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Does your child avoid school?

Most parents have to deal with truancy at one time or another. Whether it’s your child saying they are sick to avoid school or if they are pretending to go to school and then going elsewhere, playing truant will result in poor grades and is dangerous as students remain unsupervised while their parents are at work.

Widespread problem

Skipping school is becoming a part of our culture and is a far more widespread problem than we would like to admit. The Get School Foundation recently investigated the issue and their report is disturbing. Their study showed that 15% of students miss 18 days or more of school a year. Most of these students cited boredom as the main reason why they skipped school.

Take stock

If you find out that your student has been skipping school or they claim to have fictional health issues that prevent them from going to school, its time to take stock. Find out what the underlying problems are. Many students are genuinely bored at school and can’t see the relevance of algebra or history to real-world applications. Here you need to outline the consequences of a poor education and how it limits choice. You may also try a more challenging course, class or school. Engaging a tutor to help students to find academic challenges is also a great idea.

Stop gap

If students feel overwhelmed and lost, they may also skip school. When they don’t understand what is going on, they may feel helpless and skip school because they fear that they may fail anyway. If this is the case, then you need to help them to catch up and understand what is going on in class. Get an in-home tutor to work with your student to help them to fill gaps in their understanding.

Bullying

Many students stay home because they are being bullied by fellow students or perhaps they don’t like a teacher they have been assigned. You can help by teaching coping techniques or changing classes or schools. All schools have anti-bullying policies that help to protect students, so speak with your teachers.

Always include your students in any discussions about their academic futures. You need to include them in the implementation of any strategy if you want them to participate. Try to understand the reasons why they are skipping school so that you can deal with these effectively or the behavior will persist.

Your school counselors and teachers are a wonderful resource. They may have a better insight into the circumstances which your student faces every day at school and they can help with strategies on how to combat the causes of truancy.

Have you ever thought about using an academic coach? Every student can benefit.....

While poor test scores and bad grades are an obvious indicator that your student needs help, there are many other instances in which a tutor can really help your child to learn the skills they need to be confident, independent, successful learners.

The most important factor in determining whether your student could benefit from a tutor is communication; speak with them about the kinds of help a tutor can offer and speak with your child’s teacher too.

Building Confidence

Not being top of the class can cause students to feel less confident. This, in turn, could seriously affect their performance in class. When students lack confidence, they tend not to ask or answer questions in class. The teacher may overlook quieter students and they won’t participate in class and group activities with as much enthusiasm which will affect their academic performance over time.

ExecutiveSkills

More than any other assets like intelligence and talent, executive skills determine the success of a student. The ability to organize time, prioritize tasks and memorise data is key to academic performance. If you know that your child is smart, but they don’t study, have trouble focussing, often don’t hand in work or fail to study for exams, they may need some help with their executive skills.

Teaching executive skills early on will ensure that they are able to handle their workload in later grades and at college. While they should get some training in executive skills at school, large class sizes mean teachers just don’t have time to teach these skills.

A one-on-one teacher who specializes in executive skills can help your child to organize their time and carefully plan so that they leave enough time to complete assignments and study for exams. Learning studying and memorizing skills will also help to minimize time spent studying.

Honing these skills should reduce the daily homework hassles and minimize frantic morning searches for lost homework or forgetting assignments.

Academic Foundations

Each student will have gaps in their academic foundations which get compounded as they move through their school careers. Each new grade builds on the last and teachers don’t have the time to go back and explain work that has already been covered. When your child gets one-on-one tutoring, their tutor is able to start at the beginning and work through the academic foundations to find gaps and fill them.

Better Grades

Students with great grades need tutors too, especially if they have schools, scholarships or programs they want to qualify for. If you have a talented student that has started to struggle, chances are that they are just bored. When gifted students get bored, they tend to stop paying attention in class and don’t work as hard because they aren’t challenged. When this happens, their grades suffer and they may miss important opportunities. 

Whether your child is bored or they want to turn their A into an A+, you can trust a one-on-one tutor to help them to excel. Your tutor can work with teachers to find extra, more challenging work for your child to take on.Call Tutor Doctor Longmont today for your FREE consultation at 303 774 9081  or email us at jstype@tutordoctor.com.

What do you think: Lack of Sleep Leads to Poor Academic Performance?

Latest studies show that teens just aren’t getting enough sleep and this has far-reaching consequences. When teens don’t get enough downtime, they suffer from physical ailments, poor academic performance, and mental health and behavioral issues. We all know that young children need sleep and routines and so we have bedtimes. But, as children get older, we tend to forget that their brains and bodies are still growing and that they need more sleep than adults.

Studies show that teenagers need 9-10 hours of sleep. Without proper sleep, memory and the ability to concentrate as well as higher cognitive functioning is severely affected. This means that when your teen pulls an all-nighter to study for exams, they are setting themselves up for a poor performance on exam day.

A survey by the National Sleep Foundation found that 60% of high school students suffered from extreme daytime fatigue which caused them to regularly fall asleep in class. They attributed this to the average of 6.5 hours of sleep that the students we getting.

Dr. Avi Sadeh, a lecturer at the University of Tel Aviv, conducted a study to find out just how much sleep deprivation affected academic performance; "A loss of one hour of sleep is equivalent to [the loss of] two years of cognitive maturation and development.” What this means practically is that a sleepy eighth grader will perform academically closer to a sixth grade level.

Lack of sleep also reduces the efficacy of immune systems and that leaves students vulnerable to all the illnesses they are exposed to at school. Missed school days also contribute to poor academic performances.

One of the reasons teens tend to stay up late is biological. Sleep researchers Mary Carskadon, at Brown University, and Bill Dement at Stanford found that at certain times of our life, our biological clocks keep us up and make us resistant to sleep. This phenomenon is called ‘phase delay’ and occurs before and during puberty. That means that your poor teen doesn’t feel in the least bit sleepy despite the fact that they really need their rest.

One way to encourage students to sleep is by taking a melatonin supplement just before bed, by encouraging exercise and healthy eating and by getting your teens to avoid computers, games and academic tasks at least two hours before bedtime.

A Harvard study discovered that the brain continues to learn even after you fall asleep. This is when it consolidates information and works through processes or steps you have learned the day before. Have you ever found that you were struggling with something, but then after a nap or a good night’s sleep, you suddenly got the hang of it? That’s because while you are sleeping, your brain was working on the problem without the noise and distractions of the day. 

If you want to help your student to excel academically and be healthier and happier, then more sleep is definitely the answer. Move your Zzzzz to A’s this semester by making sure your students are getting all the sleep they need.