Quite often students begin the year in a casual stride and who is to blame them? After all, they have just come off holidays (about 1 ½ months’ worth).
I come from a sports training background and understand that an athlete who wants to perform well will not take six weeks off their training year. The repercussions are too great as they will lose too much form. They must work too hard to get back to square one.
A dedicated rugby player will be maintaining his/her aerobic fitness with moderate exercise during the off-season. When January comes around, they are ready to start full swing on improving their strengths, building on fitness and working on skills. That is how you stay ahead of the pack.
Most learners will forget the last four weeks of learning over the six weeks of Christmas break. Pretty much everything learned in November is lost by the time they go back to school in January/February.
I often wonder why students don’t undertake the same planning when it comes to academic performance. Most students and parents of students are willing to let the achievements of the final months of the previous year disappear through resting the brain after the school year.
The brain doesn’t need that much time to recover. In fact, that length of time of recovery is detrimental. The last month of knowledge learned prior to exams has been lost and must be relearned in the first month of the new year!
During the last two weeks of the Christmas holidays many students maintain their academic conditioning by working with their Academic Coach at after-school tuition. Some use their coach (their tutor) to work on their weaknesses from last year while others use the time to get a head start on the subject they know is in the next year.
These guys, like their athletic counterparts, are staying ahead of the pack. Is it worthwhile? You bet it is. They will go into the new year confident and stress free. They have locked in with their coach who is helping them to perform at their peak.
We live in a competitive world and those who rise to the top are those who are willing to go the extra mile to achieve that result. Time and effort are often put into young people with their sport, but will that effort bring a return on investment for them? Will these skills bring them an income? Most likely not.
If the same effort was put into their academic ability, or at least more evenly distributed well……
By Peter Kenyon: Online Maths Tutor
Not everyone learns the same way, and that creates problems in classrooms and at home.
One night I left the stove on at my stinky house and I was woken by the unfamiliar smell of fire and hoary rubbish that I left on the table. By the time I got to the kitchen, I smelt the fire cooking a stale apple core and a decayed banana peel that smelt gross, and the dog food that smelt nice. The fireman said, ‘’You smell like you haven’t had a bath for 6 months!” and I said, “That’s true”. He sprayed rusty water on me with his big water hose until I smelt as lovely as a rose. While the fire brigade was busy washing me, my house was busy turning into a vessel of lovely ashes.
This morning, my friend, Jonah, who is eight year’s old, like me, shot a nerf-bullet to get his mate’s attention in the wood-house. They were both at Jonah’s family’s Californian farmhouse, just beside the magic tree. The bullet hit the magic tree in the face just as it was waking up and that hurt it a lot and it caused the tree to fall. The tree dragged itself up and then whacked the old wood-house into lots of bits of wood until the barn didn’t exist anymore. Jonah and his mate called 000 and the ambulance took them to the hospital.
On one rainy day in the middle of Brisbane, Joseph my school friend, bought two acres of farm land. The very next day he was out in the field sowing pumpkin seeds in the damp soil when he spotted an enormous prancing horse running across the seeds he had just sowed. He was very happy because the structure of the equestrian creature was perfect for pulling the plough which meant he could do more in less time. To his surprise the horse was already very experienced with pulling the plough and so they were ready to do a day’s labour together. With the help of his mighty horse my school friend became a successful farmer.
When John and Jeff came to the ditch on the way to school, Jeff slipped and hit his head on a stick. The ten-year-old twins were alike in many ways as both were playful and blonde. John came down to Jeff to remove the stick from his head when suddenly a vicious alligator burst from the water and chased them up the slope and all the way to school. The teacher opened the window and through a baton at the alligator and the kids ran into the school room. The teacher said, “That’s what happens when you’re late for school’.
It was just after lunch and Bang! The puppet knocked over the bookshelf which fell on top of the new television. She had straight yellow wool for hair with black sewn-on buttons for eyes and inside her long pink dress was my hand. Mum stomped into the room as the puppet grinned but it was me that Mum shouted at. When Mum turned her back, the puppet jumped on the counter, ripped the paintings off the wall and tipped over the bowl of fruit. After lunch, I took the puppet off my hand , picked up the mess and mopped the floors.
We all want our children to do well in school and in life, but how do you ignite that spark that fuels a need for knowledge. How does your child develop an interest in the world around them?
A decreased ability to concentrate, confused thoughts, motivation low, increased irritability, grumbling, quarrelsome, overly sensitive to criticism, anxious or depressed. This may sound like a typical teenager but they are also signs a coach watches for in athletes.
XtraMile Tuition Strategies (North Brisbane) - 0451 030188 