A-Moms: How to Raise Competitive Award-Winning Students

By Marion Shaw

In A-Moms: How To Raise Competitive Award-Winning Students, attorney and author Marion Shaw shares her insights and methods for raising children that successfully compete in school, college, and as young adults in today’s global economy. A-Moms provides 40 simple strategies that are applicable to children of all ages (toddlers, preschoolers, elementary students, middle school students, and high school students are addressed in different chapters) and continue to be valuable assets in college and in the professional workplace. Based on the most current educational research (explained so you can understand it and use it) and insightful family examples, this book will reveal what motivated parents and top students are doing to get high grades, trophies, awards, medals, scholarships, and acceptance into high-ranking universities. This book was written to help you strategically guide your child to achievement of awe-inspiring dreams and goals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483555713

Marion Shaw

Marion was born in Ireland in 1976. One of three children, she inherited her love of books from her parents. She married her soul mate in 2005 in Ireland before moving to the UK in 2010. She travels back to Ireland as often as possible. She works full time as director of systems and process for a global customer experience management company and is a technical geek at heart. She loves keeping up with the latest trends and technological advances; however, her love of books keep her sane. She has two daughters who have changed her life dramatically in a good way. They are her inspirations behind this book and keep her alive in more ways than one. Marion is a self-professed bookworm and has passed this love on reading to both of her daughters. She would love more children to love reading and encourages them to use imagination as much as possible. She is a fully qualified scuba-diving instructor and dives when possible in all conditions; she believes the waters off the west coast of Ireland contain some of the best diving sites in the world. She also plays field hockey for her local team as a goalkeeper.

Book preview

Shaw

1. Parents are Top Students’ Most Important Teachers

I am troubled whenever I see a television news segment about education with a mother who says something like, "This school and its teachers are so terrible that my son is 12 years old and he still doesn’t know how to read." It’s heartbreaking. But even more so, it never has to turn out this way.

I wrote this book to declare that our families can take the polar opposite academic path: No matter what is happening (or not happening) in schools, we, as parents, can take responsibility for our own children’s education. Instead of being constantly worried about academic failure, we choose to be constantly motivated and inspired by our children’s potential. We can raise outstanding award-winning students who will successfully compete and thrive in the global marketplace as young adults.

Some parents mistakenly think that teaching their own children is not my job. However, with so many children struggling in schools, nobody should count on other people taking care of all of their family’s aspiring educational goals. Currently, U.S. schools have the primary focus of making sure that struggling students get their educational needs met. In 2008 research, Tom Lovelace, Steve Farkas, and Ann Duffett from the Fordham Institute surveyed 900 teachers, ranging from elementary to high school levels, and received the following answers:

Who is most likely to get one-on-one attention from teachers?

81% of teachers answered struggling students.

Who is most likely to be taught with a curriculum and instruction specially designed for their abilities?

51% of teachers answered struggling students.

19% answered average students.

Only 10% of teachers answered advanced students.

Lovelace, Farkas, and Duffett are rightly concerned about guidance in schools for our best students when teaching geared toward struggling students does not adequately challenge advanced students’ thinking and problem-solving skills:

Students rise to our expectations of them, parents need to remain engaged from the first day of kindergarten until high school graduation, and curriculum needs to challenge their thinking, creativity and innovative problem-solving skills, otherwise we will lose our best and brightest.

I think everyone agrees that struggling students should get the help they need at school. However, we also need to develop our outstanding students to reach their academic potential.

In the 2014 article, Are Gifted Children Getting Lost in the Shuffle? by Jane Sevier, Vanderbilt University Professor David Lubinski argues that gifted children should be valued as precious human capital as our future creators and leaders:

Gifted children are likely to be the next generation’s innovators and leaders—yet …are often invisible in the classroom, lacking the curricula, teacher input and external motivation to reach full potential….Gifted children are a precious human-capital resource, said Lubinski who has spent four decades studying talented individuals…. This population represents future creators of modern culture and leaders in business, health care, law, the professoriate and STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). When [gifted students] enter elementary and high school classrooms … teachers often shifted focus away from them to those struggling with the coursework. This resulted in missed learning opportunities, frustration and underachievement….

Given this situation, the realistic answer available to us is that we as parents can strategically use our personal human capital and social capital in ways that give our own children the greatest advantages. We can’t personally solve our nation’s educational issues, but we as parents can more narrowly focus our time and effort toward doing everything possible to gain crucial educational advantages for our own children.

