OT: Calling all students: What motivated you in high school?
I'm curious to know what motivated you to do well in high school? Was there ever a period when you weren't motivated or had a crisis of confidence relating to your school work? How did you deal with not doing well in a class? I'm assuming that many of you are at Michigan, so you figured it all out in the end, but did you ever have times when you really were just not into schoolwork? How did your parents deal with it?
Edit: Thanks to all of you who spent time writing responses. It's helpful to get different perspectives on this.
1. Highest educated parents produce the highest education kids. 60% of the kids who score above a 28 on the ACT have parents with graduate-level college degrees.
2. Read CONSTANTLY. Families who read constantly produce gifted kids, period. Age 2-3 onward.
3. Strong school, preferably private. Privates are not guarentees, just safer bets is all. There are less than five public high schools in Michigan I'd be comfortable with sending my children to.
4. Strong peer group. If your kid has gunner alpha dog friends, they're going to be successful. If your kids do not have gunner friends, it means they've been REJECTED by the gunner alpha kids. Parents don't realize kids sort themselves pretty efficiently. Too often parents rationalize or make excuses for why their kid fell in with bottom tier slackers.
5. Nearly 4.0 GPA = cool car. No problem leasing my kids nice vehicles if they handle business in the classroom and with extra curriculars.
I don't know why you keep going on about elite parents reading to their kids and sending them to good high schools. Obviously you are not one of them. It's all about germline genetic engineering to get the perfect baby, nootropics, and transcranial direct current stimulation. That other stuff you're talking about is so 20th century.
LOL at the Public vs Private remark in a thread about one of the nation's top PUBLIC UNIVERSITIES ..
I have a Masters Degree yet my wife now in her 40's is just now back in school getting her BA in Elem Education. So how is it that our 8yr old son is excelling at the #1 (Public & Private) Elementary School in the state of Colorado..? We have modest cars and don't read all the time.
But I am elite, so he's likely got that elitism running in his veins..!
My son's freshman class has almost 800 kids. There are more than two social groups. Way more.
Wow. That's a lot of kids.
I'm interested to know which school your son is attending, if you're willing to share.
Our son is starting at Seaholm in Birmingham in the fall...and my wife and I just came from a meeting there to discuss his class placements.
The counselor indicated that they freely move kids up and down within the math track. Maybe you should consider moving him back a notch...and he'll do better...which will help his confidence...and then move him back up?
Seaholm only has about 350 kids per grade.
We live in Evanston and the high school is like a small college. It's easy to become invisible if you so choose. Kids have moved down, but we missed that deadline a long time ago. I wanted him to but he didn't want to, and the teacher talked me into letting him stay. Next year, he won't be placed in honors, but that just makes him feel bad, not relieved. He needs some life experience under his belt to understand that this is just freshman year. There's a lot of time to improve, and more importantly, it's ok not to be great at everything. Excel in the stuff that really interests you and take AP classes in the areas that you naturally do well in. I believe that if you do the things you think you're supposed to do rather than the ones you really want to do, you'll end being unhappy.
We lived in Evanston for a while when I was a kid and while I went to Orrington and Haven, my older brother went to ETHS and got completely lost in the shuffle. From there we moved to Northern Michigan (and attended a school that sends 25-30 kids to UM and 100+/- to MSU every year, contrary to dipshit circles trolling above) and while my 7th grade Algebra text book was the same exact book we used in 5th grade at Orrington, the Michigan Public School system was/is very well-funded by comparison and like any other school district, it's as much about the other kids and resources than it is Public vs Private or statewide generalizations.
Private schools generate an entirely different set of problems and being wealthy has no correlation to intelligence.
You're going to call me a troll, yet then use either an exaggerated or at the very least out of date "Northern Michigan [public high] school that sends 25-30 kids to UM and 100+/- to MSU every year" to counter me?
I'm not trolling. I'm not generalizing. I'm not a snob private booster.
I'm simply discussing the very real issues with public education in the state of Michigan. The average public kid in Michigan never has a chance at any ascent, and will likely regress in social class. I could drown you in data to support everything I've stated, but none of you will read it and the truth only makes people defensive and uncomfortable. What makes me uncomfortable is how the state I grew up in is largely doomed moving forward and the youth left are in homes too dull to realize it.
