As an academic coach, I am always amazed at how much my students teach me with their feedback and observations. A few days ago, one of my students made an observation about grades that reinforced for me how unreliable they are as a measure of success.

I am not at all anti-grading in saying this. I am fine with the concept of studying hard and receiving a grade in return to reward the effort. In life, we are all ‘graded’ in some form or another at our jobs, and getting feedback from others is essential to growth in whatever form that feedback takes. So on the surface, a student goal of making A’s in classes makes sense, and is such a habit for most students and parents (and, I admit, for me as well) that I sometimes forget there’s a better, more measurable goal to set than looking at grade reports – until a student comes along and reminds me.

This student was feeling frustrated because he was having a hard time measuring his success from week to week due to the lack of grade updates he was receiving in some of his classes. He may have studied hard for his tests and quizzes, and turned in some late assignments to teachers to eliminate some zeroes, but when the teachers didn’t get those grades and makeup assignments entered into the online system quickly, he was unable to get confirmation that his efforts were working.

It can be frustrating to look at low averages week after week when the student knows they’ve made up some of their missing work, or re-taken a test to up the score, but I do think we need to give teachers a break here. As a former high school teacher, I know how overwhelming a job it is, and the truth is grading and entering those grades takes time that has to be carved out from the myriad other responsibilities teachers have to juggle from day-to-day. While waiting weeks to get test grades entered certainly isn’t acceptable, it makes sense to give teachers several days to get them posted. On the other hand, I always tell my students that one of the many benefits of turning in work on time is getting to see the grades in a timely manner, and that a teacher isn’t under much of an obligation to quickly grade and log assignments that missed the deadline. Resolving the consequences of your lateness, and the low grade that results from it, isn’t going to be a teacher’s priority, and for the most part, it shouldn’t be.

All the more reason for realizing a measure of success that relies less on the teacher, and more on the individual student. So how is this done? The student can think about the actions he or she is going to take to accomplish the goal of improving grades, and make those actions the real goal. Saying, “I am going to bring all my low grades up to passing” or “I am going to bump my Bs to As” is a great idea, but again, the student doesn’t control how or when that magic happens. But, a goal that states, “I am going to turn in all my homework on time this grading period” or “I am going to study for 30 minutes every day for 4 days before my tests, instead of trying to cram everything in the night before” is not only more clear and productive, but it’s entirely dependent on student action, and therefore, immediately measurable, even if it takes the teacher another week to enter grades.

Setting goals that are outside our realm of control is a habit that is tricky to change, especially when it comes to academics, because the big reward is generally to get that glowing grade report at the end of a semester. But it is worth checking in with ourselves every once in a while, especially when we’re feeling frustrated with our lack of progress, to see if part of the problem is that we’re relying on someone else to give us the feedback we need to know whether or not our efforts are paying off. It’s not about abandoning the goal of making good grades, it’s about being as proactive as possible in working to achieve them. Measuring  success against a student’s own actions provides much more immediate feedback than waiting for grades to post (which puts them in a reactionary position that doesn’t serve them). This also provides students with a more concrete and useful evaluation system if something goes wrong grade-wise – sometimes, in spite of their best efforts, students fail a test or miss a deadline, and the more detailed a student’s action goals were, the easier it is to go back and evaluate what went wrong along the way and make changes.

It may sound strange to say that grade reports are not the proper measure of student success, but in reality, action-oriented goals that focus on how a student will behave from day-to-day are, in the long run, a better form of measurement. Students need to be able to evaluate themselves regularly, without waiting for feedback from others to validate how they are doing.

Recently, while getting a yearly checkup with one of my doctors, he stopped during the middle of updating my information and asked, “You’re a teacher, right?”

After I answered in the affirmative he continued: “Do you want to know, out of all my years of education, including medical school as well as all my other advanced degrees, what the single most important class is that I ever took? The one I use what I learned every single day? Keyboarding.”

He said this as he stood in front of the computer cart he wheels from room to room, typing in updated information and notes about current complaints. It was a serendipitous moment for me, because I had just been making the observation at the school where I worked that our students with a laptop accommodation often couldn’t use it properly to compensate for their dyslexia, dysgraphia, or other learning disability. At the time, I was focused on the need for students with learning differences to take a keyboarding class, but the truth is that all students could not only benefit from taking a typing course, but are probably suffering from a lack of ability to type accurately without one.

