<p>I had a monthly course planner throughout high school and college. I still keep the planner tradition at my workplace. I will continue to use a monthly planner in graduate school. I love it! :)</p>
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<p>If they still need that much babysitting, maybe they’re not mature enough to go to college.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t dream of establishing a contract like that with my kids.</p>
<p>Marian notes,"If they still need that much babysitting, maybe they’re not mature enough to go to college.I wouldn’t dream of establishing a contract like that with my kids. "</p>
<p>Response: Marian, maybe your kids don’t need the contract that I suggested. However, college is a very new experience for most kids. There will be a load of distractions that your child has never had before, not to mention a lot more independent work than ever before. I, personally, see nothing wrong with having a contract with a kid about what is expected. However, I guess my advice can be postponed until the time grades start going awry.</p>
<p>We made one simple deal with our kids. We paid for college…they had to pass all the courses. If their GPA fell into the probation range, they knew they would be required to live at home and attend college locally until their college grades improved. We didn’t have to do that with either one (yet), but there is no question we would have followed through on that deal. Our kids’ jobs were to do well in their college courses.</p>
<p>taxguy, could you tell us what you would do in office hours with a kid having trouble? Would you consider it tutoring, or providing extra problems/topics, or ? How much time would you expect to spend with a kid?</p>
<p>I only stopped into a couple of prof/TA offices in my 4 years, and part of the reason was I had no idea whether the time would be worth spending that way, being someone who needs to learn from a book (visually).</p>
<p>A little sidebar here, in response to some posts about kids needing to learn responsibility for managing their time - I think that some kids just have better inborn time management skills (just as some kids are better athletes, musicians, or mathematicians by nature than others). I can state categorically that I never taught my kids to manage their time, except possibly, in their earliest years, by example. I’m competent in this area, but all three of them are outstanding. I’ve had friends ask me how we managed to raise three kids who are so focused and responsible. Darned if I know. On rare occasions (twice for each kid), I did bring a forgotten item to the high school. I was willing enough to do it because it was such a rare happenstance. I’ve brought my responsible, successful husband his wallet or cell phone lots more often.</p>
<p>Our youngest d is at a reach school with a rep for a tough workload, where I thought she’d have a tough time posting a strong GPA. Not at all! She’s a real stickler for keeping up with assignments and always has been. I hadn’t thought it would pay off so well at a school where pretty much everyone is a talented student - but it has. :)</p>
<p>What about the kid that exceeds expectations? </p>
<p>Take for example, the kid who is rejected by a number of ivies only to go on to win a Rhodes scholarship?</p>
<p>I think a big part of the problem, and a number of posters here have alluded to it, is that it is difficult to know what we should expect. We don’t get a very good measure of ability, I am afraid, from HS performance, especially with test centric HS curricula these days. </p>
<p>Heck, how many of us know how to define success? Is it income? GPA? Elite Grad School? Happiness? Diverse experiences? Family? Friends? Dunno.</p>
<p>There are a lot of routes to happiness but it is best defined by the individual.</p>
<p>I agree on the issues of testing and metrics in general. If you place a metric out there, those that want more will optimize for the metric. It can produce some really strange results in the workplace where the employee will try to optimize his metrics, even if it is a net negative for the employer.</p>
<p>taxguy - thank you so much for taking the time to post this - I have bookmarked it and am using it to reinforce some of the ‘talk series’ I already have with my D.</p>
<p>treetopleaf notes,“taxguy, could you tell us what you would do in office hours with a kid having trouble? Would you consider it tutoring, or providing extra problems/topics, or ? How much time would you expect to spend with a kid?”</p>
<p>Response: Professors can’t be a tutor per se. They are there to help. If there is a severe deficiency, I would recommend that the kid seek weekly tutoring in addition to coming to see me each week. I might have put them in touch with TAs or with kids who I knew understood the material. I would then make sure that the kid got what was needed by having them see me regularly. I would also provide them with additional work that would improve their deficiencies.</p>
<p>Newmassdad notes,"What about the kid that exceeds expectations? Take for example, the kid who is rejected by a number of ivies only to go on to win a Rhodes scholarship?</p>
