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The dip: How to deal with the falling grades pattern

“The dip” is something that notoriously happens right around the 6th week of the semester (typically, this means there are 12 more weeks to go). Things pile up, a few missing assignments, a few bad scores, and suddenly, everything feels overwhelming. The dip is very predictable. It actually starts at weeks 2-3, although it’s very hard to detect at this point. Everything seems fine, but details are beginning to be missed here and there. Between weeks 4-6, it really hits hard. Almost out of thin air, bad grades appear, the student is behind on everything, stress flares up, it’s hard to get motivated. Red flags are huge, it’s a crossroads. If students dive in and address problems proactively, they can turn it around. If they avoid, it’s going to be a long rest of the semester, swimming upstream, struggling to dig out of the hole. Stop dipping, turn it around, now is the time! This video sheds some light on the issue.

How post-its can help you get on top of school

Here’s a new video all about how students can use stickies or post-its to get organized. This is great for you if:
  • you aren’t great with details
  • you forget what you have for homework
  • you procrastinate
  • you forget to turn homework in
  • you don’t like to study or don’t really know how
  • you aren’t naturally organized
Trust me, it’ll help. Enjoy!  

One solid tip for organizing papers & homework

Here’s a video that just might have some great insights for you. It’s about one of my favorite systems I help students develop. I call it “the queue.” It’s a simple, powerful method of tracking everything important, homework or otherwise, in one centralized place. As one of my students said, “it feels harder in my head when my important papers are all spread out in different folders.”  Most of my students are able to apply this easily and consistently, it works!

How to set it up:

1. First, set up your entire organizational system. This may include 3-ring binders (typically the worst system for right brained learners, but some work with it just fine), an accordion folder or a simple folder system (my favorite approach.) Color code and label everything, etc.. 2. Get a different looking folder. Perhaps it’s red, a great ALERT color. Perhaps it has a distinctive design. Either way, make it easy to visually identify. 3. Label the folder. Write QUEUE in huge letters across the front. Put your name on the front and back. 4. Put post-it “flags” inside the folder so they are ready to go.

How to use it:

1. The queue is for all papers that are current, or “active.” It can include: —Homework that needs to be done —Finished homework that needs to be turned in —Study guides —ANything that needs to be signed, etc.. —Anything important, active and current 2. Flag it with a labeled post-it. ex- “MATH TURN IN!” 3. Simple. Do it or turn it in. 4. When you get home every day, the first thing you should do is, at least, open your planner and open the queue. It would be best if you planned the night as well.

When done:

1. Throw away returned papers if you don’t need them. 2. Archive papers that are sentimental or that you might need. 3. If you still need it for another reason, throw it in your class folder.

Note:

As with ANY system someone suggests, tailor it to your needs. If it doesn’t feel right, don’t do it! If you want to tweak it, by all means do so. The point is that students take ownership in developing customized systems that work for their brain, NOT that they use a “tested” cookie cutter solution (especially for outside-the-box learners).

Advocacy letter example

Hey all. Here’s a real advocacy letter that was sent by one of my families this year. Feel free to use the ideas to craft your own. I have a different article about email advocacy strategies here if you want more info.  Here’s the example (names have been changed):
  Aug 15, 2014 Dear Mrs. Jones, Hi! First of all, we are excited about the 5th grade and look forward to a successful school year. I have heard that you are an excellent teacher and that Alec is in good hands. We have been working with an education coach and doing a lot of work to help make Alec’s school experience as effective as possible. As I mentioned to you this past Tuesday Alec’s Education Coach, Seth, will be meeting with you, Ms. Smith, Ms. Miller and us this coming Friday, August 22 at 3:30. I will also have a 504 plan set up with Mw. Smith for our son prior to, or have it done at our meeting. Below, I have listed some tools and strategies that you can implement which will benefit everyone and help Alec have a smoother more focused class day: • Transitioning: give a 5 minute warning that topic or lesson will be changing, ex: “Alec, lunch in 5, get ready!” • Remind Alec to keep working and to focus on task. A note card or sticky with the task written will help, ex: “Finish paragraph :)” • Give advanced warning that he will be called on shortly, “Alec, I’m going to call on you today and ask for your thoughts, sound good?” • When asked a question allow 5 to 10 seconds to articulate answer to accommodate his processing speed. • Alec is very visual, ask visual questions, “what did you see, or what about the story did you see?” • Let him use Post-it notes: –To write down questions –To put on test and school work that needs to be turned in (“flag it”) –To draw picture to express wants/needs • Have Alec look at you when you are speaking to him, if possible have him repeat task to check for clarity • Use short checklists whenever possible • Have Alec clean out his desk once a week to keep it organized Contact me via planner, email or phone if Alec fails to keep up with reading/ quizzes or other assignments. Don’t hesitate to call or email me with any thoughts. Thanks! Name Phone number Email
I like this letter because it’s positive, not accusatory in any way, simple, concise, and it has concrete ideas for helping Alec. Feel free to share ideas that work for you in the comments below.

