“Do you agree there is too much homework?” parents (and sometimes teachers) often ask me. My short answer? “Usually.” So, if you’re one of those who question the amount of homework students get, you’ll be happy to see the 3 biggest reasons to reduce it. When my own daughters were going through high school (two [...]
Videos & Articles
With all the focus on grades and scores, let’s take that to the nth degree. IF your child suddenly does a 180 and gets an A+ in every class between now and the end of college AND because he got perfect SAT scores, he went to Harvard, now what? “The world is his oyster,” you [...]
Amy Chua’s “Tiger Mother” articles have combusted into a raging debate about east/west strategies. So when I met a lovely young woman, Jennifer, from Shanghai, I was particularly interested in her story. Jennifer told me, “Two of us were picked from my grammar school to go to this elite middle school. But when we got [...]
This is the first episode in a new video series: how to create positive change and resilience in students. In this clip: 18-year-old Anna doesn’t like school, science or textbooks. She wants to motivate herself to finish high school. One step you can take with someone who doesn’t like school is to identify ways s/he [...]
My mother is American French-Irish and most definitely not a Chinese Tiger Mother, as Amy Chua describes herself. My mother played the piano beautifully (though not as well as Chua’s kids) for fun and relaxation every spare minute she could find in a day. Even though this was her first love, my mother did not [...]
Note: This is the third article in The Myths of Education™ series. Some babies walk at 10 months and others don’t walk until 17 months. Right from the start, we have a 70% performance gap, yet we accept this as normal so we don’t insist on rating babies’ walking skills. We understand that by the [...]
Note: This is the second article in The Myths of Education™ series. Have you ever wondered why we urge teens to be the best possible student? Many parents, leaders, and educators say it’s because they believe this will get him into the “best” colleges and — the big assumption — that this will lead to [...]
A “significant majority” of the 5000 self-made British millionaires struggled in school, says a BBC study. Think about that for a moment. One of the myths we tell about education is that kids who struggle in school are not smart, have learning disabilities, or are just plain lazy. Yet, I imagine these terms don’t normally [...]
The other day, 20-year-old Andy said to me, “I just don’t know what I want to do with my life, and I worry that I’m not going to get a good job when I graduate.” In the past year, I have heard this concern so many times from students that I decided to write… An [...]
If a young adult you know is in the bottom 80% of the class, you may have been told that she is “an underachiever” (a polite way of saying lazy or dumb). Ask yourself, “Underachiever compared to what?” Compared to the narrowly-defined, standardized measures of school performance? Or compared to the abilities that will help [...]
