Tutoring is a good decision

Parents can quite often be the worst teachers. They may be teaching their child with the best of intentions but may not be doing it the right way and not consistently. When the child’s grades start falling, the parent gets all worked up and they end up trying even harder. It is a no-win situation,which turns out to be frustrating for both the parent and the child. The parent does not understand why the child is unable to understand something so simple and the child starts feeling less confident and makes more mistakes while trying to please the parent.

Enrolling your child in a tutoring center does not mean that you have failed in some parental duty. You are actually making a good decision in regard to your child since a tutoring service like Pinecone Learning Center ensures that the child understands the basics before moving on to higher levels. The advantages of a learning center are that they are consistent and have no pre-conceived expectations from your child. They evaluate the child and start at a level comfortable to the child. Another advantage is you have their studies covered and you can spend quality time with your child.

Pinecone has an excellent Math Program and a Reading program, which have been created after a lot of research and study in teaching methods and order of difficulty that the child will be faced with as they progress from one grade to the next. The programs are both based on K-12 standards. Visit their website at www.pineconelearning.com or call (408) 270-4548 for more details.

Let your child set the pace

Pinecone Learning Center is a learning center in San Jose, which is well known for its dedicated tutors and their systematic work schedule. They have a math program and a reading program which has been designed to cater to every child’s unique needs. It progresses upwards in terms of difficulty. Your child will be evaluated and then the decision will be made on which level he or she will start. Do not get disheartened if your child is starting at a lower lever than his/her peers. It is better to start the child at a level he/she is comfortable in to feel a boost in confidence. Some children may not have gotten their basics right and the tutors would prefer to spend some time addressing this before tackling more complicated levels. Do not compare your child’s work with her/his peers as the experienced tutors at Pinecone believe in letting the child decide the pace. But you can be rest assured that your child actually understands what he/she is learning and will start to enjoy the subject. You will see the results very soon as the grades start rising. Visit their websites atwww.pineconelearning.comand www.mathtutorsbayarea.com . You can call the owner and principal tutor Vivian Hobbs at (408) 270-4548 to fix an appointment.

Avoid rote learning

Some children, who had breezed through lower classes, start doing badly and end up bringing home bad report cards which each passing grade. Parents often wonder what went wrong and where. The culprit is usually rote learning. In the younger classes, children learn lessons by rote and for a while this works as the amount of study material is pretty small. But as they grow and go on to higher grades, they are unable to keep it up as the amount of study material becomes vast.

Don’t let that happen to your child. Make sure that your child gets the basics right. Once the foundation is laid, your child will be able to understand the subjects, even as they get more complicated. Pinecone Learning Center is a tutoring center in the Bay area that has a great reading program which includes an early comprehension series designed to promote reading for meaning. The vocabulary program, beginning in first grade, creates challenging activities to advance and strengthen basic language skills. They take a direct approach to grammar beginning with first grade work. The entire program blends together to help the child understand and appreciate the language.

The Math program is designed to achieve mastery of computational skills. The Math program consists of over 160 weekly booklets arranged sequentially from beginning number sense through geometry. You can get more details at their website at www.pineconelearning.com. If you would like to meet the tutor before enrolling your child, call (408) 270-4548 to fix an appointment.

A steady pace wins the race

Children learn in unique, different ways and at their own pace. So what works for one child may not be the best for another. In a classroom, teachers quite often find it difficult to cater to every child’s unique needs and so they take the middle route and create a syllabus that is aimed at an average child. But what happens is that a child, whose learning pace is slow, falters. Many teachers who are passionate about teaching try to help the slow learner with extra classes and more practice. But it is difficult with an added burden and the teacher may not be able to consistently give the attention the child needs.

Pinecone Learning Center is a tutoring service in San Jose and is a good place to get your child some extra homework help. They have a very good reading program and an excellent Math program. The lessons are created in such a way that it caters to every child’s unique learning needs. The lessons are made in an ascending order of skill and the child will start at the level that he/she is comfortable in. Only when that level has been mastered will they move on to the next level.

