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Nothing devastates a mother like the influence of the wrong crowd on her child.

She knows her child, she knows him from before he was exposed to those hoodlums!  And, Oh!  The sway they have over him!!

A child who is easily influenced by others is a child with strong doubts about this own reality.

Few can withstand a society so overwhelming as this one, with its high tech and low ethics.

   Of course, if a young man can’t win as himself, he can always become the kids next door, or take on the characteristics of the boys in the neighborhood.

   These boys are a liability to society and utterly careless of others, but if he had an overwhelming need to be approved of, he’ll become them.

   Now, it you, the parents, fall into the trap of fighting these characteristics in your child, you’ll pay a heavy price – the harmony of your home – and you’ll lose.  Force will only further overwhelm him.

   What will bail him out is:

* A change of environment

* Helping others

* Learning how to survive in this world

* Good food (organic if you can get it) &

* An education he can be proud of.

   With certainty on what he knows and what he can do, no “wrong crowd” can touch him.

Most teens are allergic to correction.

They have been corrected so much, and they feel wrong.  They feel that if they get corrected one more time, they’ll die.   So, they constantly ward off correction.

Most teens do this with the words “I know”.  It doesn’t matter what you say, he’ll cut you off with “I know”.  

Some shut you, and your possible corrections, out with noise- cancelling headphones.  

Some barricade themselves in their room, and become nocturnal creatures who only venture out when you are asleep.  

Some flee life altogether.

Each of these typical teen-behaviors is an effort to ward off correction.

And here you were all worried that your kid didn’t love you!  If that were true, he wouldn’t care what you thought of him.  No, the trouble is that your approval was all important; he just didn’t get enough of it.

He has this drive to try to be right – it’s inborn; you have this drive to teach him how to survive.  Where did it go wrong?  

There was a time you could show him how to draw a dinosaur ,or how to bake those cookies.  Aaaahh, but those were the days that you admired his art, no matter what it looked like, and you ate those cookies. “Yum, yum” you said, “Thank you” you said, “Yummy!”  After that, after you had admired the sweet lumps of undercooked dough, you could teach him all kinds of kitchen magic.

Then he grew up and you expected “better”, you expected “more from a boy his age”, and the Ice Age set in.

And now, with all the admiration long dried up, you are going to revive it.  He’ll be a little suspicious at first, but you persist – you admire.

You don’t need to lie and fake admiration for things to which you have been opposed.  You just have to admire something about him. If you don’t like the pink and green hair, admire how neatly he did it.  “Quite professional”, you say. 

Your job is to find things you can admire about your teen.

If this is hard for you, start with just noticing your teen and commenting on him/her.  “I see you chose yogurt this morning”. (No right or wrong about it, you are just saying “I know you are there”.  It’s an undercut, just seeing each other. You keep this up, 3 X a day, you speak to him without making him wrong.  He’ll eventually feel that he can receive your comm and live.  After that he’ll notice you too.  It’s a start. 

How long do you have to keep this up? As long as it takes for him to  look forward to your noticing his new band shirt.  It’s a form of admiration; noticing. 

This is a slow process, there is a lot of upset to bleed off. 

Gradually step it up, admire the damn shirt, be curious about the band. 

“What kind of music do they make?”  

“What’s your favorite song?”  

“Can you put that on my phone?”  (ask for help)

Any time the above does not fly; back up the gradient.

If you are patient, if you persist, you will again become the go-to person in his life. 

In that role you can teach him anything, including judgment.

Love, Joke

Essay writing is a subject of much upset and it doesn’t need to be.  It is strictly because it has been taught incorrectly. 

We have had this incorrect way of teaching for so long, that by now everybody has agreed that essay writing is hell.  It is only “hell” because it is taught by the make-wrong method.

    If you get a kid to do something  he can’t do, and then you take a red pen and make his work a bloodbath , he’ll have a loss and hate it.  He won’t learn anything from it, but that he’s “no good”.   

This is like putting your kid in the car, turning the key, putting his foot on the gas, and saying, “Go kid!”.  And he wraps the car around a tree and his front teeth are gone and there is blood on the windshield and you tell him, “Well, that’s not how you do it.”

        He won’t want to drive again!  Nobody learns from the make-wrong method. 

The components parts of English are so many!  (composition, handwriting, spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence structure etc.)  You will have to have mastered all of these before you could  write anything.

What we are finding is, that essay writing in taught OUT OF SEQUENCE. 