Real stories

I received this email last week and it articulated something I’ve heard countless times and in countless ways. Here’s a quote from it:
“My ex was a total asshole to my Aspie and it’s infuriating that he can’t understand his own son, nor does he want to. There’s “that” as part of this journey… fighting against educators, the “public” when we go places, and our own freaking spouses and families… Grrrrrrrr. My child’s soul got hurt. Ok, on a positive note, my son called me after it happened and they’ll be home today and we’ll talk it through. And that is a gift I can give him. :)”
Wow, those last 5 words of the first paragraph are especially heavy to me. Yeah, this isn’t your typical post. It’s real, it’s about messy stuff, it’s ugly. We deal with REAL issues and problems that affect our kids deeply. It’s also about solutions. A big gift in the above situation: She can hold a safe space for her son… HE (the son) called HER (the mom). THAT’S HUGE. I definitely can’t pretend to be positive all the time. A lot of what’s going on for our kids sucks. Parents call me in crisis, I hear the stories. There is real dysfunction; in family systems, school systems, community systems, employment systems. It’s real, the consequences are real and we can’t hide from it and expect someone else to step up and fix it. We all need to step up as much as we can. The reason I do what I do is because it’s important to me on a gut level. It pains me to know how children suffer needlessly and I want to see it change, so I do what I can. It’s only through real dialogue that we can come to meaningful solutions. Of course there are change makers, proactive people, people doing great things, healers. Of course there are countless people who have courageously stood up to injustice and made a difference. And I’m certain that if you are still reading this, you’re part of the solutions. Anyhow, I certainly don’t have all the answers. I have ideas, but that’s about it. For example, I think fear is the main culprit, that it is a corrosive force that underlies all dysfunction. I think that it’s scary for us adults to feel our feelings, and this has tremendous consequences. I think that we are pretty checked out as a society, that we have opportunities to hide and avoid healthy vulnerability at every turn. I think that prevents us from having deep connections which make life full and rich and meaningful. I know that I’ve done so much work on myself over the years that I don’t know what I’d do without it. You probably have done a bunch of  your own deep inner-work as well. We ALL have baggage and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Yet our culture tells us it’s not ok to talk about. Keep your mouth shut. Don’t hurt anyone’s feelings. Forget about it and it will go away. There’s this saying,
“Don’t compare your insides to other’s outsides.”
We may look at people on the outside, and everything looks great. We can compare too much sometimes. Again, we ALL have stuff. I have so many parents and kids open up to me as they get to know me. I hear so many stories of suffering… and stories of triumph. But time after time my heart hurts because so much of the pain is unnecessary. It’s 2014, we have tools to work with fear, emotion, clarity, yet our approach to education is archaic and ruled by quantitive data. We misappropriate so much value on this data, these scores, that we miss that point. The point is quality of life, and our metrics simply don’t cut it. We often do a horrible job of addressing emotional needs, social needs, physical well-being, inspiration, creativity, curiosity. 
“Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” -William Bruce Cameron 
What counts for YOUR children? What do you really want for them?  Shame and silence hold us back. Our stories need to be told so we can support each other and help our kids have the lives and opportunities they deserve. Some tragic stories make the news-these are so important. But we hear about these when it’s too late. We need to share our stories now, support each other now, live in the solution now. So tell me dear reader, what’s real for you? What’s your story? What do you need in order to help yourself and your children live as fully as they deserve to? In service, Seth ps-yes, the person quoted above gave her permission for me to use her words. If you’d like to share your story, I will hold that space for you any way you want. You can write directly to me privately, post a comment at the bottom to share with the community, ask me to share your story anonymously, etc.. 

