"Brag Sheet" strategies

mathmom
Tue, 12 Jul 2016 20:04:43 +0000

I just happened to run into my younger son’s brag sheet the other day. He was one of those tricky kids with vague academic deficits. He’d had a 504 plan in middle school, but dropped it for high school. (His choice, but he had good reasons.) I don’t think it hurts at all to say you have a kid who may have LDs who is not using the accommodations and it may well help. Since the GC did not necessarily know about the 504 plan this was an opportunity for the GC to say it, instead of the student where it might sound like whining. So I did mention that he’d had a 504 plan because he wrote slowly, was slow at calculations and had trouble memorizing math formulas and foreign vocabulary. I said that his lack of extra time on tests probably contributed to some of his less good grades in chemistry and Latin. His math grades actually ended up being pretty respectable. It probably also didn’t hurt that his junior year math teacher wrote a recommendation saying he was actually one of the best mathematical thinkers in pre-calc even though he often ran out of time on math tests because he was figuring out formulas from scratch.

Academically I said my kid was curious and good at synthesizing knowledge. I gave examples of ways he learned things outside the curriculum (reading Scientific American and all the history background info in computer games) and said how he’d used that information in school and how it just made him fun to talk to because he was so well informed. I like the suggestion of using the word “grit” or talking about perseverance.

The personality trait I emphasized for my kid was empathy. He always was really good at putting himself in other people’s shoes.

One of the things that made my kids happy was to succeed at something that was hard, especially something they weren’t sure they could manage when they tackled it.

Quality of leadership? Blech what an icky way to put it. As ever remember being a leader can be providing a good example not just being the president of x and y.