We hear it all the time. Teens need more sleep. They burn the candle at both ends, with early start times for school followed by hours of after school activities and homework. When I taught high school, I saw my students in first period at 7:45 a.m. and dismissed the last class 2:45 p.m. And guess what? These teens were exhausted at both ends of the day. They wanted coffee. Did you drink coffee in 10th grade?! As adults, many of us empathize with the adolescent’s desire for more sleep. We’re tired, too. But do we really understand the unique problem teens face when it comes to their sleep deficits? Because in reality, the teen brain is very different from the… Read More

Note: This is one of a 10 blog series on learning traits. Read about all 10 learning traits here. Working memory is the skill that drives how easily and efficiently you can work through multi-step problems. When we describe someone as a “quick thinker” they probably have strong working memory. Not surprisingly, it is key to academic success. What is Working Memory? Working memory is how easily you can juggle multiple bits of information in your head and use that information to do something. Remembering a multi-digit phone number and then dialing it is an example.  So is solving a multi-step math problem, particularly if it requires mental math. Reading comprehension relies heavily on working memory–you need to remember what you just read to… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff A few days ago, my six-year-old brought home a book from school that was considered a “right-fit”. Her assignment was to read the book to me out loud. We’ve been doing this since the start of the school year. It was a routine assignment and from what I could tell from the book’s jacket, a routine kind of book for a typical first grader. But this was not routine. A few pages into the story, she lost much of the fluency I would have expected given the book’s vocabulary. And why? Because she was distracted by the pictures. “That man is not wearing a helmet,” she said, looking at a man on a motorcycle depicted… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Ben Harvatine had been practicing hard before he hit the mat and couldn’t get up. He’d been dizzy for a while during wrestling practice, but that hadn’t alarmed him: it’s what happens when you’re cutting weight in a 100-degree room. The twenty-year-old MIT student wound up in the hospital and spent months recovering. It was a concussion, the first he said he’d gotten in more than a decade of wrestling. “For a week or two I struggled to carry on conversations,” he told me when I interviewed him by phone a few weeks ago. He couldn’t keep up in his mechanical engineering and architecture classes. And he was sensitive to light. “I effectively didn’t go… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Blurred vision, painful headaches, and the inability to attend even a half-day of school. When her eight-year-old daughter, Charlotte, took a fall into a metal pole on the playground at school, her mother didn’t expect the ensuing concussion would change the course of third grade. Charlotte, as you may remember from our post last week, had been twisting a friend on the swing when the friend spun-out rapidly and knocked her down. Charlotte’s head hit the pole, and after a trip to the school nurse, the pediatrician, and a few days of painful symptoms, it was clear the injury was more than a bump. We pick up today with our interview with Charlotte’s mother at… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff Concussions in Youth Sports When President Obama held a summit at the White House to address youth concussions, the focus was clearly on injuries incurred while participating in sports. Much of the flak following has related to one sticking point: yes, there’s going to be more money put into research and education, but is anybody going to make it less likely that kids get concussions in the first place by changing the rules of the games? Until then, parents have a few choices. Either don’t let their kids play or insist on changing the culture. “That says you suck it up,” as the President said. But what about when the injury doesn’t happen on the… Read More

By Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff “To know a poem by heart is to own a great work of art forever.” That’s what England’s Education Secretary Michael Gove said last month when promoting his country’s new competition, “Poetry by Heart,” according to a story in England’s Telegraph. The country is investing a half million pounds in the program run by the Poetry Archive. We Americans aren’t eligible, but the site’s timeline and collection of poems is worth taking a look at, especially if your brain is abuzz with the un-poetic noise the rest of the internet sends our way. Poetry. Memorization. Are these words or art forms we give much thought to in 2013? It’s true the gadgets at our fingertips… Read More