Dear
Parents and Guardians,
I hope this
message finds you well. Thank you to
everyone who came out this past week to conference with our teachers. I hope you find the experience to be helpful. Regardless of how well your students are
performing at this point of the school year, it is important for all of us to
continue to help them to develop perseverance.
I am including the following article
for your reference. This piece from
Parent ToolKit made the compelling point of students who has acquired the
ability to persevere is directly linked to
their ability to graduate from high school, stay married, and keep a job. It is such an important skill for students to acquire that
one can argue it may be more important than learning the various contents a
school teaches.
I think the
key point that the author made is the importance of rewarding the students’
efforts and the strategies they utilized in order to achieve success instead of
praising the students’ intelligence or innate abilities. Consider two different ways a parent may
respond to her child receiving an A on a big math test. The first is to praise her by saying, “I am
really proud of how well you organized your time this week so that you could
put in the effort you needed to study for the test.” Compare that to the second response where a
parent says, “I am so proud of the A on the test because you have a good math
brain.” The first response draws the
student’s attention to the strategies and effort she used and would increase the
likelihood for her to return to them the next time she encounters similar
challenges. The second response linked a
student’s success to her innate ability – something she has no control over. By focusing the praise on intelligence and innate abilities, it may cause the student to think the struggle she faces in her next challenge is beyond her control, and thus there is not much she can do except to give up. I hope you find the article to be helpful.
On a separate note, I would like to remind everyone that tomorrow, Monday, January 28 is the start of Semester 2. Since some
of your students' Exploratory Classes are semester long courses, your students’
schedules will change on Monday. The school is not planning to print out
paper schedules in order to conserve valuable resources. Therefore, we
ask all parents and guardians to access your students’ schedules through
Aspen’s Parent Portal and remind your students where to go for their Exploratory
classes on Monday. The students themselves can also log onto the Aspen
Student Portal in order to check what their Semester 2 Exploratory classes are
and where their Semester 2 Exploratory classes are located. You can do so
by taking the following steps after you log in to the Portal:
· Click on the “Family” top tab.
· Click on the student’s name if you have multiple students in the
district.
· Click on the “Schedule” side tab.
· Select “S2” on the drop down menu located right above the
student’s schedule.
Please
see this attachment if you need clarifications on the above instructions.
Please
note that most of your student’s schedule will not change for Semester 2.
Only the semester-long Exploratory Classes will change.
Lastly,
please note that we have made a few adjustments to our MCAS Administration
schedule. Please click here for the updated MCAS schedule. The MCAS dates are also posted on the
calendar on our school website. I urge everyone
to plan ahead to make sure your students are in school during the testing
dates. We will make every effort to help
your students make up the tests if they are absent for any reason. However,
taking make-up tests will cause your students lose additional instruction time.
Thank
you and I wish you a great upcoming week!
James
Lin
Principal
McCall
Middle School