Most of us have been lucky enough to have some wonderful teachers who are innovative in their teaching, inspiring, and deeply caring, and hopefully this is our kids’ experience too. However, you should expect your child to eventually be affected by some school issues. Expect it, because it will happen. This happens to every family and every student. However, no matter what, never let any teacher’s or school’s behavior and actions dictate the overall quality of your child’s education. All excuses must be eliminated from our mindsets in order to allow our children to deeply believe that they can achieve a high level of success, even within the imperfect circumstances of life.

If my son complains that he is bored with math, it’s my job to tell him that I expect him to get un-bored and learn his math--with no excuses! If your daughter needs help with reading, make it your responsibility to guarantee that she’s a great reader.

The prize for our children learning is not some superficial rewarding gimmick, in style at some schools right now; it is our deep belief that our kids are people in the process of becoming amazing! They grow to love that prize as they investigate the many ways that they are talented and skilled.

In the campaign to bridge the gap in education, it is parents who are gap-fillers for our own children’s education. I intentionally said gap-fillers because we must not merely bridge the gap but instead we must strive each day to fill the depths of our children’s minds with positive mindset, self-confidence, skills, and knowledge until they are overflowing and abundant.

I take great personal pride in the fact all four of my children could read every word of P.D. Eastman’s book, Go, Dog. Go! before they finished kindergarten. They learned to read all of these words in kindergarten because I worked with each of my kids for 30 minutes a day during the second half of kindergarten to personally guarantee that my kids would be reading more than 100 words by the time they entered first grade.

Nobody forced me to spend all of those hours teaching my four kids to read. No teacher even suggested it. I did it because I believe in my children and wanted them to start their first grade of school as top students from day one. We, as parents, should do whatever we can to teach our children the skills necessary to make their dreams come true.

When we take control over our children’s education, our children are far less vulnerable to school problems. If a teacher doesn’t teach something, we make it our duty to teach it to them. Every day, we can make this silent promise to our children: No matter what, you will get a great education if I have to teach it to you myself! This is our children’s insurance policy that they will definitely not be the kids who slipped through the cracks in school without learning enough. This commitment tells our kids that we personally guarantee that they will have an excellent education. After we begin to academically work with our children on a daily basis, they quickly begin to understand that they are expected to be exceptional students because there are no excuses whatsoever stopping them from their educational goals.

Beyond that are our dreams and aspirations for our kids. It is about teaching our children how to experience their own wow factors. It’s deeply fulfilling to help our kids become capable of winning awards for being great at something. Helping our children learn to reach their potentials is an act of love too.

We take this awesome mission upon ourselves as our biggest goal in life. And we’re glad to do it. We personally have what it takes to teach our kids how to get outstanding results. So here we go!

2. Top Students Know the Tiny Differences Between A’s and B’s

There is a myth that borders on legendary proportion that A students are so vastly different from B students that they are often treated as a different species of human being. According to this myth, B students are supposedly so much lower in quality that they should not even aspire to belong in the same group. Every B student who buys into this supposed inferiority will never even try to compete at the top. The myth is powerful because so many people believe it. So many B students are psyched out from even attempting to be the best, and thus they fulfill the prophecy, making the myth become even stronger.

The truth is that there are only tiny differences between A and B grades. In fact, all students who receive A’s, B’s, and C’s are much closer than anyone on the top of the heap wants to admit. In order to get a C, a student must receive at least 70% out of 100% of points possible. If you think about it, 70% is a fairly high number. 70% is much closer to 80% (a low B) and 90% (a low A) than it is to the most complete failure of 0%. Looking just at the percentages, even C students are grouped much closer to A and B students than most people generally believe.

Mathematically speaking, the percentage differences between a C and a B can be tiny. The highest C can be 1% lower (79% of all possible points) than the lowest B (80% of all possible points.). Likewise, the highest B can be 1% lower (89% of all possible points) than the lowest A (90% of all possible points). What this means is that many students can improve their grades drastically by improving their performance just a little bit.

A students thoroughly understand the percentile point system and use it to their advantage. They keep track of every score from each assignment, quiz, project, and test to make sure that they maintain an A average. If an A student gets an 85% (a mid-B) on a test, they strategically make a plan for how they will make those points up before the end of the marking period so that they can still get an A in the class. Any student who pays careful attention to their exact percentile points earned in a class and then strategically plans to make up points can improve their grades.

