* Note that there are deliberate spelling errors in this post

In the previous post we looked at problems with punctuation and how punctuation can make or brake a sentence.

The same can bee said for spelling. Spelling is a major stumbling point for students if all ages. But why is that?

For starters, English is a notoriously difficult language to learn, even for native speakers. While English usage has adapted to meet the needs of a modern society, English spelling is still rooted in antiquated language forms, so the weigh a word is pronounced isn’t necessarily reflected in the way that it is spelled, which creates unique spelling challenges for students.

But is correct spelling even that important? After all, spell-check programs abound, and online dictionaries our available at the click of a mouse.

Correct spelling might not even be that big of a deal considering that a study by English researchers found that letter order in spelling is not really that important. As long as the first and last letters are in the right place, the eye can unscramble the letters sew that the sentence can be understood.

Even with the abundance of spell-checkers and the eye’s ability to unscramble letters, spelling still poses a problem.

Teachers in England say that bad spelling occurs so frequently among first year university students that they are considering adopting a system where misspelled words are labeled as variant not wrong.

Digital communication is slowly replacing other forms of communications. We email and text message more than ever before. So, it should be know surprise that since children are the biggest users of online technology and since they communicate fluently in digital language, that they are the ones who have the most challenges using standard forms of English.

If online communication is the way of the future, and our eye can fix misspelled words, and there are programs to spell for us, why do we place such an emphasis on correct spelling?

For one thing, spell-check is never 100% reliable. There are no less than five mistakes in this post that spell-check did not catch.

As of this moment, technology isn’t everywhere. Students still need to have decent spelling skills to right exams or fill out job applications. Like it or not, people will make decisions about your intelligence based on how well you can spell.

In the classroom, poor spelling can ruin a well thought-out paragraph, causing the reader to fumble, halt, backtrack, and re-read, which can diminish from the overall meaning of the sentence. This is, of course, especially troublesome for students when that reader happens to be their teacher.

Until the time that spelling variants are accepted and online acronyms are accepted in more formal situations, students need to use whatever tools they can to help them remember how to spell words correctly.

We’ll look at some tips next time.

Learning the proper uses for punctuation is challenging for people of all ages. After all, there is an almost infinite number of rules to remember and an almost equal number of exceptions to those rules.

One of the biggest punctuation culprits is the comma. And it’s little wonder when one respected grammar guide shows no less than 15 rules for using the comma correctly, and almost as many exceptions.

Commas appear where they are not needed, and are suspiciously absent where they are needed. Apostrophes pop up where they don’t belong. Semicolons are used in defiance of logic, hyphens erroneously appear in the place of dashes, and ellipses stretch out into infinity.

The discussion on the proper uses of punctuation is a hot topic not just regulated to the grammar section of the library. Non-fiction books on grammar have even been spotted on the best-seller list.

But it you are less than a grammar enthusiast, less than a word nerd, following a labyrinth of seemingly incomprehensible grammar Dos and Don’ts can actually detract from the writing process.

But isn’t punctuation supposed to make writing, and reading easier?

If punctuation causes so many difficulties for today’s students, is following a set of confusing rules necessary? If you are not a grammar enthusiast, being forced to follow complicated rules can do a number on a student’s motivation to learn.

Punctuation has a deeply rooted history and tends to follow a pattern of popularity. The semi-colon for instance has risen and fallen in popular usage. In France, the semi colon has even been the cause of political mischief.

While punctuation has always been debated, the debate doesn’t have a place in classroom. Students writing formal papers for school need to have, at minimum, a cursory understanding with the rules of punctuation.

In informal writings such as in emails, text messages, and instant messages, the rules can be a bit more lax. Of course, informal writing opens the door to informal spelling, but that’s an issue for another day.

We’ve included a few comma mistakes in this post. Can you spot them?

