This time of year can be so hard for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere. We *know* that spring is coming, but it’s not here yet. It’s been months of cold and darkness. And since I’m writing this in 2021, we’ve been stuck at …
Some of us are morning larks and some are night owls. I am most definitely a morning person. If I had a lot of studying to do in college, I went to bed at my usual time and woke up a few hours early (in …
I was trying to work. But I was tired and foggy. I had no motivation, except to lay down in my bed. But I had so much work to complete. I was on a schedule, dang it! Unfortunately, I had gotten to a point where …
My student Mike had a problem. He had taken lots of notes for an exam on his computer and meticulously organized them in Evernote. But he needed to switch to taking notes by hand. (Why? It’s way more effective for learning!) How could he use …
“How much time do you have in the afternoon and evenings to complete work,” I asked Chris. He was struggling in most of his classes and I was trying to figure out why. “Oh, lots of time. I don’t really do anything after I get …
It’s Friday afternoon and you get an email from the parent portal. Your child has a low grade in English. Ugh. So you open the portal to check all her grades. And lose your dang mind. To get her back on track, you’re now checking …
Working with my tutoring student Lyssa was a practice in patience. For me. I gave her a folder to keep all her tutoring handouts and notes. I think I saw it every once in a while, holding papers for her school classes. Sometimes I would …
You need to get work down. That book read for Lit class, chemistry homework, or studying for your Spanish exam. But everything seems to work against you, pulling your focus. You can’t seem to get any work done. What’s wrong? I live this every single …
As we happily say good-bye to 2020 and hello to 2021, I want to return to some of my top posts from 2020. While I still focused on study skills, organization, and parenting teens, obviously the events of this year affected my content. Some of …
2020 has been a dumpster fire of a year – there is no other way to describe it. Our routines were turned upside down, schools closed, businesses went out of business, cities burned in protest, and above all, the pandemic raged across the planet. I …