K5 Learning blogger, Joanne Arcand, is both a teacher and a mom, so she has great perspectives from both sides of the fence. In this blog she shares her top 5 tips on back to school for students.
By Joanne Arcand
I’m switching grades, schools, and school boards this year and have caught some of the exhaustion and excitement that is captive in many homes this time of year. Back to school season is upon us. I have a blank slate of young nine year old minds to work with and I am almost exuberant with the prospect of introducing them to multiplication, medieval times (I could do a whole blog on that- did you know women didn’t wear underwear, but men did?), reader’s theater, and some sport called “tchoukball” (I’m going to be learning that one as I go, I think).
With the new school year beginning, it is a good time for some new year resolutions. Here are mine for the new students of 2012/2013.
Top five resolutions for new students
- Remember your manners: No one is going to pass you up on a job because you didn’t know all the prime numbers that divide evenly into 72, but being impolite to the interview panel is the quickest way to the recycling bin. Get into the habit now: maintain eye contact, remember the “please” and “thank you”, and the response to “How are you?” is not “Fine”, it’s “Fine. How are you?” Thank your teacher for the handout, introduce yourself to the supply teacher, and hold doors open for people. Someone might hold the door open for you next.
- Be prepared for the uncertainty of the future. Don’t ask “when are we going to have to use this (stuff)?” A better question is “When I have to use this, will I be ready?” As teachers, we will try to make concepts meaningful but (quite frankly) many of the careers that will be open to you when you graduate don’t actually exist yet. We’ll teach you how to think using what we know and hope that you can apply it when you need to.
- Read. The only way to get better at reading is to read. The reading will also improve your grammar, because things will start sounding right. Grammar gets noticed even online (she types as she double checks the “it’s” versus “its” above…). A recent article in Harvard Business Review (http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/07/i_wont_hire_people_who_use_poo.html) stated that hiring managers for online blog sites can give grammar tests as part of the interview process. If you can’t figure out when to use “your” and when “you’re” makes more sense, then perhaps you aren’t a good candidate for learning the ropes of the business. So read, talk about what you read, and read some more.
- Ask your parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles questions. Learn about what they do, where they grew up, what’s important to them, try one of their hobbies for a while, look through a photo album. The best form of learning can be about where you came from, it is the foundation of many of our beliefs and something to hold you up when times get rough.
- Take a multiple intelligences survey. Understand how you learn best, and add that type of learning to projects and homework which will be marked. Your teacher might even let you suggest different ways to show your learning if you approach her ahead of time(especially if you’ve been working on that ‘manners’ goal.) Build up skills in the other types of learnings as well-just because you’ll never play for the major leagues doesn’t mean you shouldn’t learn how to throw a ball.
Best of luck with the new school year. There are other resolutions that didn’t make the list (sharpen the pencils at the end of the class instead of waiting until the middle of the math lesson, for example). What resolutions would you suggest for your little ones?
Joanne Arcand is trying to juggle her role as a math teacher with her other life as mom of twin boys. She lives in Oakville, Ontario.
