Summer is coming, and for some students this means the long days of vacation, filled with fun and creative activities, whereas for others, it means long days of studying at summer school. Which ones make for better students?
Teresa Watanabe explores the tale of two students - both successful students - with two very different summer plans:
What do you think? Which is the better summer plan? Link (Photo: Anne Cusack / LA Times)Summers for eighth-grader Jade Larriva-Latt are filled with soccer and backpacking, art galleries and museums, library volunteer work and sleep-away camp. There is no summer school, no tutoring.
"They need their childhood," says Jade's father, Cesar Larriva, an associate professor of education at Cal Poly Pomona. "It's a huge concern of mine, the lack of balance from pushing them too hard."
For 10th-grader Derek Lee, summer is the time to sprint ahead in the ferocious race to the academic top. He polishes off geometry, algebra and calculus ahead of schedule and masters SAT content (he earned a perfect 800 on the math portion last fall). This year, he plans to take college-level courses, maybe at UCLA or Stanford.
"You give your kids pressure so they can learn to handle it," says Derek's mother, Meiling Lee, smacking her fist into her hand. "Because finally they have to go out into the real world, and the real world is tough."
Comments (4)
If I expect them to think and act maturely and have a good work ethic, I have to teach them these attributes.
Where once we would have spent the Summers outdoors with our friends, making bonds that could survive well into adulthood, that does not happen anymore. Goofing off for the whole of Summer playing videogames and watching clips on the Internet just doesn't cut the mustard.
Activities don't need to be purely academic to be valuable learning experiences, but they do need to exist.
Philadelphia Cream Cheese is made by Kraft Foods, headquartered in Northfield, Illinois, a Chicago suburb.
Poland Spring Water does not come from the country of Poland but from five sources in the state of Maine, one which is named Poland Spring. (Still, a 4-out-of-5 chance of not-Poland-Spring).
Avon is headquartered in New York City, nowhere near the British river where Shakespeare hung out.
You don't know WHERE your New York Pizza, Philly Cheesesteak, Boston Baked Beans or Memphis Barbeque comes from. Tex-Mex could be all Tex, all Mex or neither.
And Jim Ochsner, in addition to the New Jersey New York teams, the Dallas Cowboys currently play in Arlington, Texas, and previously in Irving, Texas. I got a kick out of calling them the "Irving Cowboys". Of course, there was quite a period of controversy leading up to the awkward naming of one MLB team "The Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim".
And Subway has thousands of stores in areas without underground rapid transit systems.