Aim Academy offers both full year and seven week long math courses. You can find them all here.
Kathryn (Bell) Gomes was homeschooled herself and found that she was grossly unprepared for college-level mathematics. She now teaches homeschooled students math online so that they can avoid her mistakes. This fall she is teaching a live section of her SAT Math Prep course. Kathryn is the author of Apologia’s Exploring Creation with Mathematics elementary curriculum.
As a professional counselor, teacher, anhttp://debrabell.com/product/secrets-of-success-getting-things-done-for-teens/d former homeschool parent, I want to give you some information which will help you to navigate the emotional angst that often comes with homeschooling teens.
Teenage Angst and the Brain
As a homeschooling parent, you have been the market leader in the field of parenting – an expert at understanding the personality and learning style of your children. But now at the onset of adolescence, “the times they are a changing.” Teens are a “different animal” and it’s a “whole new ballgame.” From both a psychological and parenting perspective we have many theories about why our kids are suddenly risk takers, judgement-impaired, contrary, and unpredictable. For years we’ve heard that teen behavior is a result of early childhood experiences, peer pressure, hormones, and sometimes bad parenting. But the latest research suggests another cause—structural changes in a teenager’s brain may largely be to blame for the chaos.
Without going into a lot of technical terminology, recent studies have discovered that the brain does the bulk of it’s maturing between the ages of 12 and 20 (and in boys this may even extend into the mid 20’s). The prefrontal cortex, where most of our ability to calm our emotions and make rational decisions occurs is the slowest part of the brain to develop. So, yes, there may be a reason for the irrational behavior you are seeing in your adolescent son or daughter.
Wiring Through Homeschooling
Okay, so what does this mean to you, as the homeschooling parent of this wildly emotional, and often irrational, growing teen? First, there is some good news. Positive things such as sports, music, school achievement, and responsibility can be “wired” into that changing adolescent brain, by you as the parent and teacher. There is lots of room for change and second chances abound during this prefrontal expansion. The bad news is that if those teen years are filled with anger and alienation, these characteristics may too, get “set in stone.” Adolescence is an important time, and you have the ability to guide your teen through this time.
My caution to you is this: in this time of unpresedented brain development, many new and unpredictable thoughts and behaviors can arise. Often emotions and actions can outrun judgement capabilities, just like they did in early childhood. Teens find it difficult to process emotions such as anger and fear; and their behavior in the midst of this emotional turmoil, can be maddening. But remember, this behavior is not a character flaw, but rather simply a function of some confused wiring in the brain, which will eventually straighten out. The goal is to respond to this behavior with responses which will allow the teen to become well-adjusted. Remember the impulsiveness and risk-taking behavior are critical to growing up into an adult.
(Thanks to Michael J. Bradley in his book, Yes, Your Teen Is Crazy, Loving Your Kid Without Losing YourMind, for some of the scientific content in this article. Photo credit: Affen Ajlfe)
Learning a foreign language is a tough assignment, but it comes with great rewards.
1. Research shows learning a foreign language boosts cognitive development across all subjects.
Why do researchers think this happens? Learning a foreign language requires kids to stretch new cognitive muscles—ones they haven’t used before. Our children learn their first language* without study or effort. It is a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon—our brains are preprogrammed to learn our native tongue during our early years. As we learn our first language, our brain trims the areas that facilitate this—and they can’t grow back. After this early learning opportunity passes, learning another language requires study and effort. To do this, kids must develop learning strategies they haven’t used before—in particular, new reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills. Once they have these new skills, they automatically apply them to other subject areas—especially to math and science and similar subjects where completely new information or skills are introduced.
2. Learning a foreign language prepares kids to enter a global community.
We already are globally connected. You probably have friends or work with people who live in other countries. That is only going to increase. The strategies your kids learn studying a foreign language will help them travel internationally or interact with others who do not speak English natively. Once they have strategies for learning a foreign language, subsequent languages are learned more quickly. My daughter, Kayte, studied French in high school and college. She added Arabic in college. Even though it was as far from French as you can imagine, she still says the strategies she acquired studying French applied. She became conversant enough to travel confidently throughout the Middle East by her junior year.
3. Learning a foreign language will increase your child’s love for learning and self-confidence.
The best thing you can do to prepare your children for whatever the future may hold is to teach them to love learning. They most certainly will have to keep learning throughout their lifetime; it sure helps if they take joy in this reality. Learning a foreign language is a tough assignment, but it comes with great rewards. We gain access to people, food, art, music, history, and so much more. We can’t fully appreciate these things without understanding the language that binds them together.
When studying something difficult
opens doors to fascinating experiences, kids learn that hard work is worth the
effort. They approach the next learning challenge with expectations of pleasure
and success. Voilà! You have self-motivated, self-perpetuating learners in
the house (every parent’s dream).
