Executive Function Strategies Blog

The “real” world. When exactly did we somehow all agree to identify the non-academic world as some separate place and time in which things will finally become real? It’s time to quash this concept because, for students, school is the real world. The skills they need to get through school happen to be highly relevant to the skills they’ll need to tackle in the world beyond textbooks, pop quizzes, and report cards.

“Please stop graduating.” I remember reading this line quite vividly in an otherwise comical card from my younger brother. It was both a sarcastic comment - he’d suffered through my high school, undergraduate, graduate and second graduate school graduations - and a serious one.  He was sick and tired of being outdone academically.  

Unless we happen to be hosting all the relatives for the weekend, I imagine that all of us have time to look up from our computers and greet our family members when they walk 

through the door and take a moment to check in. Of course, parents often complain that kids won’t talk about their day anyway. Parents offer the following familiar scenario:

We all feel the need to be there for our kids. We want to spare them emotional and psychological pain. We step in as tutors, counselors, teachers, police, chief cooks, and bottle washers. Anything, no, everything our kids need remedied, we do our best to fix. As parents, we have an unending desire, an un-qualifying need to make things better for our children. We promise to be there, but we can’t always fix every problem ourselves.