Planner haters

I hear comments like this regularly:
I hate planners. I don’t need a planner. I just don’t like to use a planner.
I know, I know. You really don’t want to use a planner. But you do need to figure out some way to manage the details. Seriously, I’ll break it down and help make it simple and straight forward. I know because I do this with students all the time and it works. The nuances I will describe will make a BIG difference. Look, students who aren’t naturally organized tend to get overwhelmed with details, and planners are all about details. Therefore it’s important to have a simple and clean system. Unfortunately, the systems we are often taught are too complicated. Anyhow, forgive me because this is a long video, and trust me, it’s boring. In fact, I almost put myself to sleep. Just kidding, but it is in-depth and should prove extremely valuable. Plan on pressing pause a lot as you get your planner “front-loaded” for the school year. Trust me, this upfront effort will end up saving you a lot of time and frustration throughout the year. Check out the video. Here are some of the most important takeaways:
  1. Print yearly planners, post them for reference, tape one in your planner. Tape your schedule in there too while you’re at it.
  2. Use a monthly planner with lines in the boxes.
  3. Get your entire schedule into the planner now, for the entire year. This is called “front-loading.” It saves a lot of time and hassle in the long run. Hi-lite every single day off. Enter birthdays, appointments, and activities that you know about, now.
  4. Thin out the planner. Get rid of every single page you don’t need. Keep it simple.
  5. Get a desk calendar to put on the wall. Enter only bigger events into it – you don’t need as many details on this one.
  6. Use shorthand in order to fit your info into the smaller boxes. Write assignments on the day they are due. Put the time first when applicable.
  7. Learn to “backwards plan.”
  8. Dog-ear to simplify finding the right page.
  9. Self-advocate. If they expect you to “use the same planner everyone else uses,” tell them you’ve tailored a system to your brain and that you need to do what works for you.
  10. The one thing I forgot to mention in the vid, sharpie your name on the front AND back so it comes back to you if it gets lost.
  11. Get off to a strong start with front-loading your planner thoroughly. Try not to get into the swimming upstream pattern. It’s extremely difficult to dig yourself out. So take an hour and do this! You got this, you rock, good luck!
💚 Give: Love my work and want to donate? 🎦 YouTube: Visit my official YouTube channel here. Please subscribe, like & comment to support my work. 👉 Share: To support me, please *CLICK* at the bottom to share on FB or Pinterest. ✏️ EF101: Here’s my jumpstart course for parents and teachers. 🙏 Thanks! — Seth

Video transcript:

Hey, this is Seth with SethPerler.com. Did you hear about the buffalo who sent his boy to college? When his son left he said, “bison.” Haha, pretty good, huh? Cheesy, I know. How’s it going? So I’m here today talk to you about planners for people who hate them. If you hate planners, you’re in the right place. There are lots of websites and videos all over YouTube about planners that talk about how to use them, but they’re all for highly organized people by highly organized people. And the thing is that these left-brain, linear sequential structured, naturally organized people love these things. They like to feel organized because it gives them a good sense of control. They feel good when they have these systems, and they’re able to take these systems and run with them. They’re able to do tremendous amounts of detail with all this stuff. Guess what? If you’re watching these videos, you’re probably not that person. This is for students who hate planners. You are not into it. It’s not that you don’t like planners, it’s that you don’t like feeling like you have to manage minute details that don’t matter to you. That’s really what it comes down to. A lot of times the way that we’re taught to use these things is not congruent with what we need. So let me set out the way for you to do this. By the way, even if you hate planners, you do have to learn to use them because like anything you want to do in life, this helps. And I want you, and everybody wants you, to be able to live the life you want to live. In order to do anything you want to in life, you have to do things you don’t want to do, including planning. You just have to have some way of being able to manage tasks and time. Again, you have to be able to manage tasks and time. We have to be able to chunk it down into small enough items that don’t feel overwhelming. Me, you, right-brain people, disorganized people, people who are creative outside the box thinkers: we’re not good with perceiving time or time management. The details can be very overwhelming. So I’m going to show you what I do with my students. I’m telling you this because it works, and I’m going to tell you in the simplest way possible. It’s going to be a bit of a long video, but get ready to press pause because if you’re looking for how to use a planner in a way that works for you, I’m going to explain some details to you that are really going to help. First of all, what you want to do is print out your yearly calendar. This is the calendar for the local school district. You’ll want to print one to four of them. You want one for the refrigerator, one for the bedroom, one for the office, and one to tape inside your planner. You’re literally going to tape it inside there. We’re going to cut off the edges like this, cut off all the edges, trim it down so it will fit in the planner, and then tape it in there. Middle school, high school, college, whatever complex schedules, tape it into the inside of your planner so that it’s always there. This is called front-loading. Everything that you need for the entire school year, get it done now so you never have to think about it again. You want to front-load your planner and get it all done. Plop all the important dates in there. The next thing is right-brained people don’t like a lot of stuff. You may have a lot of stuff, but “stuff” is overwhelming. So what you want to do is get rid of every single page from your planner that you don’t need. In this case, I literally took out 11 pages from the planner making it now very thin and very manageable. As far as this calendar is concerned, you want to take all of the pages off up until the date where you’re at. Right now is August in 2014, so we want to get all the rest of the pages gone. Bye-bye, it’s all gone. If you want to get a monthly planner, this is a great example. The only thing I don’t like about this planner is the metal because it can get crushed in the backpack and make it annoyingly difficult to open. Left-brain, linearly sequential structure, organized people don’t usually have that problem. We do. If it gets crushed in your backpack, you’re a very right-brain person and that may be a bit of a difficulty to you. If you can find one that stapled rather than a spiral that might be better. So all I have here is July through the end of the year, I’m going to get rid of July, I don’t need it anymore. Now, I have August through December. Open up to August. Here we go. This is monthly again. This is not weekly. Okay, you want to use a monthly calendar preferably with lines. The only problem is that you have to learn shorthand. So I’ll discuss shorthand in just a moment. Now we basically have about six pages in this planner. You can also get an academic calendar that is like this. Why don’t you want to use a weekly one? Well, here’s an example of a weekly one. By the way, I often will cut the planner and dog ear it right from the planner itself. I’ll just cut it with this scissor so that you can open up right to the page that you need. This one happens to be monthly and weekly, Anyhow the point is, the reason you don’t want monthly and weekly is it’s too many blocks of time. Look at that, the thing is like a novel. Again, if you’re a left-brain person you’re probably not watching this point, which is great because this is not for them. This is for right-brain, outside the box, divergent thinkers and you don’t want to be having a novel for your planner, you want the simple six-page one I was showing you before. There are only 9-10 months in a school year, basically half of August through May. There are 36 weeks plus the 10 months of the school year here. So that’s 46 pages to manage, plus these planners give you a lot of clutter in the back. Although it might be cool to have the periodic table and geometry stuff I guarantee you, if you’re watching this video, you are not the type of person who reads this stuff. You don’t read the school rules at the beginning of the book. Rip it out or just don’t use these ones. The other thing is that these are visually cluttered. The planners that schools will give you are usually visually cluttered. You may have to advocate for yourself and tell the school, “I’m not using this,” and you may run into some problems with them. They might say, “you have to use this one because this is the one that we use because it’s the way we do it.” Advocate yourself and tell them you’re working with the coach and say the coach said, “don’t do that.” It’s a lot of colors that the visually distracting and have famous quotes that frankly are also visually distracting. I do not recommend these for the students that I work with. All you need is simple, black and white, clean, easy to see, a planner that serves the purpose of planning. That all you want.  