Studying a foreign language is exactly the kind of learning opportunity that will propel your child forward in all directions. That’s why we offer French, Spanish, and American Sign Language at Aim Academy. We want to be a part of your homeschool success story, and we think studying a second language is a critical piece of that equation.
*If you raise your kids in a
bilingual home, they will learn both languages without effort or study. In this
article I’m referring to learning a new language after that early learning opportunity has passed.
Around this time each year, the students in my Psychology
Class study the concept of motivation – why we do what we do. We explore the motivations behind hunger,
thirst, achievement and one of my personal favorites, the need to
affiliate. The word ‘affiliation’ is not
one that we use often, so let me explain its meaning. To affiliate means that we “flock
together”. It doesn’t necessarily mean
that we form a close, lasting relationship, but it does mean that we have a
need to be with others. Affiliation is a
type of social motivation. The need to
belong and the need for emotional intimacy are the other components of this
type of motivation.
As children and as adults we all require a certain amount of
quality contact with others to feel good.
In fact, if we deprive others of this social contact using punishments
like solitary confinement it can cause some serious problems such as heart
disease, depression, and premature death.
When we are rejected socially our brains actually respond in the same
way as when we are experiencing physical pain.
We form bonds quickly, even when we don’t need to. I am a person who frequently talks to others
while waiting in line (my kids were always embarrassed when I did that). I am not sure why I do this, but I suppose
it has to do with a shared experience of not having anything else to do while
waiting, or just being miserable that I am wasting my time in this line –
misery loves company! Others I know form
bonds with people during an elevator ride in the hospital or while riding up to
a job interview. Or, on the long ride down, when you’re not sure if you “landed
the job”. We seem to be drawn to these
conversations. You don’t have to look very far to see that we
are programmed to affiliate with others.
One of the most famous psychological studies on the concept
of affiliation was done by Stanley Schacter in 1959. Working as a social psychology professor at
Yale University, Schacter was interested in studying our motivation to be with
other people in the same space. He
divided the students who volunteered for his experiment into two groups. The first group was instructed by a severe,
mean-tempered research assistance by the name of Dr. Zilstein who told them
that they were going to be severely shocked during the experiment, and these
shocks were going to be painful. The
other group met a “mild mannered” professor who told them that they would
receive shocks that would feel no worse than a “tickling” on their hands. The groups were then told that they had to
wait for the experiment to begin. They
could choose to wait alone in a separate room or they could choose to wait
together with others. Where do you think
the students in Dr. Zilstein’s group chose to wait? You guess it, with others! The moral of the story (experiment) in times
of stress we prefer to be with others.
Although affiliation is important, we humans seem to need
more than to just “hang out” with each other.
Most of us are also looking to belong, feel as if we are a part of a
group. This belonging seems to involve
two important factors: frequently
positive interactions with others (doing things together that are fun!!), and a
stable, enduring relationship (meeting in an elevator one time just isn’t the
same as an enduring friendship). Maintaining
close personal relationships where we feel like we belong is probably the
single most important factor in human happiness and life satisfaction. We need to be needed and feel that we belong.
If the need to belong is not fulfilled and we feel rejected
by others we can experience severe emotional turmoil. Believe it or not, this distress can even be
felt when we are rejected by a computer. When people are rejected by unknown
internet partners while playing computer games, they actually change their
behavior and even risk losing the game to ensure they are not rejected
again. Amazingly these same behaviors
occur if people in research studies are told that they are playing against a
computer and not other humans!! We
change our behavior to make sure the computer doesn’t reject us. What a
powerful need we have for affiliation!
I began this blog post talking about the students in my online psychology class. As we study this concept of affiliation motivation, I always challenge them to think of their affiliations. Are they engaging with others? Do they feel needed and connected to people in their own lives? After all teens and young adults are one of the most vulnerable populations when it comes to feeling rejected and lonely. Often in our class we begin discussing these connections, and my students begin to bond with one another. If you think about it, our class actually fulfills the two components of belonging – weekly interactions (classes) that are fun (at least I think they are), and stable relationships (we meet for 8 months of class, and many students continue to stay in contact after the class has finished). This leads me to believe that even internet class connections are ways to help our students form positive, and in some cases, long term bonds with others. These classes help students fulfill important affiliation and belonging needs.
Bonnie Gonzalez has 36 years of experience as a counselor and is passionate about helping families apply the latest research in their home schools. She teaches Introduction to Psychology for Aim Academy as well as the Secrets of Success mini-course series. Her upcoming Secrets of Success summer course helps students learn how to persevere in the face of failure. You can learn more about the seven week course here.