Remembering all the rules can be next to impossible. Even the best grammarians use a reference for time to time. Here are some grammar guides that we like:

• The Bedford Handbook by Diana Hacker, 7th edition
• The Little, Brown Handbook by Aaron and Fowler
• The Grammar Girl Website

Rising gas prices change the school experience

For students, a new school year means adapting to new things—a new grade, new teachers, new classrooms, and new subjects. But this year, there could be one more thing to learn to deal with: the elimination of school fieldtrips.

Like peanut butter sandwiches in lunch bags, school fieldtrips are going the way of the dodo. However, the death of fieldtrips has nothing to do with food allergies or even with the safety of students. School boards across the US are considering banning—or have already banned—fieldtrips due to rising gas prices.

For most schools districts, a virtual fleet of yellow school buses are involved in transporting students to and from the classroom. Schools have a hard enough time coping with funding issues and budget problems without an even bigger portion of their meager budgets going to cover the cost of school buses for extracurricular fieldtrips.

Funding issues have already hit schools hard resulting in decreased numbers of teachers, lower salaries, and crowded classrooms. As well, athletics and extracurricular programs are getting the axe.

A survey of school boards by the American Association of School Administrators shows that ninety-nine percent of schools surveyed felt that rising gas prices had an impact on their school.

Some school boards are even considering switching to a four-day school week to help deal with the rising cost of fuel. A shorter school week would decrease fuel costs associated with transportation, heating and cooling, and energy consumption.

Are wired classrooms changing the way that students learn?

Chalkboards, one room school houses, apples for the teacher, walking to school, using both sides of the paper, desks with flip open tops, writing with pencils right down to the nub…there is something in the air during back to school time that prompts nostalgic thoughts of academia.

All those images of schooldays persist as icons of academia, even though not a single one of the items in the list above is used in a modern classroom—they are nothing more than relics, quaint memories from educational history.

My, how education has changed! Now the chalkboard is nothing more than a relic of classrooms past. Today’s classrooms are wired, interactive, and media-rich. Gone are the chalkboards and the notebooks; in their places are digital displays and laptops.

But have these new technological teaching tools helped or hindered the way that kids learn in the classroom? Multi-media visual tools have certainly improved the scope of a teacher’s lesson preparation and delivery. Teachers can teach a lesson all while showing resources, three-dimensional mind maps, color images, video clips and every possible resource available to help drive home the message of the lesson. But, has technology in the classroom limited the scope of how far a student’s brain has to stretch to understand that lesson?

Is too much technology doing the hard work for students—the visualizing, the imagining? Is it making it so that students don’t have to rely on their brains to make the necessary connections? They don’t have to fill in the gaps or do the mental legwork to understand so that they can have the “A-Ha!” moments of true understanding. They don’t have to extend their mental capacities beyond what they see in front of them, because it was all there for them, all laid out in full-color and pretty pictures. Why remember the answer when you can just Google it?

Consider classrooms of the past: with little or no high tech tools, great thinkers made important intellectual leaps using nothing but brain power…no word processors to fill in words as they typed great dissertations, no spell check, no computers to help them fill in the gaps. If they could accomplish these tasks with no help, shouldn’t today’s students be able to as well?

The irony here is that chalkboards, in their day, actually revolutionized the classroom. They made it possible for the teacher to teach multiple students at once using visual aids. It was the first time teachers could write a message and have all students see it.

Chalkboards haven’t disappeared from classrooms just yet. They are still there at the front of many classrooms—sometimes hidden behind projector screens—a quaint reminder of the way things used to be.

End-of-year report cards are almost here…with their arrival comes the potential for shocking and unpleasant revelations.

Report cards are generally upheld as the ultimate indicator of student progress—after all, they are the final word on a child’s academic progress in the school year—but the wait and the wondering about what the report card will reveal can be very stressful to both kids and parents alike.

In an attempt to remove the wondering and the unpleasant surprises from the reporting process, school boards across the US have implemented online programs such as EdLine, to help parents monitor their children’s daily academic standing.