Sorry tinkerbell, but my class of almost 800 sent 25+/- to Ann Arbor and about 100 to E Lansing ...granted some may have enrolled at LCC or something.
I think this is perhaps the dumbest sentence you've penned on the matter - "The average public kid in Michigan never has a chance at any ascent, and will likely regress in social class."
The syntax makes no sense and the sentence itself smacks of your ignorance in trying to troll the topic.
Love,
The Beneficiary of 20yrs of Public Education from K-MA
Seeing how there isn't a "Northern Michigan" school with anywhere near that enrollment these days, your stats are decades removed from relevancy (assuming your recollection is even accurate). Decades of Michigan brain drain, the economy imploding, public primary and secondary schools in shambles, the auto industry is a fraction of what it once was, college admissions is global, employment is global, U-M is 50% non-resident, everyone has a bachelors.
The year after I was admitted to MICHIGAN the school began to employ a rolling admissions policy precisely because too many rich, out of state private school kids were getting accepted ahead of equally-qualified InState public school kids whose parents' taxes had always funded the University.
And not to make you look stupid ..because you're doing that fine on your own, but my HS was the largest in the state and was split into two schools because of its size. So now instead of having one class of 800 as was the case for me, there are now TWO classes totalling around 1,000 students that graduated in 2014. And... if you were to re-unite the two schools, the enrollment would be 500 more than the current largest public HS in the state.
So now you have TWO high schools in one town that graduated a total of almost 1,000 kids ...or (if you went to public high school and took basic math) about 200 more than graduated when I did.
Now perhaps these days the kids are all dumber and aren't going to UM or MSU, but I doubt it.
troll ...
I've teased out that you're talking about Traverse City, with West opening in 1997.
The average ACT from both high schools is 21 and less than 25% of each class are deemed college ready upon graduation. (Non-hooked applicants need about a 30 on the ACT to have a chance at U-M these days.) TC is one of the highest concentrations of wealth in Northern Michigan and the outcomes of the publics are terrible. For comparison, Birmingham Seaholm's average ACT is 25 and 50% are college ready.
Source: http://archive.freep.com/interactive/article/20140707/NEWS06/140706002/…
"Feeding the U," a 2010 Michigan Daily article on U-M feeder schools makes no mention of TC schools. In fact, #17 on the list is Birmingham Seaholm, which only sends <38 per year. Please tell me how your inferior in every measurable way alma mater(s) send nearly the same? They don't. I'd bet the Traverse City public highs send <5 each, annually.
And here's some light reading, highlighting the state's publics circling the drain for 20 years. "Pure Michigan is Pure Decline" http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2014/09/23/pure-michigan-econo…
And let me go out on a limb here with your constant reference to Seaholm and assert that you are making irrelevant comparisons. For starters, the TC HS serve the entire GT County - a geography much larger and more diverse that Seaholm's footprint. Let me raise another salient point you overlook or choose to dismiss ...Seaholm demographically is NOTHING like Northern Michigan.
Seaholm is surrounded by ....Cranbrook, Brother Rice, Country Day and many private alternatives that do not exist whatsoever "Up North." Further, the income and per capita everything is much higher in Birmingham than it is in northern Michigan.
For you to assert that no public school sends more than 3-5 kids to UM is asinine.
Your collective point is laudible and I applaud your passion. But this product of exclusively public schools through the Masters level isn't interested in your anecdotal ..."I know a few M Alumni who aren't super successful and those who are had two parents and a good home life"
No shit ....?! Sorta been that way forever, bra.
you sound like a Charter School honk
Ad hominem attacks tease out your insecurities and the terminal chip on your shoulder. I safely assume wealthier, more conditioned and confident private and parochial gentlemen have made you feel academically and professionally inadequate from age 18 onward. Remember, this back and forth began because you chose to exaggerate and repeatedly double down on the outcomes of your completely mediocre public high school. I don’t get any satisfaction in correcting you, I just wish parents would suspend their defensiveness, get informed, and understand just how pathetic the education and grooming their children are receiving is. The fact remains, most public educated children in Michigan are being groomed…to drop out of college & flip burgers. While your education slashing politicians send their offspring to tony private and parochial schools...to become the next generation of leaders.