Pinecone Learning Center provides sequential programs, expert guidance with caring tutor assistants and a learning-friendly environment with daily work that is tailored to your child. You can call (408) 270-4548 to make an appointment to meet the tutor. To get more details on this tutoring center visit www.pineconelearning.com

COMMUNITY COLLEGES ARE NOT PRODUCING GRADUATES

70% of community college students fail to earn a certificate, AA degree or transfer within six years. Main Culprits? Math and English (Surprise!)

“...Math is an aggressively cumulative enterprise; miss a few teeth in your motive gears and higher gears will never turn.”

Nearly 2.8 million students are enrolled in the state’s 112 community colleges this year, making it the largest higher education system in the world. However, in their 2010 report, “Divided We Fail: Improving Completion and Closing Racial Gaps in California’s Community Colleges,” researchers Colleen Moore and Nancy Shulock found that six years after enrolling in a community college, “only 30% of degree-seeking students had completed a certificate or degree, or had transferred to a university. Most of the other 70% had dropped out; only 15% were still enrolled!

A major reason for the dramatic fall-off is the huge number of students who are unprepared for college work. According to a brief from the state Legislative Analyst’s Office, about 85% of incoming community college students aren’t prepared for college-level math, and some 70% aren’t ready for college English, even though they’ve passed the California High School Exit Exam and graduated from high school, often with respectable grade point averages. According to the aptly named report Diploma to Nowhere, four out of five students who place in developmental education had a GPA above 3.0 in high school. Kyle, a first-year student at Foothill College in Los Altos when I spoke with him a while ago, told me that his GPA was 3.7 and he nailed the exit exam on his first try as a sophomore in high school. A classmate of his had a 3.5 GPA and considered herself one of the “smart kids” in high school. Both of them flunked the math placement exam and wound up in basic skills math. “It was a shock when I came to this class and the first thing I was learning was addition and subtraction,” said Kyle.

The higher the level of developmental education, the more likely students are to try to continue.

Basic skills classes can take students anywhere from one to five semesters to complete – and that’s before they can even enroll in regular college courses needed for an AA degree or to transfer into Cal State or the University of California. Most students don’t stick with them.

An EdSource study commissioned by the state Community College Chancellor’s Office found that 54% of students who passed the lowest level of freshman composition enrolled in the next level up. But continuing that pattern over time doesn’t look so good after all. Myra Snell, a math professor at Los Medanos Community College in Pittsburg, describes spending five years revamping the school’s basic skills algebra sequence in order to boost the success rate by 10%. They did it. “I was so proud of it,” recalls Snell, but then she asked the office of institutional research to do a persistence study to see how many students who started in elementary algebra continued on to a college-level course. It was 17%.

Devastated, Snell began thinking about what happened and realized “that a student who starts in elementary algebra has five exit possibilities because they have to pass elementary algebra, choose to enroll in intermediate, pass intermediate algebra, choose to enroll in the transfer level course, and pass the transfer level course.” Along the way they lost 83 percent of their students.

What to do?

Here is a comment from a veteran math professor:

Statistical quality control might readily highlight the fact that a previous individual failure to learn the intended curriculum reverberates continually for about ten years, from the first alienating failure in long division and other decimal ” carrying ” curricula to the repeated failure to accumulate key insights and skills( math is an aggressively cumulative enterprise; miss a few teeth in your motive gears and higher gears will never turn). The late Walter Denham of the CDE used to preach this same gospel, and it seems things haven’t changed much in 20 years. As a general proposition, the evidence argues that we do not understand quite how to imbue into more than 30% of our students the antecedent schema and archetypes for Algebraic reasoning, and this fact has been stubbornly true for the 17 years now that I have been teaching HS math.

I don’t know what to do about teaching math, but there are some wonderfully good and frightfully smart math teachers among us, including many in elementary schools. I think we need to focus like a laser beam on both these great math teachers and our elementary schools to try to wrench some drastic improvement at scale in student’s math skill.

Or, you could enroll in Pinecone at any age and commit to the program for 2-3 years until you have mastered all the shaky concepts that comprise the missing teeth in your gears.

Four Things You Probably Don't Know About People With Autism

In honor of Autism Awareness Month I have decided to compile a list of some common myths and misconceptions about autism spectrum disorders and the people who live with them.

As a teenager living with Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism, I am speaking my opinion from my experiences and research and am not necessarily dictating facts.