There are two painful aspects to this:  

1. The kid is writing before he knows how to write, spell, or make sentences etc., so he has losses there.

2. He is putting forward  A VIEWPOINT.  This is very brave.  He is saying  “This is my point of view; I feel strongly about this”. And rather than getting an acknowledgment, he gets correction. 

This hurts.

Just imagine, you say “Martha, you and me belong together; will you marry me?” And she says, “You and I, Charley, it’s you and I, okay?”  No duplication of the intent.  Slap in the face.  Very painful.  

     The only way a student can survive this make-wrong method of teaching is to decide: “The teacher sucks”, and  “I must be stupid” followed by “I’m out of here”.  And that’s terrible, because once he has decides that – the ship is sunk.

Now the Brits did it right (long ago), they dedicated the first 6 years of school to grammar.  They called it a  grammar school.  You learned how to hold a pen, write beautiful cursive, how to spell, you learned vocabulary, punctuation, how to make compound/complex sentences, public speaking, prose and poetry etc…. You learned all those things in grammar school.   

And then you went to High School and to Debate Class.  You learned to express yourself , be persuasive and defend an opinion, to use logic and reason, how to deduce, analyze and extrapolate …. This is where you learned to think!

When the student had all that down and he could capitalize and insert commas in the right places, he was asked to write essays.

Then it was a cinch!   Frankly, it’s a twenty minute lesson.  You sort of explain the structure of it, and you remind him that all the tools  he needs for this, he already has.  NOW you can say, “Have at it kid!”

In our school we start writing essays about 6 months before finals.  None of my students are allergic to writing!  When they are ready, they sit down without any trepidations, and they write the most beautiful essays!  Then we tweak them a little bit, and a little bit more, lightly, without any make-wrong, and then they sit their SATs and get perfect scores.

It is that simple.  

Teaching by make-wrong is a losing proposition.  You probably remember it from when you were young, and how you hated it because you couldn’t win.  How you were being corrected on something you hadn’t learned yet, how you were asked to do something you couldn’t do. 

It’s mean!  It kills creative writers.  

Please don’t let anyone do that to your kids.

I hope this helps.

Joke

I used the think of “pain and unconsciousness” as severe pain and complete unconsciousness. I never considered gradients thereof.

Now that I repair students and come across their moments of reduced analytical power, these gradients have become very clear to me. They coincide with illness, injury, drugs and weariness !! (tiredness)

The student at my desk tells me he has a vague recollection of “having done that” (part of math), but he “doesn’t remember”.  This leaves him with the idea that he is not too bright.  The truth is that he experienced moments of reduced analytical power while being taught. His level of Mind Alert was such that he could not place the data where he could recall it later. (in other words it didn’t get filed in the analytical mind)

There are gradients of weariness, illness, injury and drugs, causing degrees of Mind Alert (see Chart of Human Eval).

What if Johnny is

a little sick (just an ear ache, that’s all)

a little drugged (Zyrtec or Acne pills)

a little tired (wouldn’t go to bed, and I couldn’t drag him out of bed this morning)

often scared of the bullies  (you know how kids are)

regularly eats junk food  (if I don’t watch him closely)

had growing pains all summer long? (getting tall like his dad!)

Would that be the summer he lost it in math?  The time he couldn’t remember what was being taught and he decided to “hate” the subject?

Even if the student in front of me can’t verbalize what happened that summer, he can point at one of the pictures below, which show how ANALYTICALLY THERE he was at the time he was taught.  I can then explain to him the gaps in his education.  As he was only 20% analytically there, 80% of the data was misfiled under “I don’t know”.  He was largely not there to get it. (nothing to do with how smart he is).

Now in Miss Snotgrass’ class he never learned anything (too late in the day; kid too tired)

The boy got an education that beefed up his bank and left him spinning, for every gap in his education makes the next step an out-gradient.

It is my job to find and fill these gaps and get him winning again. This is done by going over every scrap of his education (as he doesn’t know what he doesn’t know) and watching his indicators.

Soon he’ll find the truth: that he is smart and can do anything!  What a relief!

Love, Joke

(See:

Educational Dianetics R&D Vol 4, August 1950 – for data on reduced analytical power by reason of weariness.

Chart of Human Eval column AN, Level of Mind Alert)

It is, of course, your job to make sure your kids land of their feet.  This means you make sure they are competent in the basics needed to interact with society.  These basics haven’t changed in the last few centuries (only the methods): we all know what our kids need to learn as they grow up….. or do we?

Schooling claims at least 12 years of your child’s life, and what does he come away with?  Really?