Alright, in your planner you’re going to want to take your year calendar, and you are going to want to highlight every single day off for the entire school year. What that means is that your planner is going to look like this. You’re going to go through the calendar with a fine-tooth comb and highlight every day off. This is November of 2014 and in this school district, they have the 14th off and they have the entire week for Thanksgiving off. This all done and it feels really good for students to be able to see this. Trust me. I do this all the time as soon as we go through the entire year, get the whole planner done. It feels really good to know that you start saying “wow, that’s a lot of days off,” and you can really look forward to these days off. Also in terms of front-loading, we’ll write in the days from the previous month the 31st or 30th of October and so on in a different color so that visually it stands out. And then you can pick when you’re ready to use November or when you’re done with October etcetera. You want to do this for the entire school year. And then the only problem is you don’t have as much space as you do on the weekly planner, they give you tons of lines. So what you’re going to want to do is learn to write shorthand, and here’s an example of the shorthand. I will put a photograph of this on the blog post so you can go ahead and look there for photos of everything. Hopefully, you can see this. So for example, for Math “M: page 65 1 through 21 high,” so it’s very short. “LA: the draft is due.” Science, “SCI lab 14 is due,” “4 p.m. Dentist.” Any time you put something in your planner, you want to put it on a date it’s due, not the date you’re given the assignment. Now, what you can also do is backwards planning. You put, for example, you have a test this day, you write it in on the day that you have a test, and then you backwards plan and write in the days that you intend to study for the test. Now if you’re a right-brain person chances are if you write in that you’re going to study four times, you’re probably not going to study four times. You want to account for that and plan for 5 or 6 times that you’re going to study and just know that you’re not going to study a couple of those times and be okay with it. A lot of times it’s better to over plan. It depends on your personality but consider that. You’re going to put it on the day that it’s due, or that you’re doing the activity, then backwards plan. The other thing is that anything that’s associated with the time, like in this case there’s a dentist appointment at 4, you want to put the time before you write what the item is. That’s because visually the eye is going to see the number, and you want to be aware of the time first because that’s a priority and it’s not flexible. Always put the time first. Finally, you want to color-code your calendar. You don’t need to, but a lot of people you might want to have some kind of coding system because it makes it easier visually. You are probably a very visual person and this makes things easier for you as well. You might start with the weekends or holidays, and you’re going to go ahead highlight all the days off for the entire school year. I’m starting with weekends. There’s all my Saturdays. In this case, the school start on the 21st. So you’re going to highlight all your days, get it all done. And then any time there’s a big event, like here, you can write huge. The cool thing is that you can still write on top of that. So for Halloween, you can put an icon of a pumpkin or something, and you still have room to write on top of it that says, “6 p.m. Soccer“. Highlight all the days and get everything in your calendar that you can. If you have things that are odd about your calendar, for example, if you have a late start day or certain weird times of classes on certain days, or if you have extracurricular activities, get everything on to the calendar that you possibly can for the entire school year. If you know that you have a certain activity that goes every Thursday night from 6 to 8 until November, get it in the calendar now. You want to front-load as much as you can, it’s a lot of work at the beginning but saves you time and frustration for the entire rest of the school year. You really want to get into the habit. One of the worst things that students experience is the “swimming upstream syndrome.” You start to get a little behind, usually, this starts to happen around the second or third week of school, but it doesn’t become evident until about the sixth week of school. So you’re starting to get behind around the third week, and then around the sixth week, suddenly something happens: a report card comes out, a grade gets back to you, you have D and F, and big red flags come up. You do not want to get into that pattern, help yourself out. I do recommend you put these on your wall. These are really cheap go ahead and grab a couple and throw it on the wall in your bedroom or your office, but I don’t recommend using them with thumbtacks because you want to be able to pull it down every once in a while to work with it. If you’re doing a lot of work, like if I was highlighting this, I wouldn’t actually do it on the wall, I pull it down and do it on the table. Having these little nails and a hammer and put it up and then hit it into the wall. It’ll stay there for the entire school year. I think I covered most of what I was going to say if I forgot anything, I’ll go ahead and get it in the show in the show notes on the blog and I want to thank you very much for your support. And I want to wish you an awesome school year. You got this. Of course, you’ll have some ups and downs, but it’s all good. You got this. Please CLICK below to share.