According to an article in the New York Times called I Know What You Did Last Math Class these programs open the lines of communication and to keep parents informed at every possible opportunity throughout the school year, not just when report cards arrive.

The reporting technology fuels the debate about a parent’s level of involvement and what is or isn’t private in a child’s education. As you might expect, responses to programs that allow parents to monitor their child’s progress online vary from one end of the spectrum to the other.

Keeping informed of your child’s academic progress however is not dependent solely on new online technologies—there are many other warning signs throughout the year which signal that a student may be heading into academic hot water.

There are the newer technology or web-based indicators; school blogs, teacher sites, and class webpages where parents can log on and read what particular assignment a class is working on now. There are behavioral indications—bad attitudes about school, lack of motivation, lying, skipping classes; and there are the more obvious warnings—a poor mark on a test, homework not completed, or even the dreaded a call from the teacher.

Regardless of any warning signs that may have been missed during the school year, the end-of-year report card is the final update. And while it may be the end of the road for progress in the school year, it doesn’t mean that all hope for the academic future is lost.

After all, there is still the summer to get the kids back on track, even if there is no online monitoring program.

More on that next time.

The rising sun and buzzing alarm clocks signal the arrival of morning. School bells ring to signal the start of the school day, recess, and the end of the school day. Church bells and cuckoo clocks mark the passing hours. When the kettle boils—it’s teatime. Home from school and work—it’s dinnertime. The sun sets, its bedtime.

Our lives are measured in compartmentalized segments of time slated out for us. So why is managing our time such a challenge?

We are constantly multi-tasking and splitting our time a hundred ways. We talk on the phone, do homework, surf the net, and make tea … all at the same time!

Instead of each of small task taking mere minutes, it takes much longer. Homework should take one and a half hours; instead, it takes close to four.

The hectic pace of our lives, the interruptions, and the distractions do little to help our time management issues. It is difficult to filter out the constant din of TVs, radio, instant messaging alerts, IPods, and of the clang-honk-beep-buzz of our modern world. Adults find focusing on one thing at a time challenging, so it’s no wonder that when kids are faced with a time-management issue, they have no idea how to solve the problem, and put things off until the last minute.

Like so many other skills that we need in life, time management techniques don’t come naturally to all. A little instruction and a lot of learning can help even the busiest of students to complete homework on time, finish projects well ahead of the due date, and to end procrastination for good.

Time Management: it’s a skill that we can all use, both in and out of the classroom.

“Math is stupid. I hate it. I’m never going to need this stuff.”

I’m guilty of having uttered each of these sentences in my life. Math was always a struggle for me, much to the dismay of my father. He was a virtual human calculator who dealt with complicated math equations in his daily life as a banker/financial advisor. Like most fathers, he looked forward to his children following in his mathematical footsteps. It wasn’t to be.

Now, in my day-to-day life words are of my most-used tools. Regardless of the profession that I chose, I still come upon math every day.

• In cooking: ¼ cup is smaller than 1/3 of a cup
• In Shopping: How much is 35% off of $29.99?
• In baking: Cook a 10 lb turkey at 45 minutes per pound…
• In Decorating: How much carpet do I need to cover the floor of my living room?

As it turns out, I did need this stuff. The teachers were right.

I wish that I had paid better attention in math class. Despite being a relatively good student, the further that I got in school, the less that math made sense to me.

Thankfully, my proficiency in other subjects was apparent (hello, writer’s craft), so I could get by without having top marks in math.

But that doesn’t mean that I ever gave up trying to get better math marks. I knew my multiplication tables inside and out, thanks to flash cards and a variety of unique learning techniques I may have been able to recite my times tables, but I never really understood them.

It’s been years since my father and I butted heads about math homework but unfortunately, not much has changed. Math is still a struggle for parents and kids because many kids still don’t get math.

It’s not because the curriculum is too hard, or the teachers are ineffective. Some kids struggle with math simply because the basic concepts of math are not relevant or meaningful to the student.

