Hey, It's OK! What To Do When You Realize Your Child Is Not The Next Nobel Laureate

I’ve learned a lot about kids during my years in education. For starters, they come in all sorts of packages. You have the quiet ones, the loud ones, the focused ones, the scatter-brained ones. You even get a sprinkling of the ones who aren’t really sure which universe they exist in. It all makes for a fun and exciting school day. I say that in all sincerity. If there was one thing I would remove from school today if I knew it wouldn’t affect the outcome is the pressure to succeed. I am almost convinced the school accountability movement that sprang up as a reaction to societal issues has morphed into a tyranny of testing.

Please don’t get me wrong. I am for assessing and learning. I want kids to learn, to really grasp a truth so tightly that it alters their being; but the pressures that come from making sure children achieve that razor’s edge of knowledge has led to some unintended outcomes. One notable one is a dissatisfaction when our children come home with anything less than an “A” on their assignments. It reminds me of one of my favorite stories from the testing scandal that happened a few years ago. You probably remember the parents who got caught and then went to jail…all because they knew their children weren’t up to the standards of the schools they wanted the kids to go to, and they cheated to get those kids into school. I wonder what those poor kids thought knowing they were not the students their parents made them out to be, and how it affected them in their inner thoughts.

Which takes us back to our topic. We all want our children to succeed. We want them to have the notoriety, the accolades, the credibility of being a top student. I have lost count of the times I sat through a parent interview and been assured that the five year old drawing outside the lines in front of me was the next Einstein, only for those parents to see that their child was really just an average kid when the assessments came back in the first quarter. I’m not saying that it’s wrong to have a hope that our child will be “the one”, but parents often put themselves and their children into a corner by setting arbitrary expectations for learning success before any verifiable data shows where a student actually stands. As the years go on, pressures mount until students get to high school and parents struggle to understand why their child is shutting down and refuses to learn, or constantly lives in a state of anxiety.

Mom, Dad, let me help you out before it gets to this point. It’s okay if your child is not jumping grades at 6 years old, or competing in the Math Olympiad as a 9 year old. Believe it or not, there are a lot of “average” people out there changing the world, and your child could change someone’s world for good one day if you do the most important thing in child rearing - training a child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6). In our rush to make sure our kids have the skills for life, let’s not forget to teach them how to live. To do that, here’s some practical tips and goals for helping your child through school.

“Life is about timing and overcoming difficult things.”

— Carl Lewis

GOAL #1 - Help Your Child Find God’s Will

Knowing the will of God for our life is the single greatest thing we can know. God has a plan for each of us that starts with salvation and goes from there. We are each uniquely designed to fulfill a purpose in His plan, and He has given us the skills, capacity, and temperament to complement the physical attributes needed to accomplish that purpose. Teach your child the benefit of hearing God’s voice and following His leading to the greatest blessings in life.

GOAL #2 - Develop Your Child’s Talents

It doesn’t matter how you came into the world or what your intellectual abilities are, God gave you a talent (or more). Even people who would be classified as developmentally delayed or disabled have God-given talents. Help your child realize those talents and then learn how to wield them for blessing and the glory of God.

GOAL #3 - Instill Character

Someone once said that talent without character is a horrible combination. Teach your child godly character that hones and balances the inclinations of human ego toward using talents in a biblical manner. We have several examples in Scripture of people who had talent but used it for wrong. The end results were not good. Conversely, there are those who did use talent for good, and we see the blessings that came as a result of it. Make the learning of character a constant habit. Instill it from an early age and refine it as the years progress.

GOAL #4 - Show the Blessing of Hard Work and Learning as a Process, Not a Consequence

Your child is going to come up against what I call “the Wall”. This is the point at which learning becomes exponentially harder for a student. It usually happens around 4th grade, but can occur as late as 9th grade. This is the point that kids realize that learning is becoming very hard, and the reason it happens around these milestones is because the material starts becoming more abstract. Children’s brains are not quite engaged in the abstract reasoning process in the latter elementary years, so concepts that don’t have concrete physical representations really become mindbreakers. It’s frustrating for a child, but it’s even more frustrating for a parent who has forgotten what that stage of life felt like. instead of getting frustrated when your child comes home with a mound of homework and “just doesn’t get it”, sit down and talk through the problems. Let your child know that learning is a process that involves struggle and failure. If failure can be internalized as a stepping stone to greater success, it leads to more confident and successful kids who turn into the same as adults. This is why I love science. There is no right or wrong, only valid and invalid. If we find that we have arrived at a bad conclusion, we back the process up and go a different direction until we find the truth. Whenever your child comes home and work is a struggle, remind him or her that it’s ok to work and strain, but it is never ok to quit.

Setting a good precedent early is a life changing experience for a child. Our own experience at SBA, and the data, shows that creating a hard-working, initiative driven mindset with these goals in mind creates a lifelong learner who embraces those things put before him. I would encourage you to start wherever you are with your child and develop a wholesome mindset toward learning with these four goals and tips. You never know what genius you might actually unleash.

“He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?”

