Success Beyond the Test

I ran into another parent telling me their child is having great success in middle school. This one is also in advanced placement classes and getting straight "A's". What worries her mother is that she does her homework on the bus and hardly studies for the tests, as opposed to her older child who also gets straight A's but spends hours studying, sometimes till midnight.

I told her what I hope is happening is that last year her daughter learned how to process information by making sense of it. As opposed to trying to "stuff" unfamiliar information in her head via repetitious memorization, she is connecting the unfamiliar things her teachers are presenting in class by attaching them to the familiar things she does know.

"I don't know" was not allowed last year because it meant she wasn't thinking. She always knew something. Each one of her billion neurons had up to 10,000 possible connections.

Instead of trying to cover everything, we tried to uncover as many of those connections as we could.

Instead of teaching to the test, we taught to her brain.

Now she works with her brain instead of against it, and what used to take hours now takes minutes.

And she is more powerful and happier than ever.

They say it's too difficult to teach the right way for every student. Here's another student saying it's not.

They say the risk is too great deviating from the standard curriculum and that teaching to the individual is impossible. The risk IS great, and many times IT DOES seem impossible.

......And yet here's another student, another life-long learner capable of making an impact in their world, saying they were worth it.


*Sofia wasn't doing well in reading at the beginning of the year. Once she learned how to make sense of what she was reading, she became a very active reader (as I think you can see :-)

She now has the highest level of reading points possible for a first grader, is passing 3rd grade tests, and I find her reading my 5th graders' science books........proving once again that no matter who we are, when we learn to use our brains to make sense of what we're trying to learn, we learn to do seemingly impossible things.....and that real success lies in educating ourselves how to develop this source of inner strength