I'll go out on a limb and say that our leaders have sucked lately. Whether it be business or political leaders, there are a lot of self-serving greedy douchebags running around, stuffing their own pockets and making sure that their like-minded friends do the same. That's not leadership and it's not winning. Being able to afford a yacht is not winning. Being able to have vacation homes in multiple locations is not winning. The adults I know who went to my son's public high school are savvy, sophisticated, and able to deal with many kinds of people. They're self-aware and confident. Are they all presidents of companies? Well, one is. The rest have successful careers in a variety of fields, make enough money to live where they want, do the things that they want outside of work and lead fulfilling lives. The only way to judge is to look at the adults that grew out of the children that attended the public schools. Our public school is underfunded, is racially and economically diverse, and has an average ACT score of 23. Yet it sends kids to Michigan, Northwestern, the Ivy's, USC, Texas, Purdue Engineering, some of the smaller excellent liberal arts schools of the midwest as well as Illinois.
And by the way, I grew up in wealth. It was all around me. Kids at my private school had Corvettes, Mercedes and Ferraris. They didn't all end up on Wall Street, either. One is an aerobics instructor. Another opens Dairy Queen's (trains the new employees). Another is an English teacher. One guy is a brand manager at GE, not a bad job by any means, but it is middle management. He went Cornell undergrad for his engineering degree and then Kellogg. He's just a cog. But he's happy because he travels a lot.
In a nutshell, your definition of success is too narrow. You don't get the nuances of what it means to have success.
We've heard that colleges like kids from ETHS for just that reason: having to learn how to cope with the insane size and also the diversity. The kids there have to function on their own. As a parent, it's virtually impossible to get in contact with a counselor. Teachers have been responsive, but there's no helicoptering at ETHS. The place is so huge, my son didn't use his locker for the first six weeks because he didn't have time to get there between classes. It really isn't for everyone.
The end
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the flow and partied a lot. I got high, got drunk, and occasionally chsed a girl or two. I was at least three years ahead of my perrs in terms of partying. I remember going to to Wisoconsn to visit my brother and getting drunk at the house with his frat bros and then going to bars when I was 16. When you're doing that plus trips to Europe and Canada, 21 isn't a big deal and bars lose their grandeur quickly. This was on top of normal partying with my friends.
Because I am smart (I'm not blowing smoke up your butt, I have found and formulated mathematic patterns I have yet to find online) I was able to connect to the genius kids and hooked them up with whatever they wanted in terms of "party accessories" because I had connections. When I look back, I have always been a bit of a rebel. It is far from cool because I feel like I have short changed myself in the long term.
My first minimum wage job.
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First semester, my son took debate. It was a class with all grade levels, and some very high achievers, which in a diverse school of over 3000, is saying something. The teacher was an African American guy with a Ph.D. who made race relations the center of the class. My son was enthralled. He was pretty intimidated by having to debate juniors or even in front of juniors, but he ended up getting an A in the class because he was motivated and engaged. The challenge is finding the motivation when the class isn't enthralling or personally engaging. He loves genetics and is doing well in bio; he hates proofs and graphing equations and is doing poorly in geometry.
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I'll add fear of not giving my children a better life than my parents gave me.
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(.Y.) and ( . )( . ) mostly. I was a terrible student until midway through my junior year of undergrad.
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I don't know if you'll actually see this, and maybe someone above has already mentioned something similar (but I don't have time to check because I have to leave for work in a few minutes).
The issues you describe your son having sound very similar to how things went for me in high school and college. I'd always managed to be an A/B student without really trying that hard, never took notes, never studied, skipped doing my homework if I knew I was doing well enough in the class to get away with it. I had a few classes in high school that were a real struggle to make it through this way, and in college it got a lot worse.
I still managed to graduate, worked productively for a few years, and then I took a work-from-home job and noticed that all of the problems I had in high school and college came storming back into my life. Turns out, I have ADHD. For me, it's much more attention deficit than hyperactivity, but because I never had any over the top problems in school, no one ever noticed or figured it out.
The thing with ADHD is it can make focusing on specific tasks a huge, energy consuming undertaking. A smart, well driven person can overcome this to some degree, but it still makes things harder. If you think this might be the case with your son, I would strongly recommend taking him to see a psychologist. The reason I recommend that goes well beyond his potential performance in school, ADHD left unrecognized and untreated can (and did in my case) lead to depression.