Advocating via email

Please CLICK above to share. Unfortunately, many advocacy efforts have little effect, so it’s important to make every step count as much as possible. In this post I will explain how I help families write advocacy emails at the beginning of the school year. This is mainly for elementary through high school but can be applied to college students as well (see the end of the video, go to min. 9).

How to write the email:

Note: These are just my recommendations. Take what you like and leave the rest.
    1. In your email program, create a “GROUP” of relevant contacts who are involved with helping your student. This may include relevant teachers, counselors, school support staff, admin, and any private therapists you may be working with. Call the group “TEAM JOHNNY” (yes, fill in the appropriate name). You can use this group for the entire year to make sure relevant communications go to all parties, that they are on the same page.
    2. Make the headline in all caps, and write: IMPORTANT: JOHNNY JONES   This increases the likelihood that it will be read carefully and makes it easier for staff to locate visually as they go through their inbox.
    3. Add a photo if possible so they know who your child is. Remember, teachers have a lot of students to get to know.
    4. Start by sharing something you are genuinely appreciative of.
    5. Use bullets or other CRYSTAL CLEAR formatting that is EASY to read.
    6. End with EASY ways to get in touch with you.
    7.  Resend it 1 week later, 1 or 2 weeks after that, and 2 weeks after that (4 times total). If teachers are not supporting your student properly, get in there, and advocate in person asap!

Example email:

(Headline) IMPORTANT: JOHNNY JONES
Aug 9, 2014 Hi Team, Quick and important note. Please read the entire email! My name is ____ and my child is ____. First, I want to thank you for all you do for our kids. I know this is an incredibly busy time of year and I appreciate you taking a minute to soak this in. It will help you help meet my child’s needs. Here are the 3 most important things you need to know about Johnny: 1. PREFERENTIAL SEATING: Johnny needs to sit in a place with minimal auditory distractions while sitting close to where you teach from most often. 2. EXTENDED TIME: Johnny processes information in a unique way. (explain). When appropriate, he needs extended time. Here is how it works best for him… 3. ORGANIZATIONAL SUPPORT: Due to executive function issues such as… Johnny benefits from… Again, I know you are busy so I will follow up with you next week to make sure his needs are met and to see how I can support you.
(You can also add a relevant background or refer to documentation when it’s helpful.)

Here’s the video of me describing it:

Love my work and want to give? Click here! To support me, please CLICK at the bottom to share. Click here to visit my official YouTube Channel & subscribe if you want! Thank you — Seth
Reading the transcript? Great! We’re currently uploading hundreds of transcripts so you can read them asap, but they are NOT all edited yet. This is a big process. If you notice anything wrong and want to help us, feel free to click this Google Form to share it. Thanks so much for pitching in! – Seth

Video transcript:

