Blog
Rolling Admissions at The Beekman 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. In an effort to salvage a school year that is getting bumpy, parents and students should actively search for a school that is more in line with their needs and able to offer an immediate placement. Some schools are more experienced with this than others. For over 90 years, The Beekman School has been providing the New York City metropolitan area with full-time and part-time schedules for a range of students with specific needs not being accommodated in their current school...read more
Can Therapeutic Accommodations Be Found at a Mainstream School?
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. A concern that parents and students frequently express when meeting with us is the overlapping of private therapy and required in-school therapy. They feel that they are addressing the therapeutic needs outside of school and they are seeking a school that will work with their therapist in developing a schedule that supports the specific accommodations that have been identified. Here are ways The Beekman School can provide your child with a mainstream education while you provide the therapy that your child is benefitting from: Rolling admission throughout the school year and summer Academic courses available 12 months per year Part-time as well...read more
Beekman’s Core Capabilities Can Help Your Child
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. This list that you have just created is going to help you identify a school that should better support your learning needs. Now, start your Internet search using key words to help narrow your results. Then, make a list of schools that offer the most accommodations specific to your interests. Some of the factors that might be important to you are: Up to double-time on all tests/quizzes Listen to audio recordings of books Hear instructions orally Access to peer note-taker Use of an electronic device to take a...read more
Are There Disadvantages to a Progressive Education?
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.” Most parents are familiar with traditional education, the style utilized at the high school they most likely attended. Each teacher had a syllabus for a course and followed that curriculum from September to June. The focus is on the teacher and the material he/she has outlined for the course. The progressive education philosophy embraces a more student-centered approach. While teachers have objectives that they want to cover in a course, the curriculum encourages student input so that their particular interests can be incorporated into the design of the class. Students learn better through their own experience. Therefore, learning facts is more supported when students understand...read more
Units!
“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. There are twenty four hours in a day, four cups in a pint, twelve inches in a foot, one thousand meters in a kilometer, one hundred centigrams in a gram and to convert from Celsius to Kelvin, you add 273. You should be familiar with these English and metric system units, but do you remember the mole? If you do, thank a Chemistry teacher. My favorite unit is the mole. One mole is equal to 6.02 x 10^23 atoms. This unit is one that many of us don’t use in everyday life, so you might not be familiar with it unless of course, you’re a chemist. I don’t love this unit for the help it gives me in my day-to-day, for, even as a Chemistry teacher, I don’t use it every...read more
People are Fundamentally the Same
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. Document Based Questions (DBQs) are a core element of history classes and tests, and can frequently prove challenging. However, sometimes the meanings are clearly comprehensible at first glance. In Early World History, students get the experience of reading some of the earliest letters available, those from ancient Sumer and Mesopotamia (written around 2000 BCE). We anticipate that these texts will be incomprehensible from a modern perspective, until we begin reading and students immediately recognize themselves. A father admonishes his son about being a...read more
When is the Right Time to Write the College Essay?
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. As a student of adolescent developmental psychology, I have learned to wait on one key aspect of the college process: the personal statement. Teens are living through an intense period of social, emotional, and cognitive development, which means that a lot can change over the course of a school year. The junior year is often one of the most challenging experiences for students; the workload increases in volume and difficulty, and college entrance exams only add...read more
Cultivating a Differentiated Classroom
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. Differentiated Instruction in the Classroom For me, this inconvenience led to a math complex. Luckily it started at such a late age that I was able to work out of it on my own. For many, the instruction in a classroom, designed for no one in particular, can have detrimental effects that last a lifetime. Differentiated instruction, like many things, dates further back than its popularity would make it seem. As...read more
Princess/Teacher/Citizen Scientist
When I was young and adults asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, my simple response due to my love of Christa McAuliffe, Princess Diana, and the aunt I still look up to today was: princess/astronaut/teacher. In 1986, my elementary teacher rolled a TV into the Science Corner and my classmates and I tearfully watched Christa McAuliffe, the first teacher trained to go into space, die in the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion. Due to the early development of a strong case of self-preservation, I narrowed my future career choices to just princess/teacher. In 2011 Prince William got married to Kate and I really wasn’t that in to Harry, so here I am, 20 years in to my teaching career. I love teaching. Let me clarify, I love teaching science. It’s such an exciting topic. However, if I had become a princess, I think I’d take up the cause of encouraging more students to enter careers in science. I’d probably spend the hours I was not parading around in a tiara on websites like...read more
Memoirs for the Summer
Summer reading does not have to be a compensatory list of books that students dread reading and save for the last possible second. Summer can (and should be!) the perfect time to explore new genres or to revel in old favorite genres. Some of my favorite genres to read are memoirs, biographies, and autobiographies. I particularly love reading about people who have left a lasting impact on the world. Sometimes, like Darwin, these figures are well known, but I also love to read about lesser known people like Irena Sendler and Bryan Stevenson. I have compiled a list of a few memoirs, autobiographies, and biographies that I thought you might enjoy reading over the summer. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (there is a version that is adapted for young adults) by William Kamkwamba and Bryan Meale This biography is the story of a boy who figured out how to bring electricity and running water to his drought ravaged village in Malawi. It is a riveting story of a boy who used innovative methods to...read more