“Modern schools” stress social molding more than academic competence and fail at both.  (A child stuck in screens will be hard to teach, and a child who cannot keep up with his class will develop “weird” behaviors).  

The idea that education is a matter of “data” made Google a teacher and turned our children into little flash drives (8 for $32 at Office Depot).  What happened to independently thinking men and women?

Knowledge is crystallized thought.  It’s the result of a process of weighing.  It’s a “oooooh” moment that comes with a smile, and total certainty.  It makes it possible to act on that new understanding.

You do want your children to eventually act, produce, create and exchange.  

Are they actually being prepared for that? 

Can your 5-year old read? 

Can your 6-year old print correctly? 

Can your 12-year old figure a 15% tip in his head?  Can he write a 

letter?  Address an envelope?  Can he fill out his application for a 

membership at the YMCA, or will he hand it to you, Mom? 

Can your 16-year old fill out an application for a summer job?  He can 

probably compose a symphony on his iPhone, but can he make a 

spreadsheet?  Does he find reading the classics a struggle or even torture?  

If you have been relying on symbols like A, B- and C+, if you have stayed at a safe distance from your child’s education trusting the school to  get the job done – reach in now! Check the above points, and at the first “no”; call me.  

I have answers, short programs, grammar camps, summer math boosts, quick fixes, one-year programs, college prep tutoring….whatever he needs to restore his confidence and WIN again! (And if I can’t deliver what’s needed, I can refer.)

(760) 954-9197

Call soon and reserve his/her spot.

Love, Joke

Judgment is a thought process.  It is figuring out how best to survive. It is taking all things in consideration and predicting an outcome. Now if the outcome falls short of your expectations, your judgment was off.

If your teen ends up in the hospital with a fractured skull because he accepted a ride from Joe who came to a sudden stop on a snowplow; his judgment was off.  He did not predict that Joe would tackle that snow plow.  He could have, he knew Joe to be reckless so and so, but his car was cool and there was a girl watching him.  A nice girl who would no doubt remember his sliding into that car. This would make it so much easier to talk to her later about the prom, and possibly kiss her, and maybe score.  THAT was his thought process. That was how he figured he would survive – in Lucy’s arms.

So, we do not need to put your boy on a short leash, curtail his social activities, forbid him to see Joe, and give him a stern talking-to; we need to have him look at what he was thinking when he got into that car.

Now, “having a look” only happens when one feels safe, never when one is being challenged.

A workable approach is “tell me how getting into Joe’s car was a good idea.  You must have thought that it was a good idea, or you wouldn’t have done it”.   He’ll tell you.  You may have to word it a few different ways, but eventually he’ll brighten up and tell you about his odds with Lucy.

Lying there in a cast, he is keenly aware that things didn’t work out, and (if you don’t make him wrong) he’ll be open to advice on more effective ways of getting Lucy’s attention.

We are all just trying to survive, and we do it with the data that we have.  He didn’t know that women fall in love on the dance floor, now he does.  You had a man-to-man with him, and he is learning swing dancing and a box-step or something where you can hold her really close to slow music.

He has a way of being cause, because you taught him.

There are so many situations where a teen flounders for lack of understanding, but will he listen to you?  Oh, no! 

Read my article “Correcting  your Teen” – there is a way to do it.

Teaching  IS  the route to that judgment we need to instill.

Love, Joke  

We are long past the time when getting an education meant getting a lot of data.  Data, both true and false, is readily available; we have an app for that.

We are also past the time when exclusivity and expense indicated a a good school merely knowing who’ who doesn’t cut it anymore – and there’s an app for that too.

Those who manage data seem to do well these days; this requires evaluation of data. A good evaluator can spot identities, similarities and differences. He can observe what is and project into the future. He can be there.   He can think.

There is no app for that.

For a young person to prepare for a successful and productive life, he needs to practice being there, he needs to build certainty on his ability to observe and project into the future.

A surprising number of these successful thinkers prove to be self-taught, homeschooled or the product of a free-thinking uncle with a penchant for blowing things up in his garage.

Somehow these lucky kids escaped the constant pressure to adjust to their environment, and preserved this quaint idea that they should adjust the environment to them.

They could be there, as themselves, form opinions, disagree and grow a healthy disrespect of institutionalism.

They didn’t buckle under the pressure to agree; their education was pleasant, unhurried and casual. This allowed them to engage in the business of learning rather than schooling.

They became brave, independent thinkers – there will never be an app for that.

See Creation of Human Ability R2-55