Hey, this is at the top floor. Com. Hope you’re having a great day. I’m here to talk to you today to the typically about advocacy for students at the beginning of the school year and doing that through email. So my goal here is to give you some ideas. I’m certainly no Pro this or no expert but I do it a lot and I hope we have some good tips for you that you can apply and my goal for you is to really have an understanding of how you can craft letters of the beginning of the year to maximize the potential for teachers meeting the needs of your students and primarily directed at students in elementary school middle school and high school. Although I will try to touch on how I deal with this with college students at the end of the video. So the first thing that I do when I’m crafting these letters is I help with the family said it work with weed create a something called team. So and so so it was team stats. If I was the student we would create a group of emails in Gmail or Yahoo, or whatever. Your email carrier is a group of contacts. You can make a group of contacts and call it to everybody relevance in that team. So you’re going to put any relevant teachers if you’re working with a therapist and he support staff at the school and sometimes you want to add administrators when that’s appropriate to the team. You’re going to send out a letter and you’re going to send it out for time pretty much and you’re going to send it out to the entire team that way everybody’s on the same page. Everybody sees the communication. And it makes it very simple and very clean. So what you’re going to do if you’re going to crap this letter N in the headline of letters going to write importance and increases the likelihood that the people who get the email are going to read it teachers are inundated with tons of email. Okay, so you want your email to stand out in the inbox? Too if the teacher is looking for that email later. It stands out in the inbox is easier to locate because it says the student’s name right in the headline and it’s all bold letters. So those are the two reasons for that. Now what you want to do in terms of crafting the letter itself is you really want to think about the three or four main needs of your student. What are the most important things that you want this team to know about your student if you can attach a photograph definitely attached photograph, especially in middle school and high school because a lot of time the teachers might not even know the names of all the students until October have over a hundred students that they pee sometimes a lot of human being to keep track of know when they have 45 minute classes and they only see them a couple times a week. So the older the kids get the more important it is to throw a photo out there. Yes, I know. I know that your student might feel embarrassed by this or I know that that’s a battle that you may have to work with, but I’m not as concerned about that as I am the most important thing which is that the teachers understand clearly what your students needs are and if you wait until the 5 for the IEP meetings or whatever meeting happen or if you’re passive and you wait until the paperwork is to the teacher and hope that the teacher reads this early and connects the dots with your students as you’re just decrease in the likelihood that they’re going to get their needs met in your increasing the likelihood that you’re going to be dealing with very frustrating stuff in the future. So what you want to do is really use bullet point try to stay away from paragraph. Please listen to me again. These teachers have tons of emails are going through make it very clear simple bullet. These are my students need boom. Boom. Boom. Boom email very appreciative. These teachers are often very overworked very under resource the okay you want to say hey, how’s it going? Thank you so much for what you do and be genuinely appreciative. I know that it’s a busy time of year. So I’m sending you a quick letter here and I want to let you know what my students needs are so that you can better meet them. If you have any questions at all don’t hesitate to contact me and then leave every way that they can’t I contact you can say phone number cell phone whatever you can make them know that they can text you if that’s good for you email and put the information there so that they can reach you easily. Okay? Then go ahead and write your bulletin notes in M email and say hey again. Thanks so much for what you do. Just want to send a quick email. Take care. Now. You want to take this exact same email and you want to send the exact same email out one week later. The first email goes out just before schools start a day or two before school starts if possible. Second email goes out a week later started off a little bit differently though and own it. Just a hey thank you so much for what you do. My student was telling me that you really did this while I really appreciate how you guys are doing. This is really helpful. I’m sending you the exact same email I sent you because I know that you guys are super busy and inundated with tons of tasks and I just want to make it easy for you to know what my kids needs are and then send the next letter. The Beast and the next letter and one to two weeks after that one. You’re going to send the exact same letter again. Hey, thanks so much. This is really working for my student. I’m hearing good feedback about this. Please keep an eye on this. This is really important. And meanwhile, here’s the exact same letter. Please read this over real quick, and then think I’m at the end and finally. One more time a fourth-time two weeks later. You’re going to send it again. Same same story. So students. They’re very overwhelmed and you want to keep the most important need bulleted and right there so that they can look at them. And don’t worry. If a lot of my family are concerned that they’re going to be perceived as overbearing or at helicopter moms or something. Like don’t worry about that don’t care about that. All you care about is your kids needs. I want to say that again. All you care about is that your kids get their needs met. Okay, so don’t feel guilty. Please know that it’s okay to really know that you’re just doing what you need to do. Okay. It is the job of the tools to meet your students need I’ll get to that college stuff in a second. Before I get to that I want to tell you that if you sent in your gut that something is going wrong in school. Do not hesitate to get in there and go to the administrator or the counselor or the teacher or whoever just go in or call and make an appointment whatever you have to do. Okay, and obviously you want to be respectful daytime in the end understanding that they probably are doing the best that they can do with their resources and time. But it does matter your kids still needs to get their needs met. So but if I think a lot of times parents ignore their gut, And it doesn’t lie to you is something feels off some things off. You need to go in there and figure out what it is and I think that people ignore it because it says, it feels like you’re interfering or or overbearing or however field just I’m giving you permission let that go get in their teachers and principals want to help your students. They want to do the best they can do they don’t always know what to do in actually, especially with families that I work with because I see all of these problems coming up in schools with teachers who really are not trained and qualified to serve students in the capacity that they’re expected to. Don’t get me wrong teachers. I love teachers. I was teaching for 12 years. I have believed preciate you but there are teachers that really don’t need to be in the classroom particularly the ones who aren’t trying to grow any how I was going to talk about his college student. For college students. We are not dealing with an IEP or 504 and RTI or any kind of documentation like that you the student? Want to have a letter that communicates to a teacher that is in writing that you can college students a lot and meet your professors and get to know them. Well, okay. When teachers know you they can help you better it is absolutely mandatory. If your college did they could you take responsibility get to know your teacher trust me it helps you but you want a real letter so that they can actually soak it in against you know, this is who I am. I have these needs I want to know that he’s a very legitimate that’s something I’ve dealt with my whole life peers will work tears with doesn’t I know that you’re working very hard but in good conscience, I need to be clear with you and ask for the following accommodation and then tell them what you need whether it’s being able to fit in a certain place in class weather is having written notes beforehand. Whatever it is reach out to them communicate with them. I find that college teachers are often very willing to work with my students in a different way than high school middle school and elementary teachers are so you really need to take Advantage of that is the difference game. And the anyhow, I hope that help. If if you have any question, go ahead send me an email you can make a comment on the end of the blog post if you want, but I try to reply to everybody. So go ahead and ask me anything if anything’s unclear again, just something I do a lot and I care a lot about and I just want to see students get the needs because that is the job of the school. Take care. Be well. When I remind you that you rock you got this. I’ll talk to you later. Bye. Bye.

