Organization 101: Teaching Your Child How to Get His Act Together

Middle School Years: Achieving the Best Education for Your Child, Grades 5-8
by Michele A. Hernandez

Chapter 1

Before setting out to design a book that would be helpful for both parents and students, I sent out a survey to roughly 650 parents at the private school where I work. I asked them a series of questions about education: what skills they felt their children lacked, what they wished the schools would teach, and what they already did in order to help their children. I grouped all these questions into different subject areas and outlined the book's major chapters around parents' most pressing concerns.

My biggest surprise was that an overwhelming number of parents (about 80 percent of those surveyed) said they felt that their children's most serious problem was a total lack of organizational skills: how to organize a locker, a backpack, a notebook, a schedule-the list went on and on. Most parents wished that the school had a larger role in teaching these skills but acknowledged that they wished they were better informed to help their children learn these vital skills at home.

Since I monitor the academic progress of all students on our campus (high school and middle school), I have the opportunity to speak to many parents every day about their children's academic struggles. In the majority of cases, their academic problems are rooted in their inability to organize their time, their workload, and their various after-school commitments, rather than in any lack of academic talent. The more time I spend in schools, the more clear it is to me that a student who learns to be a master of his own schedule is much more likely to succeed than an equally bright student who is organizationally impaired.

Why is it that young middle school students have such difficulty organizing their lives? The hardest adjustment for young children is the transition from having the same teacher all day (as most do in elementary school) to having a different teacher for every subject (the norm for middle school). More than any other factor, this dramatic procedural change marks the transition from the comforting environment of elementary school to the often “sink-or-swim” environment of middle school.

Think of the change from your child's perspective: Children love predictability and regularity. For years they have been accustomed to having the same person teach them all day, almost always in the same room. They have had time to learn that teacher's idiosyncrasies: Does she write the assignments on the board? On a piece of paper that goes home to parents? Whatever the case may be, they quickly adapt to the teacher's methods, and through sheer repetition, become more or less adept at keeping track of assignments.

Suddenly, at the onset of sixth grade, students may find themselves in a different location (some schools switch campuses after the fifth grade), while at the same time their routine is completely disrupted. Not only do they have a different teacher for every subject, they also have to move physically from classroom to classroom-the teachers do not come to them. Add to that the confusion of five different ways of assigning homework in the best of cases; that is, assuming each of the teachers is consistent in using the same technique every day. Is it any wonder, then, that many children who were doing fine in elementary school find themselves lost and confused when they get to middle school?

When your children make the transition from fifth to sixth grade (or from sixth to seventh grade), it is perfectly okay as parents to help them organize themselves and teach them the necessary skills. In some schools, the teachers themselves teach organizational skills, but in my experience, the majority of students in the United States do not learn them well enough, or shall we say early enough, to help them succeed before they get too far behind.

I think it's better to assume that whatever methods they learn in school, while not necessarily incorrect, will just scratch the surface of what I will try to outline for you here. As a postscript, although you should help your children learn these study skills yourself, you should also put pressure on the school to teach them as well. Many fine schools devote an entire class to study and organizational skills because they don't count on individual teachers' being able to cover all the skills students will need to succeed.

The first thing your child will need is the proper set of school supplies. Of course these supplies vary greatly from school to school, and even from teacher to teacher. I don't want to devote a great deal of space to school supplies in this chapter, but if you want a quick refresher course, I have included information on backpacks, binders, paper, homework notebooks, and basic school supplies in Appendix B at the back of this book. Feel free to flip through this section if you need to.

Copyright © 2000 by by Michele A. Hernández

About the Author

Michele A. Hernandez is a native of New York City, graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Dartmouth College in 1989. She earned a master's degree in English and comparative literature from Columbia University. For the last four years, she has been assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College.