So if the difference is so tiny between grades, why do A students always rise to the top? My second oldest daughter summed it up well, "‘A’ students do everything possible to earn points while ‘B’ and ‘C’ students only do most of the things possible to earn points."

Precisely what do A students do all of the time that B and C students are doing most of the time? A students always follow the directions. They analyze the directions, if necessary, to squeeze out every possible point. They double-check the pointing system for a project (sometimes called a rubric) to make certain that their project covers each and every possible point. By the time every possible point is covered, the project is usually awesome. B and C students often gloss over the directions and, accordingly, get points knocked off for doing the project a little bit wrong in some aspect or for incompleteness of an assignment.

A students always double-check their assignments, projects, and tests to make certain that there are no blatant errors that can easily be avoided. All math is double-checked because A students know that there is one right answer for a math problem and everything else is wrong. All math problems are neatly and correctly lined up and all work on each problem is shown in order to get maximum points. All writing is neat enough to read (if teachers can’t read it, points are lost) and is carefully checked for spelling and grammar errors. B and C students often miss obvious errors because they don’t double-check their work at all or not very well. Accordingly, points get knocked off for those easily avoidable errors.

Andrea Wiens, in research done for her master’s degree at University of Nebraska-Lincoln, found that more careless errors correlated with worse grades on seventh grade math tests:

* A students made 0.87 careless errors per test.

* B+ students made 1.69 careless errors per test.

* B students made 1.79 careless errors per test.

* C+ students made 2.39 careless errors per test.

* C students made 3.88 careless errors per test.

* D+ students made 3.24 careless errors per test.

* D students made 2.67 careless errors per test.

* F students made 4.25 careless errors per test.

You should note that according to this research, on average, A students made less than one careless error per math test—meaning that certain A students in this study made no careless errors on their tests. Careless errors wreck grades.

A students always do extra credit assignments and problems as a backup strategy for lower scores that occasionally happen. Yes, top students sometimes get B’s or C’s on quizzes or tests. Most of the time, A students do more extra credit than they need, but it is worth it because it is their insurance plan for getting an A. B and C students do some or none of the extra credit assignments and problems and, accordingly, don’t have enough extra points stored up to make up for a lower test or quiz score.

A students enjoy being great at what they do, and their schoolwork reflects it. They often go over and beyond minimum requirements that are set forth by teachers. Essays and stories are often several pages longer than the minimum page number. Projects have special details, charts, and diagrams that are not required but are certainly appreciated by teachers. Many B and C students are less sure of their potential, and their schoolwork often inadvertently reflects a weaker belief in their abilities.

Could better grades really be as easy as studying percentage points and making tiny changes in a student’s behavior? Yes. Getting good grades is really more about accountability than intelligence. There is no reason why a child who is routinely a high B student in all of his classes can’t tweak his average of 86% (high B’s) slightly upwards to 91% (low A’s) by improving just a little bit in order to become an A student. I believe that more B and C students would improve their grades if they knew how extremely close they already are to that next grade.

It is up to us to get our children to understand that they have the potential for great grades. Eliminate all myths of inferiority. We must teach our children that all people have potential to be great, no matter what background or culture. We need to get them to understand that good grades are mostly about careful attention to all details that can earn points. We need to help our children learn how to analyze their assignment, quiz, project, and test scores so that they can strategically plan for good grades. We must develop a deep belief that our children are smart enough to get excellent grades. If we, as parents, deeply believe in our children’s potential, our children will absorb this belief and make it their own.

3. Top Students Can Learn About Anything!

One of the most interesting concepts I learned as a lawyer is that people can learn about any topic or idea imaginable. Yes, lawyers must know the law, but, more importantly, we must apply the law to a wide range of factual circumstances. It’s part of the job to learn about all sorts of things. After all, lawyers cannot intelligently argue about mechanical malfunctions, medical surgeries, chemical reactions, crime scene forensics, and so many other factual circumstances unless we first learn a great deal about these subject matters. Fortunately, regardless of what type of jobs we have, we all have the choice to actively learn about whatever we want throughout our lives.

This concept of being free to learn about everything only entered my life as an adult. I believe my parents meant well, but while growing up, there was a thick layer of unspoken rules about what was appropriate and inappropriate for me to learn. My family never discussed news, girls learned household and cooking skills, and boys learned car and house maintenance skills. My brothers and I were taught that women