When I left the public school system in 2010 keyboarding classes were still offered, but they were far from mandatory, and a lot of students avoided them. I know I was guilty of assuming that, because the students had clearly been using computers since they were children, they had already developed the ability, and it seemed a lot of people around me assumed the same. This was at a time students were still disallowed access to cell phones during the school day, so the extent to which students bypass computers and laptops almost entirely in favor of their smartphones was not as evident to me then as it was when I returned to teaching after graduate school – to this day, I am still amazed at how many students insist on using their phones for everything they can get away with using them for; checking school email, accessing the library’s databases, reading uploaded teacher notes, and even typing them. No wonder when they’re forced to type an essay on a computer, they move at a snail’s pace and take what feels like days to hunt-and-peck their way through the process – they are literally tapping out responses to everything they say, and rarely, if ever, really typing.

This lack of keyboarding ability not only slows them down, but it drastically affects their ability to think about what they’re saying, because they’re concentrating so much on what they’re doing and how to hit the proper keys. Typing should be second nature to them by the high school years, so they can hammer out ideas quickly and move into the rough drafting and editing phases, but more often than not I found trying to work with a student as he or she typed out an essay to be an almost torturous experience, and I admit to often allowing kids to hand-write just to move the process forward. Sure, I had a handful who came to me with a typing class under their belts, and they all carried and used their laptops consistently, but those kids who’d never learned how continued to choose hand-writing responses and essays to typing whenever possible, and the struggle to read those responses (or worse, their notes, if that’s what they were writing) caused them way more frustration than taking a typing course ever could – even if it sounds like a boring or unnecessary class to take.

It’s downright tragic that a student with a learning disability is unable to utilize a technology that can be so helpful to them because of the keyboarding issue, and I now make sure to emphasize the importance of it to those students and their parents. But honestly, I should be recommending it to all students, because any kid who gets out of high school without really learning to use the keyboard on a computer is going to be at a disadvantage when they get to college. It might not be what you want to use an elective credit for, but if you don’t believe me, take it from my doctor – it will be the most valuable elective you ever take!

READY TO GET STARTED? Contact me at cynthia@coxtutoring.com, call or text me at 281-346-9372, or use my contact page. 

As a ninth grade counselor and teacher, I witnessed the struggles of students (and their parents) making the transition from 8th to 9th grade first-hand. But it’s not so much moving from middle school to high school, or even high school to college, that is the truly difficult part; it’s just that each new step emphasizes those areas of navigating your education you still need to master. The skills you need to get the most out of your education are the same no matter where you are along that path, and it’s never too early to start putting pro-active behaviors into place.

Believe it or not, your educational institutions – your teachers and your schools – are there to serve you. It may sound like a terrible thing to say, but the fact is, there’s a game to be played, and if you’re sitting on the sidelines you may not be losing – but you’re not winning either. You can’t be a passive learner and truly learn. You need to participate in class, ask questions of your teachers and of your school, and reach out for help when it is needed. Never should you get to the end of a class with a teacher to whom you’ve not spoken – not even in a college class of 300! It is not enough to avoid ‘losing’ at the game of school; you are wired to ‘win’ – because we all are. It will look different for every person, but once you get the feel of your own personal success, you’ll be glad you stretched yourself outside of your comfort zone and started to grow.

Maybe you aren’t comfortable with the ‘winning and losing’ construct that I’m using, but it’s the simplest way I can say it. When I worked in a small-group setting, it was a regular occurrence for a student to walk into the classroom, sit down, and immediately begin to ask questions about an assignment he or she had just been working on in English class. My first question to that student was always, did you ask the teacher about this? And inevitably, the child would respond in the negative, even though they’d just left that teacher’s classroom!

Never before working in this environment – where I had the chance to work one-on-one with students instead of teaching English to 25+ kids per class – had I witnessed the depth of student resistance to exposing perceived academic weaknesses to their teachers and peers. While I do not feel this experience is exclusive to students with learning disabilities, I did see in them more clearly how beaten down we can be when our hardest work does not yield results that in any way mirror the level of effort we put into them, and how stubborn that innate need for self-protection can be after even just a few instances of perceived failure.

This is just one example, but really it’s a composite of what I saw play out over and over again with my small-group students: A student is struggling with a subject. She appears to grasp a concept well until test day, when once again she bombs the exam (sound familiar?). By November she is devoid of hope, convinced she will fail, and completely resigned to that fact without being willing to entertain any option or alternative. We all sense that she knows what she is doing, but the grades are telling us otherwise.

Now let’s say this student is only attending tutorials sporadically at this point, and she clearly needs more regular help than either sporadic tutoring or our classroom program can offer. We know that when  she goes to the teacher’s tutorials, there are other students also in the room, and she rarely, if ever, asks questions. So we convince her (more like strong-arm her, I admit) to attend a set tutoring schedule with her classroom teacher where she is the only student present, and she begins meeting with the teacher one-on-one before school two times a week. Soon enough, she’s passing her tests and quizzes, and for the rest of the year, she makes decent grades – her class average never falls below a C again, and her attitude never takes another turn for the worse, even when the occasional stumble occurs.

