ADD Student

Posts Tagged ‘learning’

Have you ever really thought about why teachers assign homework? I know kids think of it as so much busy work, designed to make their lives more difficult, but we know that’s not true.

The purpose of homework is twofold: to review the day’s lessons and increase understanding and to prepare for the following days lesson.

A reading assignment, for instance, is designed to sort of put down that first layer of understanding on what may be a new topic. Doing the reading makes you more prepared for the following day’s class.

The following night, the assignment might be to answer some questions at the end of the chapter or to do a worksheet. At this point, the homework serves to push that new knowledge deeper into the brain and to measure how well the student understands the material.

As parents of kids with ADHD, we know that homework can be a nightmare for everyone involved. Sometimes assignments that should take one hour take three, and we find that we don’t have enough time in the evening to get it all done.

To me, it makes no sense to wage this battle night after night, working until everyone is frustrated and exhausted. How much good is being done here?

As parents we have the power to say “enough”.

Teachers do not rule our lives. They are on our side. In fact, there are no sides here. Everyone is working towards the same goal: to educate our children.

What I’m saying is this: remember the purpose of homework – to increase and measure understanding.

If your child can skim through a chapter, stopping to study pictures and charts, to read headings and definitions, and if they can then reasonably answer questions about the chapter’s content, then they have accomplished what was intended – whether or not they actually read the chapter.

If, after 15 math problems, it is clear that your child understands the material, why make them spend the extra time to complete 15 more when they could be working on something else?

And the reverse is true: if, after trying for 30 or 40 minutes, your child is still not grasping how to do the math, another two hours spent on it is not likely to bring success, either. Stop. Take a break. Come back to it for a few minutes to see if it has helped. If not, a talk with the teacher and perhaps hiring a tutor are in order.

Remember: homework is ultimately about grades, but it is first and foremost about understanding and comprehension.

Keeping those ideas in mind may help to eliminate the homework wars around your house.

I have an article whose deadline is today, March 1, 2010. It’s about half finished. Lucky for me, the person I have to submit it to understands ADHD very well, so when I finally get it in around midnight, she most likely will be OK with that.

Learning to write a paper, whether for work or a school assignment, is a skill that all of us should possess.

When you have ADHD, though, writing an acceptable paper can be a big challenge.

Well written papers are organized in a logical manner with a clear beginning, middle, and end. The sentences are grammatically correct with proper punctuation and spelling. They start with a point and they stick with the same point throughout the paper.

People with ADHD (and some without ADHD) can be overwhelmed by the sheer rules and organization required to put a paper together. My daughter Sarah, who is an excellent writer, can write a wonderful paper as long as no one asks her to outline it first.

My son, Andy, used to struggle with writing papers, but he’s a college student now and has no problems at all. Here’s how I helped him:

When he was younger, he would dictate his paper and I would type. I did my best to punctuate it as he was speaking it, so if he ran on talking for some time, I added no periods.

Once he was done, I would print it out and he would proof it. We would make the changes he wanted, and then I would proof it.

I tried to make my suggestions in a manner that helped him learn. For instance, if he jumped from point A to point C or D, I would ask him about it. Maybe his readers would not see how he got there. Then he could make more refinements to the paper.

Another thing that I did was to show him the basics of a paper:

The beginning is where you introduce your topic and what you’re going to say about it.
For each point that you are going to make about your topic, you need at least one paragraph to talk about that point.
In the conclusion, or end, you summarize all that you’ve said.

Having a simple template helped immensely.

Once he got the hang of those things, we worked on learning to use certain words to transition from one paragraph or idea to another.

Of course, the best way to learn to write a better paper is to practice as much as possible. In addition to all that I taught Andy, he also got the benefit of all of his teachers and all of the papers they assigned over the years.

Learning to write a decent paper can be done; sometimes you just need a little help.

We have all of these wonderful technological advances at our disposal these days; why not put them to work at helping you earn better grades?

Here are a few random ideas, in no particular order:

Teachers – get your Twitter on. Really. How cool would it be if each of your teachers had a Twitter account and used it once a day to tweet the day’s assignment? 60 seconds of extra work on their part equals way less headaches on parents and students. Forget the assignment? No biggie; check your instructor’s recent tweets. Teachers – want extra credit? Spend an hour or even 30 minutes on Twitter in the evening to field any questions about the class or home work.

Printers and scanners and copiers, oh my. These days you can buy a printer than will also scan and copy papers. You can also buy stand alone scanners. Both products are very affordable. And what can you do with them?

Oh, what about copying or scanning each class syllabus the first day of school so it doesn’t get lost? Or making a copy of the homework before it gets lost on the way to school? Or copying/scanning the paper that has all of the requirements for the long term assignment due in 12 weeks? The possibilities are endless.

Can you say jump drive? How about saving a copy of each homework assignment – especially that 15 page term paper – on a jump drive? Clip it to your backpack and if the hard copy gets lost, there’s another just waiting to be printed out.

Email. What about emailing a copy of that term paper to the instructor or to yourself using an internet based email so that you can retrieve it anywhere.

Save it online. Google documents, Yahoo and other internet based services will let you save copies of your documents to their server. Again, that makes your papers accessible anywhere there is internet.

Smart phones, iPods, etc. Lots of handheld devices like smart phones, iPods, and other electronic devices do way more than most people realize. You can store documents on some, access internet on almost all, set appointments, reminders, alarms and more. Start making the most of that little device today.

I’m sure there are many other ways that you can put technology to use for you. What can you come up with?