Adults in this country spend a good deal of time learning to balance the many opportunities and priorities available to us. For many, this is a time of abundance – both material abundance and an abundance of opportunity. We balance our roles at work with our responsibilities to family, friends and community. Many of us also take on service roles. All of this comes on top of hobbies, reading, dining, entertainment, and maintaining our health.

 

Children face the same challenge of trying to balance schoolwork while simultaneously learning lacrosse, the trumpet, to play tennis and to make and maintain relationships. The difference, of course, is that we have had lots of practice at balancing these multiple demands, and our children have not.

 

This might be why we sometimes have the “pleasure” of watching children to see what happens when one of the balls falls with a SPLAT! Have you noticed, though, that it rarely is the “keeping up with friends” ball that falls? More often than not, it is one of the academic balls -- the history test that didn’t go so well, the project that didn’t quite get done, or the quiz that didn’t get enough preparation.

 

From a child’s perspective (and maybe from our own, if we are honest about it), our kids are actually making the right choice. Friendships are precious. If we had the choice for our kids between having honest and meaningful friendships and slightly lower grades or high grades at the cost of grave social discomfort, most of us would choose the former.

 

That is not to say that we don’t want BOTH high achievement and a rich social life for our kids, but that is a tall order, one that sometimes takes years to learn how to make happen. All of us learn to make choices and to elevate our priorities. These decisions, as many of us know first hand, are sometimes surprising AND are always an opportunity for learning and growth.

 

Ask students, and certainly, they know what they “should” do. They should prioritize their work, organize in advance, and execute to the best of their abilities. You might even be lucky enough to have a middle schooler that does all of the above, but that is not the norm for most Middle School students, at least not at first.

 

Most Middle School kids are on a different, perhaps flatter, learning curve. Often, they need to first be shown the value of these strategies. Students often discover in Middle School that there are just too many things to juggle, and too much information to rely upon past practice, less sophisticated study habits, and plain old good fortune. Sometimes, they learn the hard way. Although it is not pretty to see a

student come face to face with the demand to learn new skills, it is a milestone of significant import because it creates the need to develop new habits and strategies.

 

Having been around schools for some time now (30 years!), I have this happen to a lot of students. It looks a little bit different for each child. For some, they see the accident coming their way and take necessary evasive action by unilaterally adopting the more sophisticated strategies taught in class. This is often done just in the nick of time.

 

Others need to experience a small fender bender, maybe a graze with a “C” or “D” before switching over, while a few need to run into the wall over and over again, experience the carnage, hear the wail of sirens and even then only reluctantly and distantly perceive the need to develop a new approach.

 

The outcome in each case is the same, although the collateral damage to GPAs and parents’ frayed nerves can be vastly different. Ultimately, though, all children, over time, see the need and benefit associated with developing the ability to organize oneself differently in order to reach desired goals.

 

Sometimes it is actually parents that delay children from becoming more accomplished jugglers. In our effort to protect our children from hitting the wall we either rescue or blame.

 

Rescuing — rushing to the store to get the missing supplies, reminding our child for the fifth time of the upcoming test — only delays a child’s recognition of the need to develop compensatory skills.

 

Blaming — putting control of the situation outside your child’s control and attacking the situation or person — also delays skill development and has the more insidious effect of teaching our children a less helpful set of skills.

 

It all makes sense, but in the long run, it does not help our children to develop the very skills and strategies they will need. Every child deserves the same opportunity to try, to experience the outcomes, to get support from teachers and family, and to develop the organizational and study skills needed to meet with success as the level of challenge increases.

 

The Middle School gives our students many opportunities to challenge themselves. Sometimes kids will succeed, sometimes they will not. It is our job as parents and teachers to help kids see that there are lessons to learn from each experience, to pick up the ball that dropped, and to get it back up in the air again.