So what happened? In those private tutoring sessions, her teacher had time to ask specific questions, and wait for her to answer without having to navigate the responses and reactions of other students. Together they figured out where things were going wrong, and worked on a strategy to make up for the deficit. This isn’t someone else coming to the teacher with paperwork and telling them what the problem is and what to do to assist with it, this is better – because the teacher sees the struggle in action and participates in addressing it. Maybe the teacher realized she was more successful when she answered questions orally instead of writing them down, and gave her permission to test privately to recite her answers (if that sounds like too radical a solution, that there’s no way a classroom teacher would allow such a thing – I’ve seen it happen. Repeatedly).  Maybe the teacher realized an underlying issue with reading fluency or comprehension was causing the problem, and alerted the student’s counselor so it could be addressed. Or perhaps the one-on-one time simply allowed the student to review concepts that flew past her too fast in the classroom – anything is possible. But such solutions will never be found if the student declines to show up, ask questions, and get the teacher on her team. 

Doing this is incredibly hard for many students, because it makes them vulnerable to the adults and peers around them. They have, after all, one job to do in school – pay attention, take notes, and learn. When they cannot accomplish this on their own, it taps into all sorts of insecurities and, in many cases, real past experiences where they were mocked or shamed for falling short in the eyes of others. Perhaps the people who did the shaming didn’t do it intentionally, or even realize that the one sarcastic comment they made as an attempt to cheer the kid up affected them as negatively as it did. But to the student in question, it doesn’t matter. Such memories loom large in a child’s mind (and in many adult’s lives, too) and it involves a lot of courage and a good bit of trust to open themselves up to criticism again. But it can be done, and in fact, it has to be done – not just to get what you need from your teachers but to help you move past the roadblocks to your success and replace those old, painful memories with some new and positive experiences.

Just think if the kid in our example had asked for assistance from her teacher as soon as the problem arose – she would have never gotten into that hole in the first place. It’s not that the teacher performed some miracle once she got the kid into her room for tutoring; it’s just that he or she was finally made aware that there was something going on other than apathy that was holding her down. And that is the point I’ll make here, too: you  have to do more than just show up. You have to make that connection with those people charged with educating you. If you don’t, it is not just your teachers who won’t know of what you are capable – you won’t know it, either.

READY TO GET STARTED? Contact me at cynthia@coxtutoring.com, call or text me at 281-346-9372, or use my contact page. 

I remember several years ago, when a high school where I worked was planning to implement a school-wide email system so that every student enrolled had an account. The program was going to be expensive, and a committee was formed to sift through the dynamics and logistics of the plan. A friend of mine on the committee insisted repeatedly that the system would not be used, because ‘kids do not use email.’ I admit that even I discounted her objections, and of course the plan moved forward. One year later, we were all admitting that my friend had been right. The students were trained in the first weeks of school how to log into and navigate the system, and for most of them, that was the last time they used it.

However, as a teacher in a special program where I worked closely with a small group of students, I was in a position to require them to check school email and use it regularly, as well as monitor that they were doing it. They had to log in to their email account at least once a week, and every time one of them had concerns to discuss with a teacher, I encouraged them to use school email to do so. We always had to consider whether email or in-person communication was the proper approach, but it was important students began to consider electronic communication as an option; at least at the time of this writing, email is still the primary mode of communication these kids will have with their universities when they get to college; and unless things change dramatically in the next 5 years (which may happen) email will be the primary mode of communication they will have with their co-workers and employers too. So in my opinion, it was always a benefit to start getting comfortable with it now – not to mention it was important for the students to use a system the school had spent so much money on to provide!

At first, I was surprised to find students so hesitant to send emails to teachers. Their primary concerns were spelling and grammar errors, but in my experience these were not the biggest stumbling blocks that could derail an electronic communication. Establishing the proper tone was far more important than spelling everything correctly; teachers generally aren’t grading the emails they receive, but they are interpreting them and responding to them on a personal level, so learning how to create and maintain a polite and respectful tone was my priority. It was also the most difficult aspect of email communication for students to grasp (and let’s face it, we’ve all had an email be misinterpreted from time to time, or misinterpreted something we’ve received, so it’s not just a kid thing).

