<p>One characteristic of high-achieving students is the capacity to know what has to be done to succeed. They know in a general sense what it takes to do well, and they also know more specifically, such as what sort of answer a teacher would most likely be looking for on a test essay, or what constitutes good class participation.</p>
<p>I have a very obedient, hard-working child who would do whatever she knew to do, but lacks the ability to figure that out very well. Some of this is due to factors beyond her control (disability, average intelligence), but I still think she should be able to do better or at least I should be able to help her to improve more.</p>
<p>A simple example of the problem would be how she filled out a book report form on a biography of Charles Darwin. Note that she’s interested in reading a book like that and can understand it pretty well. The form asks for a sentence or two about the topic of the book. She wrote that the book is about the life of Darwin and “what he found on the Galapagos Islands.” Duh, of course it’s about his life, it’s a biography! And “what he found” gives no useful information. However, if I push her and question her, she is perfectly capable of providing the details and writing better sentences. She just doesn’t do it on her own, and it’s not that she’s lazy. Her thinking might be lazy, but not deliberately.</p>
<p>Ah… D1 was like this in high school. I would like to tell you some parenting act that helped her get better at this, but nothing seemed to help in high school. In college she got her act together on this and went on to graduate Phi Beta Kappa. But NO ONE (teachers, parents) would have predicted this outcome in high school. I suspect it was a combination of being more motivated in college (possibly by fear, as she knew she had to actually be able to support herself upon completing her four year degree). And maybe her brain developed somewhat in this area around the age of 18. Also she had some friends in college who were a good influence – she chose to live in a learning community housing option – many of those freshman friends turned out to be the top students in her class. Sometimes it requires someone who is not a parent AND a situation where the outcome seems to be higher stakes to get through to them…</p>
<p>Give her a list of general questions to ask herself about each assignment:
What is the purpose of the assignment? What does the teacher want to see?
How can I respond to answer that.</p>
<p>Sounds like your kid will make a great accountant or government bureaucrat. Getting her there is the trick. In the meantime, she needs to learn to answer the implied question, and not the literal question.</p>
<p>The best schools teach how to think/learn, not what to think/learn. Have her approach each assignment with the goal of learning how to think/learn. Elementary school was a time for “what”. Now is the time for her to take those skills and learn “how”. If she can learn that mindset, it might help her in approaching assignments (and not be frustrated by them).</p>
<p>You have my sympathy. I call my D2 the bare minimum girl. She does the task, answers the question, follows directions but doesn’t go an inch further. I will be watching this thread closely. </p>
<p>On the opposite end of the spectrum, D1 is intellectual but has ADHD which often throws her off task.</p>
<p>If I could give D2 some of D1’s learning gene and give D1 some of D2’s drive to complete tasks, I’d have perfect children! Ha.</p>
<p>My oldest is very bright but dysgraphic. So, she would, when she was younger, limit herself to short but sweet answers. She would even limit her stunning vocabulary (800 SAT CR for reference) to shorter words, because writing just was painful.</p>
<p>I just had her start all of her work on scratch paper when she was in junior high. Just: write everything out quick. No spelling, no grammar, no sentences. Just the ideas. Once she had them on the page, she could almost always come up with something really great, even if the actual writing in an academic form took more time for her than someone else.</p>
<p>It might be from a different cause, not the physical act of writing, but it might still be a good idea to teach your kiddo how to brainstorm first. I actually think the brainstorming, though practical, saved her curiosity, as well. Even in her final year in college, or at work, now, she does this. Sometimes she keeps the brainstorm in her notes and tosses out the paper once it’s handed in. </p>
<p>She writes, essentially, from bulletpoints, now.</p>
<p>I don’t know GFG but there isn’t really much one can say in a sentence or two. I think she was correct to identify it as a biography as it specifies the genre, which is important. The next sentence she wrote was a little vague but it could pique a readers interest - what DID he find on the Galapagos Islands? Perhaps that was her intent. </p>
<p>I have a middle schooler who tends to do the bare minimum when it comes to written work, unless it is an actual test. He just wants to get it done and thinks it will suffice since he isn’t being graded on homework assignments. I do review his written homework and ask questions like you did to illicit more complete responses. This has helped immensely as I think he needed a little help in understanding what acceptable “thoroughness” looks like. I also think that it does not help that many teachers do not review individual homework, they just go over it as a class, so he thinks he can get away with it! So I am the gatekeeper and he knows he will just have to do it again if it is not complete.</p>