I know the depression reaction is fairly common, though I don't know the details of how it tends to manifest. I can tell you that for me, it was seeing all these people I knew do things that I couldn't (like start writing a paper more than 24 hours before it was due). I built up a combination of inferiority complex and fear of failure, and the pressures of college coursework put me into fairly serious depression a couple of times. It was not fun, do not recommend.
Mental health is still very socially stigmatized, so I don't generally talk about this stuff, but I hope it's been of some value to you. It's of course possible that none of the things I described apply to your son, but if they do I hope that you'll be better able to handle them than I was.
Thanks for responding. I think this may play a role in his situation. We had him preliminarily tested and he was just under the threshold for ADD. But when my husband and I saw the test questions, we both thought this has to be it because it was like the test was written with him in mind. Interestingly, he spent six months watching Youtube videos and poring over information on how to build his own PC. He saved his money, bought all the components and put it together himself, which required a lot of focus and patience. But I've read that people with ADD can have laser-like focus with something they're very interested in and also that they are gamers and screeners. There's something about playing video games and being on screens that keeps them very focused.
...you talk to Dr. Roger Lauer. He is a neuropsychologist in Ann Arbor. Came highly recomended. Our son is entering 9th grade this fall and was diagnosed with ADD in 4th grade. He was doing well academically until this year. With high school looming, we decided to invest some time and money in to having a full evaluation. The report from Dr. Lauer confirmed much of what we had been seeing and suspected, but he put together an action plan to help get our son back on track.
His evaluation will identify ADD, learning disabilites, anxiety, depression, etc.
It's worth the time and financial investment if you can swing it.
As for some background, our son was previously getting all A's, except for a B in advanced math. My wife and I are both Michigan grads and live in Birmingham.
I've found ADHD to be super manageable, with medication or without. The biggest hurdle is recognizing the potential signs and taking the steps to do something about it, which you've already done. Kudos!
All the other behavioral things you've mentioned hit pretty close to home for me too, so I'm going to mention some things that I've found very helpful in my journey through this stuff. Of course, I am not a doctor and all of this is anecdotal, so if you get any real medical advice that contradicts this I would suggest that you ignore me. Anyway.
Structured schedules. This is the one thing that's helped me more than anything else, and it's the reason that the biggest problems I had were in college and at a very un-structured work-from-home job. Try setting and maintaining a daily homework/study time, and stick too it even if there isn't much homework or studying necessary that day.
Take breaks. Instead of trying to focus on the same thing for a long period of time, take somewhat frequent 5-15 minute breaks and come back to it. This is a big reason that tons of tech companies have ping-pong or foosball in the office. ADHD: super common in programmers.
Read books. I've found that if my leisure time is spent reading books (pretty much any books) instead of watching TV or playing video games, I'm better able to concentrate on important tasks during the times of day when I need to be productive.
Lastly, I want to touch on depression again. Depression is a pretty scary concept, but if you're prepared then it doesn't need to be. By addressing mental and behavioral health issues in an up-front and non-stigmatized manner, I think you significantly reduce that chances that your son will ever have to deal with more serious issues like depression. However, just in case, I'd strongly recommend reading the descriptions of depression by Allie Brosch of Hyperbole and a Half. You can find them here and here.
Well, I'm not a student anymore, but when I was, in my household it was simply expected/understood that I do well in school. I never really considered the alternative.
Then I completely stopped caring/trying and just started working a ton and figured I'd go the WCC-->UM route so I didn't apply to colleges until the spring of my senior year. Then my parents wouldn't let me go to Community College so I went to a private engineering school on scholarship since I applied to UM too late.
I took honors/AP classes until I noticed some of them were the same content except with 3x the homework and more complicated equations but same forumlas(AP/honors Physics/Calc/Chemistry vs regular) and I hated getting home from work at 12-1am and doing hw until 5am. I realize a lot of the people on here pay for their children's college, good for you, however if you won't be explain the importance of AP classes and how much money they can save. I saved a ton and got to graduate a semester early. Also if they're the type of student skating through school they'll get use to reading the book and studying, as well as heavy loads of homework. I just read my books cover to cover once or twice and slept in class.
