My son was 7 at the time and my husband and I had some concerns about his ability to focus his attention.  We would ask him the same question over and over again and his reply would be “What?”.  We knew it wasn’t a hearing issue since he had been tested several times.  Our thoughts began to turn to ADD.  Was it possible that he could not concentrate on our questions because he was already two or three thoughts ahead?  I approached Jan Van Blarcum of Creative Tutors and asked her if she had any suggestions.  Immediately she recommended Laurie Gaines who is a Creative Tutors Franchise owner.  Laurie spent over 2 hours with our son and shared with me that the issue had nothing to do with ADD.  Our son was very, very bright however he was challenged in the area of auditory learning.

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McGraw-Hill School Education Group, the leading provider of print and digital educational materials for students in grades PreK-12, has developed a new program for Texas students that helps build reading comprehension and enables them to become more active readers.  Texas Treasures utilizes a highlighting feature which alerts students to pause, reread, and interact with the text.  The hope that is in this interaction with the textbook, students will become more successful critical thinkers and will truly learn to analyze what they are reading.  Highlighting has proven a helpful strategy in that when something of true significance and importance comes along in the text, the student will be signaled.  This encourages students to not only recognize the important term or idea but also to ask themselves if they understand it.  The idea is that with this strategy, key concepts will not be missed.  As a former high school teacher, I think this strategy could be very helpful because I often noticed students reading right past the most important information without truly acknowledging it.  It is important that students learn how to pull the most valuable information from the text so that they not only understand the material but also that they know what to study and be able to recall.  If they do not learn this by the time they go to college, they will be in real trouble.

This article is about the subject of Algebra and the challenges it poses for many Texas freshmen.  One particular teacher's class from Holmes High School in San Antonio was focused on in this article, but things said here probably ring true for freshmen all over the country.  Along with the struggles of simply understanding Algebra, the article also talks about what a crazy time of life the ninth grade is for teenagers who are experiencing some major changes.   According to this, many educators refer to ninth grade as "the critical year."  As a former ninth grade teacher, I can't help but agree.  I saw so much development in my students between their ninth and tenth grade years.  If they could just get through that crazy freshman year, they seemed to really grow up and be okay.  The ones that fail too many classes their freshman year though and do not move on  face serious challenges.  Will they be able to stay focused long enough to get through that year of school so that they can progress or will they get stuck there and eventually give up?  What this article says is that Algebra may be one of the classes prompting many students to do just that--give up.  I saw it many times.  When a student tries and still cannot succeed, they feel defeated and often eventually just decide the class isn't worth their time.  A child at this level often cannot seem to see past their daily lives down the road to the future which means they often miss out on the importance of their education.  According to this article, abstract thinking might not even be developed at this stage.  That means Algebra would be awfully tough.

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