it took to get on track and really wake up.

My Linguistics professor called this kind of morning issue the difference between capability and performance. He explained how we speak differently when we have a cold because our nasal passages are blocked up. Our ability to pronounce words is changed while we have a stuffy nose. That means “m” becomes “b” and “n” just disappears. If I have a cold and say: “I’m sick and can’t talk,” it comes out “I’b sick and ca’t talk.” Of course, I am capable of pronouncing every word correctly, but my performance is off when I’m sick.

The US not the only country battling with school improvement

If you are wondering why education is floundering in the United States, why stop here? I just listened to British school Chief Inspector Sir Michael Wilshaw discuss how changing the United Kingdom’s school inspection form will lead the charge to change education in the UK. His talk can be found at RSA under the title “The End of Satisfactory Schools.” I suggest you listen to it. Hopefully the talk will dispel the myth that UK schools are better than their counterparts in the US, or that their leaders are any wiser than we are in our approach to school improvement. They have similar issues. Their leaders advocate being harsher as a method of improving schools.

Haven’t we heard enough of this? Beating up the teachers, the administrators, the unions, and the communities they serve will not improve education. Changing a form so that struggling schools are given a more negative category will not help either. If there is to be real reform, we have to get out of the mindset that just being harder on employees will win the day. We already have a high turnover rate in classroom teachers. We disrespect them in every political race, and yet we keep going down this cul de sac hoping that it will lead us on the long path to “excellent” schools filled with “highly qualified” teachers and “high-performing” students. We imagine that proper categorization will generate students happily engaged in their communities who are preparing for profitable and productive lives once they leave school.

I created a simple paragraph format for my students to help them respond to the types of multiple-sentence assignments they found in their science, social studies, and English textbooks. The idea was to give the kids a template for developing a top quality answer and teaching them to apply the template to all of these assignments. I wanted my students to be able to wow their other instructors with high level responses.

To accomplish the task, students just had to follow a few simple rules. First among these was to write four sentences for each response. Second was to use keywords from the textbook’s original question. Other rules involved making a claim, proving the claim with  details, and analyzing the claim in relation to the details.

Most of my students stepped up to the task when they found out how they would be graded. Each response was worth five points. If they wrote less than four sentences they would only get one point. If they wrote four sentences they would be eligible for the full five poinsts, as long as their answers were of sufficient quality to demonstrate that they understood what they were talking about and had proved their points. I wanted to teach students to develop their answers. Unfortunately, some students by nature resist such well-intentioned desires.

One student, a kid I truly enjoyed talking to and having in class, was a born and bred member of La Resistance. He would artfully avoid anything that would signal his true ability, therefore he naturally would turn in a one-sentence response to every question in order to earn his one, and only one point for each.

As all good English teachers do, I wrote a lengthy diatribe on his feeble assignment, gave it back, and informed him that he had to return it to me completely rewritten, with four sentences for each response. The next day he came in smiling, tossed the original sheet of paper on my desk, and went to his seat. I looked at the paper and noticed that his solution was to take his single sentence answers and randomly place three additional periods in each. It was a brilliant solution.

I believe he is working as a chef. If not, it would be a waste of talent. He was a great cook, even in middle school.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

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Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.

When I was in sixth grade I was sick for a week and stayed out of school. The assignments still made it home, much to my chagrin. My mother insisted that I keep up with my schoolwork. The following Monday I went into German class and had to take a test. Only a few of the students passed. I was one of them. In fact, I got a top grade.

You need to know something about me. In sixth grade I was put into a special class for troublemakers and underachievers. I was not in the A student category. The material on the German test, however, was easy. It was easy because I took the time to study it. In fact, the material on that test was no different in complexity than any of the other tests I had bombed in that class. I learned an important lesson: school success does not depend on the teacher. Sure, a teacher helps a student to learn, but if the student puts little or no effort in, then the result is poor performance on assessments.

While I was at home I had no distractions, so I studied the material. The test was easy because I had made the effort to learn.

Go to Contact Us if you are a student or have one who needs my assistance.

Peter Conrad is an educator who serves students through a combination of mentoring and tutoring. He teaches the self-sufficiency skills students need to succeed in their education and careers. He currently lives in the Phoenix area, and works one-on-one with students throughout East Valley and beyond, including Coolidge, San Tan Valley, Queen Creek, Chandler, Mesa, Gilbert, Tempe, and other areas on request. He works with online student via Skype, email, and Moodle. He is also available as a speaker. 

***

Simple things give you success in school

If you or your child are having trouble in school, it may be that you’re doing a few things wrong.

What are they?

There are simple things that you can do to be more successful that no one tells you about. I know what what they are, and I’ve been sharing them with my students in the classroom for many years.

Click on the package below to see my video about what you can do today to be more successful in the classroom.