Sunday, February 24, 2013

Apprenticeships Are Valuable Learning Vehicles

Internships Help Students Prepare for Workplace
Education Week, January 29, 2013


Apprenticeships are valuable learning vehicles that have been dropped out of our educational environment.

In the rush to push every student to go to college, we lost sight of the fact that not everyone needs to go to college to build a career.

Going through an apprenticeship, becoming a journeyman, a craftsman and finally a master is the proper gradient to ensure each master is built on a solid foundation of knowledge and experience.

Anytime you address a subject, skill or ability you want to learn or teach be sure to first break it down into the gradient steps that should be learned, and approach them in the right order. Equally important, be ever alert to the symptoms of the by-passed gradient when they manifest so you can backtrack and get it right.

Dr. Maria Montessori demonstrated this with her methods a hundred years ago.

Great masters of any activity do this. They achieve their mastery by having broken down the subject of their area of mastery into its parts and practice, practice, practice each of those parts until mastered. Then they combine the parts into the whole of the performance.


I rescue failing students by remedying the Barriers to Learning

Sunday, February 17, 2013

Your Child Lags Behind in Reading Skills - What To Do


Your Child Lags Behind in Reading Skills – What To Do

I recently read a post from a concerned homeschooling parent.  They were concerned that their son, who is their fourth child, was not yet reading at age 7.  He/She was wondering if they needed to perform an intervention or wait for him to grow into it.

One response to this post was “What if your child is the same age as you other children were when they were eagerly reading, but is either not interested in learning to read, or is having great difficulty learning to read?  Do you panic?  Do you have this child tested? Do you wait?  Will the reading just ‘click’ at some point if you wait long enough?  How does a mother know if this is a ‘maturity issue’ or if this difficulty is a sign of a learning disability?”  This person then went on to recommend some curriculum.

I, on the other hand, have a different view on this.  Since the child has little interest in learning to read I would ask: what subject is the child greatly interested in?  Once that is known I would then show the child how learning to read can help them in learning more and doing more in the subject they really enjoy.

The child has not been shown the Purpose & Value of learning to read.  This is one of the prime Barriers to Learning and one that is tripped over continuously.

If this child were shown the value and relevance to them of learning to read, I would bet that child begins devouring books.


I rescue failing students by remedying the Barriers to Learning.

Sunday, February 10, 2013

Drowned in Stream of Prescriptions

Drowned in Stream of Prescriptions

An addict's parents couldn't halt a flow of Attention Deficit Drug




Richard's death is horrendous and all too common.
He wanted ADHD drugs because it helped him to focus and get through his college classes.

That's because we don't teach good study habits.
We don't teach our kids how to learn.


I rescue failing students by remedying the Barriers to Learning.
www.howtolearneasily.com