Autism is still a widely unknown realm despite extensive research. If you would like to support funding for autism research and families with autism or read more about autism spectrum disorders, please visit www.autismnj.org or my blog at www.theautistartist.wordpress.com.

Autistic People Are Not All Created Equal

Autism is a spectrum disorder, meaning that there are many conditions within the spectrum. The most common autism spectrum disorders are autism, Asperger’s Syndrome, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder—Not Otherwise Specified. Their symptoms can range from severe, as in some varieties of autism or the little-known Rett Syndrome, or can be very mild, as in high-functioning autism and Asperger’s Syndrome. Severe cases usually involve severe language delays, and some individuals never speak. These people are referred to as “non-verbal”--they need constant attention throughout their lives and usually spend their adulthoods in group homes or with family members.

High-functioning individuals, on the other hand, can go on to be extremely successful and independent. Some famous people speculated to have autism are Albert Einstein, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook.

All people on the spectrum have some varying degree of social deficiencies, hypersensitivity, targeted obsessions (such as train schedules or dinosaurs), and fine motor deficiencies.

Just because somebody is autistic does not mean that they have autism. Autism is a specific diagnosis, while an autism spectrum disorder could be any of several conditions.

10 Percent of Autistic People Also Have Savant Syndrome

Savant Syndrome is probably most famously portrayed in the 1991 movie “Rain Man,” in which the main character is an autistic savant. In reality, around 1 in 10 people with an autism spectrum disorder also have savant abilities, though they are not as obvious in some people as they are in “Rain Man.”

This is because the severity of Savant Syndrome (that is, how prodigious the abilities are) is generally proportional to the severity of the ASD in the individual. Prodigious savants, while possessing unbelievable abilities in their respective area, are usually extremely low-functioning and a lot of times are unable to communicate efficiently.

Those with more mild forms of autism tend to have more mild forms of Savant Syndrome (A notable exception is Daniel Tammet, the current world record holder for Most Digits of Pi Memorized at 25,000 digits, who is a prodigious savant and has mild Asperger’s Syndrome).

The four types of savants are mathematical calculators like Rain Man and Mr. Tammet, who can compute large equations mentally, date calculators who can associate any calendar date with the day of the week it fell on, musical savants who have perfect pitch and find music natural, and spatial savants such as Temple Grandin and John Elder Robison, who can design and test machines in their heads.

Autistic People Always Act For A Reason

The most common thing many people associate with autistic children is tantrums. In non-verbal or semi-verbal children with more severe varieties of autism, tantrums occur quite frequently. In these tantrums the child will scream, run, bite, pull hair, hit himself, and/or cry and more, depending on the specific child.

They may seem random and unsolicited, but the truth is that every tantrum has a reason. Autistic people are extremely logical thinkers and, in fact, do not enjoy having tantrums. The internal chaos that ensues during an episode is quite uncomfortable and is always a response to overwhelming stimuli in the outside environment.

Common settings for tantrums are crowded supermarkets or restaurants, amusement parks, or any place that is too loud, too bright, or too enclosed.

More Boys Than Girls Are Diagnosed With ASD

1 in 110 children have been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, and 1 in 70 boys have been diagnosed.

Boys are four times more likely to be diagnosed than girls. This may not necessarily mean that ASD occurs more often in boys--my theory is that it is more difficult to diagnose an autism spectrum disorder in girls because we learn to adapt to our environment much easier.

This does not mean that autistic girls are smarter, but that society simply makes it easier to be a girl with an ASD. While young girls tend to be accepting of their peers’ differences, young boys tend to act out physically upon those who are different. As a result, autistic boys tend to be bullied much more than autistic girls, and since boys have a harder time of controlling emotions, they tend to act out in the form of violence or tantrums. Such actions usually lead to immediate evaluation by psychiatrists and earlier diagnosis.

Because girls have to worry less about bullying, they are less likely to be evaluated until other symptoms become more evident later in life.

Nicole D'Angelo is a 17-year-old Warren resident diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome. She is also an Autism Awareness Ambassador for Autism NJ, working to increase awareness of Autism Spectrum Disorders during Autism Awareness Month. Each Tuesday for the next four weeks, Warren Patch will publish excepts from Nicole's blog to help others learn more about the diagnosis and gain a better understanding of those living with autism.