Last night we had a great class. This story from “How To Talk So Kids Will Learn” by Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish, is what inspired my lecture last night.
Read on and let me know what you think!
“Paul wasn’t a great student. He believed in doing the least he could in the shortest amount time in order to “get by.” One afternoon after school he came into the house and just stood there. I took one look at his face and became alarmed. “What happened?” I asked.
He said, “I just kicked in the garage door.”
I was shocked. “On purpose?”
“I failed my algebra test!” He blurted out. “And I tried! I really tried this time. I studied and I failed.”
He was clearly in so much pain that I told myself that this was not the time to focus on the garage door. I felt terrible for him. For years now his father and I had been after him to apply himself, to try harder, and here he had finally done it. He’d honestly tried to do his best and it turned out that his best had resulted in failure.
“Well, aren’t you going to ground me?” he demanded.
I didn’t know how to respond I only knew I had better hand on to whatever skills I had to keep us both from drowning. Tentatively I asked, “Did you bring the test home?”
He reached into his backpack and threw the paper on my bed. It had a sixty scrawled across the top. I studied the paper and tied to figure out what went wrong. I said, “ Paul, please, I can see how upset you are, but I need you to explain this to me. This first example, the on you got right, how did you arrive at the answer?”
Paul explained a long, complex process to me- something about factoring a polynomial into a binomial. I tried to follow him, but couldn’t. When he was finished, I said, “So you understood the theory, even though I don’t, and you must have understood these other fie examples because you to them right too. What went wrong with the other four?”
Paul leaned over the paper and said, “In these two I multiplied where I should have divided and in these two I just made stupid mistakes in addition.”
“So what you are telling me,” I said slowly, “is that you understand all this complicated stuff, but that you made four careless errors that cost you forty points. All I can concluded is that you have a mind that can grasp advanced mathematical concepts, but that you need to make yourself check your calculations before you hand in your paper.”
Almost before my very eyes the tension drained from Paul’s face. As he left the room, I took my first deep breath and felt as if I had passed some kind of test myself.
Ten minutes later Paul returned. He said, “Don’t worry about the garage door, Mom. I used the hammer very gently to straighten it out.”
Love this story!
Can you help your kids understand where they are getting stuck and help them get motivated about their own work?
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