— Micah 6:8

Spaced Learning - Keeping it Fresh, Again

One of the hallmarks of the A Beka curriculum is its spiral method of learning. In this method, students are introduced to topics that continually build upon one another and then “circle” around to earlier concepts in more depth. This method works with a concept called spaced learning. This concept uses science to maximize the amount of time between concepts and skills so that they become ingrained in the mind better.

When we practice spaced learning, we are using our mind’s ability to remember and forget to a greater potential. Most of us remember trying to cram as much information in our heads the night before a quiz, hoping it would stick. If we did remember it during the quiz, we quickly forgot it afterwards. Why? We only tried to access it right there. After that, it didn’t really have any value so our brain pulled the plug and we moved on.

With spaced learning, we use time as an ally. Our memory goes through the “forgetting curve”, an exponential reduction in the knowledge we have learned as we get farther away from learning something. Within an hour of learning a new concept or skill, we forget up to 50% of it. Within seven days, if we don’t revisit it, we will have forgotten most of what we have learned. When we use spaced learning, we have set intervals where we come back and revisit that knowledge. This is what happens in our classrooms every day. Teachers and students review and build on the prior day’s knowledge in a specific timeframe to ensure the knowledge sticks in the memory of each student. Not every student is the same, so sometimes the effect is greater or less, but the basic principle remains the same.

You might be saying to yourself, “That’s great, but what does it have to do outside of the classroom?” One reason students have homework is to shorten the interval in which that memory is used. By causing a student to rehearse what he or she learned in school that day, homework helps solidify that information in the brain. When done properly, it aids knowledge retention and helps students speed up the learning process the next day. One way parents can help is to ask what was learned in school from the day. When we talk about what we have learned and show it to another person, it helps build the synaptic connections that cement a memory in our mind. Asking your kids to tell you what they learned in class can create an interval where memory is secured.

“The expert in anything was once a beginner.”

— Helen Hayes

Think of spaced learning as a form of meditation on what was learned. Psalm 119:97 states, “O how love I thy law! it is my meditation all the day.” When we bring those memories back, they bring other benefits as well. Keeping these intervals going helps reduce study anxiety, promotes deeper understanding, reduces mental exhaustion, and helps make real-world connections. So, how can you help your student succeed in spaced learning? Find a new concept that he or she learns at the beginning of the week. You can do this by asking your student or the teacher. Then, spend 5 or 10 minutes working on that concept. It might be as simple as rehearsing some history facts or working on a multiplication family. Do that every day of the week, but add a little more to what you did each day. At the end of the week, your child will see a marked improvement in what he or she knows.

CACS Fine Arts Competition

Several SBA Cougars placed in the Colorado Association of Christian Schools Fine Arts and Academics Competition on March 9th. Students competed in several categories, including music vocals, instruments, photography, drawing, and sculpture as well as academic testing and the statewide science fair. We want to recognize the following students for their hard work in their areas of competition.

Jada Anderson - 3rd Place, Spelling Bee

Josiah Johnson - 3rd Place, Junior High Sculpture

Titus Tolbert - 2nd Place, Spelling Bee; 2nd Place, Elementary Black & White Photography

Alexia Amaro - 3rd Place, Junior High Color Photography

Gwyn Tantay - 2nd Place, Junior High Watercolor

Sarah Adams - 1st Place, Elementary Mathematics; 1st Place, Elementary Monochromatic Drawing; 2nd Place, Elementary Crafts

Zaine LeBlanc - 1st Place, Elementary Crafts

Wyatt Johnson - 3rd Place, Elementary Crafts

Summer Haley - 3rd Place, Elementary Sculpture

Lindsey Tolbert - 1st Place, Junior High Vocal Ensemble; 2nd Place, Junior High Black and White Photography

David Mendizabal - 1st Place, Spanish; 1st Place, Senior High Still Life Photography; 2nd Place, Topical Preaching; 3rd Place, Senior High Spelling Bee

Madelyn Wyatt - 1st Place, Junior High Vocal Ensemble; 2nd Place, Junior High Instrumental Ensemble

Hayleigh Olenick - 2nd Place, Junior High Instrumental Ensemble

Aaron Adams - 2nd Place, Spelling Bee

Spencer Najera - 1st Place, Male Vocal Ensemble; 1st Place, Senior High Sculpture; 2nd Place, Vocal Ensemble; 3rd Place, Senior High Creative Writing

Camdin Corriveau - 2nd Place, Vocal Ensemble; 3rd Place, Male Vocal Solo; 3rd Place, Topical Preaching

Zoey LeBlanc - 2nd Place, Vocal Ensemble; 2nd Place, Political Science

Iliana Martinez - 2nd Place, Vocal Ensemble

Maryanna Adams - 2nd Place, Vocal Ensemble; 3rd Place, Senior High Science Fair

Nathan Wyatt - 1st Place, Landscape Photography

Sydra Swonger - 1st Place, Woodwind Solo; 2nd Place, Junior High Instrumental Ensemble

Isaac Adams - 3rd Place, Junior High Science Fair