8 Quick & easy ideas to start school off right

Make no mistake, the patterns that are set in the first 4-6 weeks of school set the tone for the entire school year. If students hit a wall 6 weeks in, and red flags start popping up, chances are they’ll be afflicted with S.U.S.S. for the rest of the year (Swimming Up Stream Syndrome. Not fun). Therefore, it’s critical to hit the ground running and be prepared on day 1.

Here’s how:

(Take what you like and leave the rest) 1. Print 4 copies of the school’s YEARLONG calendar. Tape 1 in the planner, post one in your study space, one in the desk or locker at school and one on the fridge or other convenient reference spot. Refer to it often. 2. Enter ALL relevant info for the entire school year into your planner BEFORE day 1. This includes job hours, extra curriculars, birthdays, etc.. Box out every single day off with a highlighter. (If you are a college student, print ALL syllabi BEFORE day 1 and enter every single relevant detail into your planner. All tests, projects, assignments, etc.. BEFORE day 1.) 3. Print 3 copies of your SCHEDULE. Put one in your planer, post one where you do homework, and 1 in your desk or locker. 4. Clearly label EVERYTHING possible with your name- on a sticker or with a sharpie. 5. Get a MONTHLY planner. Not weekly. Create a simple shorthand coding system and use it. 6. COLOR CODE folders and composition notebooks, 1 color per class. 7. Make a CATCHALL folder to centralize important stuff, homework to do and homework to turn in. 8. Create a SACRED STUDY SPACE. Just as it sounds, this is a space that you have intentionally designed to be the ultimate space to focus and be productive. The more focused your study time is, the more free time you have.  Good luck. And feel free to leave a comment below with any great ideas you might have. It gives all of us ideas we can adapt to our situations!  

WDS & Fizzle

I know, unusual blog title. Here is a video about a conference I go to every year called the World Domination Summit, a podcast I am crazy about called Fizzle, and some thoughts regarding the world our kids are growing up in. Hope you are having a phenomenal summer. Seth