<p>Response: This actually happens a LOT more than most people know. As I said, GPA and SATs only go so far. In my experience, drive and attitude can actually be more important than SAT scores and GPAs.I have seen this time and again about kids where were rejected from their first choice schools and yet performed outstandingly well. I have seen many kids who did not get merit scholarships outperform the kids that did get the merit scholarships. It fact, it happes so frequently, that I think it is more the rule than the exception. There just isn’t a really good way to test for a strong inner drive, good time management skills and a positive mental toughness,which makes the admission process fairly unreliable.</p>
<p>Frazzeled: Most likely you had reasonable expectations for your kids from day 1 and followed through on the consequences of them not meeting those expectations. I’ve observed through the years our friends and kids. The ones who struggled the most with their kids might have set expectations, but never had consequenes. Think about the parent in the grocery store with the unruly kids who is saying “if you do that agian I’m going to whatever”, aisle after aisle the kids are still misbehaving but the parent does nothing. As these 3 and 4 year olds get older they just understand your expectations (what you are referring to by never teaching your kids to manage their time). I propose that in fact, you did, teach your children through your behaviors and by following through. Maybe you made sure you were on time for doctor appointments and hussled the kids a few times so they understood you wanted to be on time, maybe you told the PTA you’d make cookies and you were really tired that night but you mustered the energy to make the cookies, maybe you promised a friend you’d help with something and something came around that you would have rather done but you helped the friend because you promised. I proposel that is “teaching” our kids subliminally time management, fulfilling promises and mustering strength to complete something.</p>
<p>My kid goes to office hours with her professors. Some of the things she does…reviews study questions, goes over material presented in class to be sure she understood it clearly, and go over tests when they don’t quite go the way she thought they would. It’s nice to KNOW what she did right/wrong…and she finds that the profs are very willing to work her through these problems to help her understand in the future.</p>
<p>Her profs also have open conversation office hours where students can engage in discussion about the class topics. She finds these very helpful and interesting.</p>
<p>She doesn’t understand why more students don’t go to office hours.</p>
<p>Her school also has an excellent tutorial program. She has had tutors in a couple of higher level math classes, primarily to go over problems for clarity. DD says this has been fabulous, and again, she doesn’t understand why more kids don’t do this.</p>
<p>You might want to look into whether her school has a learning center (as opposed to student tutors) that works with kids who have time management issues beyond the average. They might require testing but maybe not if you aren’t looking for accommodations just support. I definitely know the magical thinking issue and think it could be a real downfall in college since the Prof’s aren’t going to keep an eye on individual kids the way high school teachers might.</p>
<p>From a recently retired college foreign language instructor… I’ve learned that it takes a LOT of encouragement and trust-building to get a student to come and seek out help. I didn’t always wait for the struggling ones to come to me. I occasionally sent emails saying I’d be glad to help. Several came, others didn’t. Now and then, I would just put a note on the homework saying they had to see me before they left class.</p>
<p>But really, the key was simply this: show up, do the work. Nobody fails from doing that.</p>
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<p>Simple advice and what we tell our kids. Strange how some kids just don’t get that. We also pointed out to our kids just how “few” hours they are actually in class and reminded them that they should not forget the hours they need to put in when they are “not in class.” We suggested they start at the very least the same total hours they put in during high school. We pointed out that the balance just shifts - in high school they are in class more hours/less hours doing homework. In college they will be in class less hours/more hours doing homework. We told them just to make good decisions. If they want to play in the afternoon when they might not have class, fine, just put the hours in that night or that morning. We told them they will be the owners of their own time unlike high school where the school owned their hours, or the athletic coach owned their hours or their parents owned their hours…they will own their time and need to be smart about how they do that…then we held our breaths…for a year.</p>
