Read Online Joe Bruzzese by Parents' Guide to the Middle School Years - Free Book Online

Unless the grades border on failure, give your child a chance to brainstorm a list of ideas for academic improvement. If you jump in too soon with a barrage of helpful hints (or a warning of severe consequences), you strip your child of all responsibility for personal improvement. An informal sit-down with him is often all it takes to generate a list of new strategies. Lectures and severe consequences result in short-term changes at best. You have a better chance of seeing long-term positive change if, with your support, your child makes a firm commitment to act on his own ideas for improvement.
    Situation: Your child’s course schedule has been challenging from the beginning of the quarter. Nightly assignments and test preparation keep her studying late into the evening hours. The extraeffort at home hasn’t translated into improvement at school. Over the past three weeks, her test grades and assignment results have slipped significantly. When you’ve tried to offer her support, she’s responded with irritation, assuring you “Everything is fine” and “Just let me deal with it.”
    Suggested action: Kids tend to achieve at a fairly consistent level over time. A rapid descent in academic achievement is a signal that something is amiss. A child’s reluctance to discuss the issue is further cause for alarm. In this case, your first step should be to contact the school. Try sending a brief email or leaving a voicemail, expressing concern for your child’s recent academic decline and asking for suggestions about how you can offer additional support. If a teacher’s response indicates an equal level of concern, then suggest a short (twenty minute) meeting during after-school hours in which both you and your child can talk with the teacher. Although most adolescents balk at the idea of a three-way meeting, their attendance is absolutely essential if any long-term changes are to be achieved.
    Situation: Tension at home has reached an all-time high. With the exception of an occasional hello and goodbye, your child now communicates in short grunts. Although the recent report card shows solid marks, your usually jovial child seems caught somewhere between frustration and sadness. Repeated invitations to engage in family activities are met with little enthusiasm.
    Suggested action: A few poor academic outings or a recent blowup between friends coupled with the emotional changes brought on by puberty is the classic recipe for adolescent angst. When asked, most adolescents can’t articulate a single reason for their emotional swings. Don’t hesitate to talk with adults who affect your child’s life. Connect with teachers, coaches, and adult mentors; they can be an invaluable source of information and support. Often the other adults in your child’s life have observed some ofthe same behaviors but dismissed them as isolated incidents. By gathering a variety of perspectives from the important adults in your child’s life, you can gain a more complete picture of what may have led to your child’s current emotional state. In a typical weekday he will spend more time with adults outside the home than with his parents, so it’s in your best interest to keep in contact with this group of influential adults.
    A well-established relationship with your child’s teachers prepares both of you for the first of many formal achievement benchmarks: progress reports. The uncertainty associated with progress reports can be anxiety-producing, even for the high-achieving child. The self-imposed pressure to excel often keeps high achievers in a perpetual state of stress as they wait for confirmation of their progress.
Avoiding progress report shock
    About four weeks after school starts, your child’s first progress report will arrive in the mail. Of course, you hope the report will be cause for celebration. Inevitably, though, some students (and parents) suffer from progress report