And when students don’t have a fundamental understanding of the concepts, they rely on memorization to get by.

Some kids get math naturally, and others don’t. Those that don’t have to work harder to develop a better understanding of math basics. If your child is not a natural math learner, then the struggle is trying to help your child find the link to the real world that will make math meaningful and relevant. It’s a process that can take years, but its one that is well worth it, because math doesn’t end when school does. Math has practical applications in everyday life. When the light bulb finally goes on for your child and math begins to makes sense, the struggles begin to slip away…

What do you do to make math meaningful for your child? We’d love to hear from you.

On the subject of participation in the classroom, we’ve looked at how to encourage your child to raise his hand in class, and how participation in the classroom can improve grades.

We’ve also touched on how being shy can prohibit a child’s willingness to participate. But another big reason that accounts for an unwillingness to participate in class is a fear of failing.

It seems that there is a perception among students that if you are not 100% right, it is better to not try at all.

Which is understandable. After all school can be a very competitive environment. We live in a culture driven to achieve top grades. Parents, teachers, school boards, and even advertisers all preach the message that good grades are the key to success in life. It’s an all-pervasive message that surrounds everything that a student does. So it’s only natural then that a student who can’t compete at the A-level wouldn’t want to compete at all.

But the message that we should be sending to students is the only was to get the grades—to get ahead, to be on the winning team—is to TRY. Students need to forget the negative and focus on the positive.

We need to tell our students that it’s ok to have the wrong answer occasionally. Some of the greatest minds of our time had to fail several times before they were successful.

In his quest to find a route to India, Christopher Columbus found the Caribbean. He wasn’t the world’s best navigator, but the point here is that he tried. He didn’t give up.

Success comes from the attempt. It’s okay to be the student who puts his hand up to answer a question a hundred times and only be right once. It’s certainly better than never putting your hand up at all.

You’ve heard the saying that goes: if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again? It’s a good refrain to remember in life, and an even better one to remember in the classroom.

Encouraging Students To Speak Up in Class

Grades 7-12

How many classes in a school day are fun, interactive classes—a place for bouncing ideas off one another in a point/counter-point lively interactive learning forum? Sadly, the answer is not too many, if none at all.

Most classrooms exist in the lecture-listen format, which means that in order to interact within the classroom, students have to raise their hand—it’s the only way to ask questions, to solicit comments, to get feedback, and to become an active participant in the classroom!

But many students are hesitant to put their hand up in class. It’s risky business—attracting attention and running the risk of being wrong, or even ridiculed in front of the class.

Still, putting your hand up in class is a risk worth taking. Here’s why:

• It can signal the teacher that you have something to add, or that you need clarification
• It helps you become an active participant in your education
• It tells the teacher that you are paying attention, and thinking about what is being taught
• It shows that you are relating this new information to other information

Raising your hand—whether you are called on or not, or if you know the answer or not—helps you to gain a better understanding of the subject matter. Understanding the material is better than memorizing it—memorization only gets you through a test. Understanding is for life.

Raise your hand if you want to really learn.

Read related articles: Positive thinking and Confidence and Cheating

It’s report card season.

For parents of achieving students it’s a time to celebrate your child’s hard work.

For parents of under-achieving students it’s a time that is not looked forward to.

For parents of teens, it can be a whole other issue altogether. (see previous entry about how parent-teacher interviews can go horribly wrong)

Teens can be uncommunicative at best, so one school in Baltimore came up with a unique solution to talking to teens about report cards—they brought in neutral third party from John’s Hopkins who are not invested in the report card results.

The third party is objective and not likely to be upset by poor grades the way a teacher or parent is. The third party has a better chance of communicating with the teen about poor grades without the teen getting defensive or upset.

And so far, the program is working. It’s an opportunity for teens to talk formally about their progress and goals with an objective adult—a system that is especially good for teens too proud or embarrassed to ask for help.