In an ever-increasing global community, no one should be asking why learning a second language in high school is so important. And if you are planning on continuing your education after high school, you don’t need to ask yourself if learning a second language will help you get into college because most colleges are going to require it anyway.
Blog
How can parents know if a school is providing a good education? Who monitors the quality of an academic program to ensure that students are receiving the kind of preparation they need? There are several organizations whose responsibility it is to establish an accredited high school. These can be local, state, regional, or national organizations. Also, it is possible to identify an accredited online high school.
Rolling admissions means that you can enroll is a school at any point throughout the academic year. While some schools may want you to wait until the beginning of a new marking period, others will allow you to join classes when you’re ready.
In our experience, if a student is unhappy in a current school then the situation usually deteriorates as the year progresses. The longer a student remains in an inappropriate placement, the larger the portion of a student’s final grade will be consumed by those poor grades.
By the time students reach high school, if there is a need for therapy, it has been identified and a list of requested accommodations has been outlined. Often times, these students have already started working with private counselors or therapists outside of school and/or enrolled in special programs or support services after the school day.
There are many choices in schools and knowing which one is the best fit for a student can be daunting. What happens when you’re weeks or months into a new school year and you can already see the writing on the wall - you’ve enrolled in a school that isn’t working out as planned? Transfer!
How? The first thing to do is make a list of why the current school isn’t appropriate. This could be everything from the physical structure to the student body or the classroom environment.
First of all, as someone who has worked in education almost 40 years I can’t imagine saying there are disadvantages to education. There are, however, pros and cons to different styles of education and a popular buzzword in the field over the last couple of decades has been “progressive education.”
“Units are life or death!” I tell my students. I often use the following example:
Let’s say we’re all on a boat and Mary falls overboard. I turn to you and yell, “Quick, get me 12 of rope or Mary will die.” You bring me 12 centimeters but I needed 12 feet and alas, glug, glug, gurgle, gasp, poor Mary is dead. Units are important.
Why should we study history? There are many potential answers to this question, but one of the most crucial is the way in which history helps us to better understand ourselves by illustrating just how universal our experiences and behaviors are. My favorite way of bringing this fact home is through having students look at primary source documents, and allowing them to figure out for themselves what the documents are telling us.
Every year when families of sophomores and juniors meet with me, many parents express to me how “behind” their child is in the college process and how stressed everyone is about that. At that point, I always ask, “Behind whom?”
“Everyone else.”
While there is definitely a timeline involved in the college process, that timeline is also intensely personal for each student. Comparing that process with someone else’s process is not only stress-inducing, but it can also be detrimental to a student’s unique college application.
Growing up most classes weren’t a good fit for me. Early on I found my math work pretty straightforward, which is part of what led me to my eventual role as a math educator. Fast-forward a few years however, and the jump from too easy to too hard happened swiftly and unexpectedly. I found myself unprepared, with few study skills established, and even worse, the impression that because I was being challenged, that meant I was “bad at it”. Jumping from too easy straight into too hard, the classroom that was “just right” eluded me for the majority, or dare I say all of my education.