This time of year now has a new meaning for me: it's the period when kids in elementary and secondary school finish off another installment of "book learnin'" and prepare for a summer of escapism. For my high school students, that usually means cramming for Math final exams, whereas their junior counterparts have typically had their last test of the year already and thus have put things firmly into cruise control.
What comes next, for me, are summer engagements for Math tutoring. I have four lined up so far, with more possibly to come. It can be a challenge working with kids in the summer, though, because they're out of learning mode and into play mode, making for some tough slogging if you want to teach them something. What I like about it, though, is that the grind of getting them through "the current unit" is gone, freeing me up to focus on things like foundational understanding, general problem solving techniques, work habits, reasonableness-checking and other things that I write about in No Kid of Ours is Failing at Math (How Parents Can Help). Parents often fixate too much on marks for my liking (easy for me to say when I'm not the one receiving the report cards, of course!); the summer is my chance to cut loose and really get the kids thinking about the less obvious topics that usually end up helping them across units in Math.
My favourite students are the ones who bring their "A" game to the sessions even in the summer... especially since I realize that that's asking a lot of a kid at that time of year!
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