<p>I still have trouble coming up with 1-2 sentences describing what a book is about. Maybe your D would do better if she lists what it’s not – like with the Darwin bio – it’s not a love story, a text book, a mystery – wait – it kind of is a mystery – or it describes a mystery – and he’s Sherlock Holmes, figuring out why some species evolved and others didn’t.</p>
<p>I do this with S when he can’t come up with an idea. I throw out anything – just to get him to take a stance.</p>
<p>I’ve observed that some people understand better with examples and models than they do with instructions. Perhaps you or her teacher could provide her with some examples of good answers to review?</p>
<p>One thing that also worked with S is I tell him “you talk; I’ll type.” So I sit at my laptop and he free associates for 20 minutes (while I furiously type down everything he says) until his ideas coagulate. When he’s freed up from simultaneously thinking and typing, his ideas flow better.</p>
<p>Yes, recording their thoughts helps them consider beyond the obvious and lets them focus on thinking rather than thinking and writing. As they get ready to leave the home, you can try transitioning them to dictating to a digital recorder that can play back their thoughts when you’re not there so they can evaluate which ones are the most useful for further development.</p>
<p>Agree that helping your kid develop a list of questions to consider about his/her assignments is a good idea so that she/he can try to address them in their assignments.</p>
<p>I think to a degree many of us have kids & loved ones who prefer to do the bare minimum. For our family, that was one of the reasons we had to switch our kids to school which had higher standards as to what was a bare minimum (this meant an elite private HS with tuition which was pretty expensive for us at the time). It worked well for us, but was an uncomfortable time. We did really want both kids to develop their OWN internalized standards rather than offer bribes and rewards, which some families have found effective. It has worked pretty well and both kids enjoy learning now, for the sake of learning. It makes us very happy.</p>
<p>One of my son’s 9th grade teachers showed the class sample student essays representing a variety of grades. The teacher explained why each essay had earned the grade. This excercise helped my son immensely. He could see how meeting the bare minimum of an assignment was not sufficient to earn an A. His grades are important to him and seeing the subtle differences in grades had been a strong motivator. In his case, he didn’t have a clear idea of what was really needed in the assignment. He is a literal thinker and seeing these examples helped him realize the need to add in details even when it isn’t obvious from the assignment that one should do so. He sometimes has the opposite problem if answering questions too thoroughly which is time consuming.</p>
<p>Can you provide something like this for your daughter or ask her teachers or a guidance counselor for this kind of help?</p>
<p>Samples definitely help her grasp the requirements, but sometimes she’ll adopt the example’s structure too rigidly.</p>
<p>She also misses hints. For example, if the teacher says that Chapter 5 is especially important, she thinks he means it’s important material relative to the rest of what was covered. Which he does indeed mean. However, she won’t necessarily go the next step in logic and conclude she’d better especially study Chapter 5 because it will be featured heavily on the upcoming exam. Also, she takes the words “optional,” and “if you want to,” very literally. She won’t grasp when “optional” means “optional if you don’t care about getting an A.” Recently, one teacher told the students they could take their in-class research papers home to work on them more if they wanted to. You guessed it, she didn’t “want to.” But if the teacher had said “You can take your research papers home if you want to do an extra good job and get a good grade,” she’d have done it for sure.</p>
<p>My oldest son used a very helpful software program in hs, Inspiration. It is mapping for brainstorming. First you brainstorm, then you can drag and organize things into place. It helps make an outline where you can work to add supporting ideas. It’s very visual. Also to note, keyboarding is a different neurological pathway then handwriting. For anyone with a written language disability (this was my son) this bypasses the handwriting that is so laborious. Many people go undiagnosed because they are also gifted and compensate in other ways. Every student is going to have to eventually learn coping methods, ways to organize, etc. This was a really great tool suggested by his GC. Since then I have heard of many others that have had good experiences with it as well. It may be worth looking at to see if it may be something that might help your DD.</p>
<p>Wow, BI, what a great program! wish we would have known about that.</p>
<p>ETA: I’m glad you are noticing this stuff GFG. You will be able to help her figure out what it is she needs to pay attention to, and help her have lists for that.</p>
<p>If I’d have had the first one SECOND, after the one who had no issues? I would have been pretty freaked out by how much she needed to just “talk” about homework. The second one? I worried constantly that she wasn’t working hard enough, since the older had to work so hard.</p>