Helping junior high schoolers connect with their future

As a parent of a junior high schooler, you know that the preteen and teen years are no academic cake-walk. An expanded roster of challenging courses and tests can produce a fair amount of pressure at a time when kids don't always feel like focusing on school work.

From an adult perspective, we understand there is a lot riding on how well children learn their lessons now: Future coursework will be easier to tackle, they're more likely to meet state academic requirements, they'll have a better chance of earning scholarships to defray the cost of higher learning, and ultimately they will improve their chances of getting a satisfying job.

Unfortunately, most of these life goals are too far off to be meaningful to the average junior high schooler. Children don't really have the foresight to truly understand that failing a math course now might affect their ability to pass a math Regents exam in high school or that it could ultimately close off a lot of career choices to them.

Knowing that the junior high years are important academic stepping stones, how do you help spark your children's interest in learning and help them understand the rewards of doing well or the penalties of slacking off? We all know lecturing is futile. Preteens and teens are likely to tune you out or they might become rebellious and stop applying themselves altogether.

So what does work? Here is what some parents, teachers and guidance counselors recommend:

• Tap into their interests. Learning doesn't have to be drudgery. However, the difference seems to be whether or not kids find their classroom work meaningful to their day-to-day lives. One parent said that her seventh grader has applied his mathematics skills to his love of baseball — he figures professional players' statistics and also uses it to chart his own athletic growth. Her other son, an eighth grader who she describes as a kid who "doesn't seem as sure about where all of his learning is going to get him," recently discovered through an interest inventory that he has an aptitude for a career in truck driving. After doing some online research with her son, they found that truck drivers need to keep accurate logs of where they've traveled. Now her son is learning to keep logs and in the process is honing his organizational skills. He has also tied what he's learned about truck driving to his social studies curriculum. He can now see how learning to read maps could be applied to something he might do in the future.
  
  Though some children have clear interests, there are many others who have yet to find their niche. Taking an interest inventory (a series of questions designed to determine interests, strengths and weaknesses) can be helpful. Volunteerism and service projects are also good ways for kids to explore what they are passionate about. Talk with your child's guidance counselor for more information about these resources.

• Help children develop a more global perspective. To see the applicability of what they are learning, children have to be able to look beyond themselves at the larger world. You can help by subscribing to local newspapers, setting news sites as the home page on the family computer and talking with your children about relevant current events. You can also watch movies together that deal with current events or other historical topics (the local library is a great resource for these types of recorded materials).

• Expose children to future career possibilities. Take them to work with you and let them learn about the basic skills you draw on when you do your job. If, for example, they express an interest in writing, talk with them about the vast number of ways that people can use their writing both for pleasure (poetry, short stories), as well as profit (journalism, editing, writing books for children, etc.) At this U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site, kids can explore careers that relate to their various school subjects:
  
  http://stats.bls.gov/k12/html/edu_over.htm. The teacher's guide includes links for additional information on careers.

• Use older siblings or family friends as role models, but resist the temptation to compare, particularly if they are struggling academically. Rather than trying to explain with words how a high school or college curriculum relates to junior high school lessons, point to the projects, daily coursework and tests that older children are tackling. If feasible, have your children work at their homework together so that the younger ones can see for themselves what future academics are like. This type of sibling mentoring can be an effective, real-life means of showing the relationship between dedication to schoolwork now and success in the not-too-distant future. [top]