I agree with others, would never ask for help even in Elementary school, I always thought my homework meant that I should do it. Other kids who parents helped(did their hw), angered me, I'd rather do my own work and do it poorly than be judged upon someone elses. I guess helping is different that doing, but I felt a ton of parents just wanted their kids to get good grades and didn't care if they learned. Either to help or brag about them, I'm not entirely sure. I refused to ever tell my parents I had hw because I didn't want them to look at it or criticize how I did it.
Need to get the kid to motivate themselves and see the importance if possible. You can keep on them and should if they won't do it otherwise but really best if you can get them to do it themselves.
Wendy,
I didn't read after the first page of responses, but wanted to share my take based on your reply.
There doesn't seem to be any problem with your son, per se. The teacher has incredibly high and potentially unrealistic expectations. This is something that will happen to your son again in college at some point. It is a good experience for him to navigate (with your help) and make his own choice. He can't change this teacher, and he won't get an A. He can drop, he can study his balls off for a B/C, and he can risk getting a C/D. Life sometimes puts tough choices, and it is good to think through it, process it, and make a decision.
In terms of colleges, one C, especially in 9th or 10th is no big deal. It also seems like it will be offset in the GPA by the honors, and by the fact that he'll be in line for the AP classes that up his GPA like whoa.
I hope this is helpful. Hopefully he chooses to study an hour a night for that B and learns that sometimes those in power can't be moved, even when they might do well to be.
-Former math tutor who had all As through 11th grade math and had an F going in to Christmas break in Calculus. Brought it up to a C. Good experience for me. Didn't get into my first choice university in part because of it, but transferred in after one semester.
Thanks for your response. I've always been a fan of "adversity as teacher." In baseball, my son has worked his way up the ladder, starting on the C travel team in 6th grade, which is late to begin travel anyway, and he worked his way up to be a starting pitcher on the A team this year in high school. The travel coach uses his story to motivate the younger kids to keep working. Just because you're not on A now doesn't mean you can't make it there eventually. And the road has not always been easy, either. A lot of tears and self-doubt along the way. In school, he's been autonomous since 4th grade. The only time I get involved is when I read a paper and see errors, which make me crazy. Sometimes he refuses to change them. So this class has been like a huge punch in the gut, and I'm still waiting for him to step up and take on the extra work and just suck it up. If he gets a C-, I'd be relieved. He has a 3.5 unweighted with the C- he got in geometry in the first semester. I think that's respectable for his first year and doesn't give him too big of a hole to dig out of.
A 'C' won't kill you so don't let that stop him from trying in the future, I got into Michigan with C's on the transcript. Motivating won't ever come from you. The lesson here in my opinion is not letting hardship define him. Grades don't reflect intelligence. If he finds a reason to keep working hard and move past this class it will be fine. If he lets this class make him stop working hard or scares him from other honors classes is what will get him in trouble.
Dupont Circle, this isn't about getting into Michigan. It's about learning how to be a better student and deal with adversity, and learning how to find motivation within. I went to Michigan and I loved it, but it's not the only school out there, and it's not the only school that propels someone into success. I know people who went to Michigan who haven't achieved the kind of success you constantly try to sell on this board. And I know people who went to mid-level schools who have achieved great success. It's the qualities I talked about and not the school name on the diploma that largely determine how much success a person will have, at least career-wise.
We don't live in Michigan. My goal is to help my kids make choices that are completely their own, and that they're comfortable with. I've had friends who were manhandled by their parents - told where to go to college and what to study - and it nearly ruined their lives. I want my kids to work as hard as they can to have as many choices as they can when it comes time to apply to schools. That's always been our goal. If we lived in Michigan, I might be more focused on Michigan. Our state school is Illinois and I don't have a feeling about it one way or another. I know it has a great engineering school but my kid doesn't want to be an engineer. If he goes there, fine. If he goes out of state, fine.
"I know people who went to Michigan who haven't achieved the kind of success you constantly try to sell on this board. And I know people who went to mid-level schools who have achieved great success."
I encourage you to consider the SES of the wildly successful "mid-level" alums you claim to know. I know a few successful "mid-level" alums too. Of course all of them attended $10K-25K/year private schools or premier publics like Birmingham, East GR, Grosse Pointe or Bloomfield Hills. All hail from upper middle class, two parent, both equipped with graduate level degrees, homes.
The average public high school in Michigan sends maybe 1 to 3 kids to U-M each year. The premier privates and publics send 60-100.