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<p>It’s been awhile since I’ve participated on these forums. A couple of computers ago, I used to bookmark and organize my favorite posts, and there were a great number of them from so many knowledgeable posters. While I no longer have those bookmarks nor my old login stuff, I still remember this one of Taxguy’s and was happy that it came up in a search. </p>
<p>Taxguy, you wrote a wonderful post years ago that might be helpful to revive: [thread=135001]I thought I would share a letter to my daughter about college.[/thread]</p>
<p>I’ve recently been reading again as we are about to launch S2 as a college freshman and share many of these concerns. Our older S will be a Senior in college next year, and we didn’t worry about him as he naturally had very good management and self-advocacy skills. He was just kind of hard-wired that way. He did share recently that he is one of the few that still makes use of office hours or TA reviews and the like. Much like Oldfort’s D and others, for S1 it is an efficiency issue, and he is surprised that others prefer to slug it out, or not, on their own. </p>
<p>With our younger S2, however, I plan on sharing the general ideas of your letter as part of our ongoing strategy of teaching college life skills. These things do not come as naturally for S2, so we started the self-advocacy and executive function skill facilitation back in Middle School (actually started in Montessori School pre-school and elementary school). We believed the grades would come along if he learned how to “do” school. He is very independent, wants little help, has his ups and downs and lessons learned, but he “does” school on his terms to his own degree of success and satisfaction. I think he is very proud of his level of competence and has surprised himself with his growth and his reach.</p>
<p>Thanks for sharing, then and now.</p>
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<p>This is a problem with hiring grads too. You can see the grades, internships, courses and ask them to present but drive is hard to detect. When you hire from industry, you can look at their list of accomplishments and contact their references to see if they have the drive and energy that you talk about.</p>
<p>Good post and follow-ons. As taxguy pointed out, there has been significant grade inflation. Beyond this, ETS did a rescaling of SAT scoring a few years ago that compressed SAT M and CR scores at the high end. For example, the same performance that would have received a 730 V back in the dark ages would get an 800 today in CR. Both are incomplete measures of academic competence, drive, or time management. This makes it much harder for schools to discriminate at the high end, which is what they are trying to do. </p>
<p>As a result, adcoms try to read the tea leaves for proxies for what they are looking for: essays that make one stand out from the pack, superior performance in ECs (from which one can but need not learn time management skills), expressions of passion, etc. At one level, I suspect that their choices are fairly uncorrelated with the determinants of strong academic performance in college.</p>
<p>The main point: Because GPA and test scores aren’t great distinguishers within some reasonable range for a school, some kids with terrific grades and scores will do extremely well, some not. The differentiators will be underlying ability, drive and time management skills that are not teased out by grades/test scores or semi-random stuff like ECs and quirky essays. Although previous posters have focused on the drive and time management skills, which I think are important in college and especially important in the work place, it is worth focusing as well on pure intellectual horsepower. Some have more of it, some less, some focused in only some areas, etc. But, SATs/grades/teacher recs do not necessarily identify the brightest kids. So, some kids even with good time management skills and drive, will just be in the bottom half of organic chemistry or physics or French or economics. But, except in Lake Woebegone, as LMNOP pointed out, 50% of the people have to make up the bottom half.</p>
<p>Actually, I think drive is fairly easy to detect. I do it by asking a lot of non academic questions, their jobs, school projects. Many interviewers like to ask tough, mind teaser questions, but I am more concerned if they have the drive to get to the destination. </p>
<p>I just hired a student for the summer who doesn’t have the best GPA, but is working 30+ hours a week to put himself through school. He is responsible for his room and board, sometimes had problem paying for food. It is not to say kids have their education fully paid have less drive, but I would like to see what they done to push themselves.</p>
<p>A student who has tapped into all resources (extra help from professor, TA, tutoring, or study group) is more desirable than a student who just sits back to hope for the best.</p>
<p>Where I work, employees are expected to work a lot of hours from time to time. 80 hours a week is not uncommon. Sometimes this is expected for several months at a time. Someone can be an above average employee but still not make it up to the level of high-level pressure on a consistent basis.</p>