Let me give you an example of a typical student email I might receive – you might not believe this is an accurate representation of a typical email, but trust me on this one:

hi mrs. cox I was checking my grades online and I still have a zero for that late homework I turned in that you said you would grade. can you get that grade changed please thank you

Hm. How did this email go wrong? Let’s count the ways:

1. Number one is so obvious you probably missed it, but it happens regularly: there’s no name on the email. IF the student used their school email address to send it, a teacher can usually figure out who it is from, but do you really want your teachers to have to decipher who you are when you’re trying to get them to change a grade in the gradebook for you? No, you do not. So always be sure to sign your name, and as a safeguard, ALWAYS use your school email and never a private one, since it is most likely to identify you by name clearly. owns3dogs@gmail.com is likely to go into a spam folder anyway, so that’s another good reason to stick with school email for school business.
2. While we’re on the subject of proper structure, don’t stop with just including your name as a formal signature – include a formal salutation, separate it from the body of the email, and separate the closing and signature from the body as well. True, this is an email and not an old-school written letter, but it still makes the email easier to read, makes your name stand out at the bottom, and communicates respect for the teacher by addressing them in the salutation. Besides, sending an email to the wrong teacher has been known to happen, and if you’ve put a name at the opening of it you will eliminate that particular confusion. And it’s not just students who skip this step by the way; parents often fail to do this too – I’ve read many an email requesting my assistance for a student problem and had no idea which student was struggling with the issue (NOTE: if a back-and-forth conversation is generated, it isn’t necessary to use the salutation and signature every time, but it doesn’t hurt, either. Besides, if an initial email turns into a chain of responses from both sides, it’s probably best to turn the conversation into a face-to-face one. Too much back-and-forth is a warning sign that email communication may not be working).
3. Now, let’s talk about tone. I admit that if I received this email at the end of the working day, it might irk me a little. OK I’ll be honest, I know it would irk me a little. The student is just stating the facts here, sure, but it sounds accusatory. And that is not an impression you want to make on your teachers (or your co-workers, I might add). So I always shared the following handy-dandy little trick with my students: whatever the situation is, pretend it is all your fault. I know it isn’t all your fault, but pretend like it is anyway, and write the email from that perspective. You are the one who has messed up, and you’re really just writing to let them know how badly you messed up, and apologize for causing them problems. You don’t have to use those words, just use that tone, and I promise you your email will sound professional, respectful, and sincere. And you will have the best chance possible of not offending your teacher, and getting him or her to do what it is you want them to do. This is the way I approached every single email I had to send to teachers asking them to do things I knew they didn’t want to do (and as a counselor I had to send a LOT of those!) and while it wasn’t foolproof, it almost always did the trick. Here’s an example, based on the same situation as the email above:

Hello Mrs. Cox,

I apologize for taking your time, but I thought I’d turned in that late homework to you last week, and in looking over my grades online I see that I still have a zero. Did I actually turn that homework in, or is it still missing? I really meant to turn it in to you, but I’ve been falling a little behind lately and I’m concerned I messed this up without meaning to. Thank you for time about this matter and again, I apologize for the inconvenience.

Regards,

Your Student

Notice that nowhere in the email above does the student even ask the teacher to change the grade, but after reading it he or she is most likely going to take the time to do just that. The truth is, your late homework assignment probably HAD slipped the teacher’s mind, and your gentle nudge reminded her about it in a way that motivated her to fix the problem, rather than irritating and reminding her what a pain it is to have to grade late work at all, and trigger her passive-aggressive tendencies so that she waits another week to get it graded.*

Obviously this email has also been edited for proper grammar and punctuation, which is always a good idea, but again – do not get so obsessed with the possibility of such errors that you give up before even trying, and end up with a zero you shouldn’t have. Although it might be a radical thing for an English teacher to say, I maintain that proper tone is more important in an email than proper spelling and grammar – unless either or both of those components are so poor the message cannot be interpreted.

*If you’re still thinking you’d rather not use email for your communications with teachers, consider how convenient it will be if, in three weeks’ time, your grade in the gradebook still hasn’t changed, and you have a dated, written record of your initial contact with the teacher about the matter. Teachers are busy people, and even the best of them forgets from time to time to take care of something like this; while you don’t ever want to use a previous email as a ‘gotcha’ against a teacher, again, that mostly comes down to the tone and attitude you use to handle the situation. The bottom line is, if a teacher ever tells you too much time has passed from the initial turn-in date for that homework assignment for you to get credit, it sure is nice to be able to show him or her that you did turn in the late assignment, and checked in with the teacher about it, in a timely fashion. I cannot tell you how many times communicating via email has helped my students in situations very similar to this one – and every time, the student has agreed that using email was what made the difference. 

READY TO GET STARTED? Contact me at cynthia@coxtutoring.com, call or text me at 281-346-9372, or use my contact page.