4 MORE Important College Skills

Learn the Keys to Communication

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Ever make plans for a special feast and then arrive at the store without your shopping list? You’ll remember the major items but a nagging fear you’ve forgotten something will follow you home. Navigating the final educational years with your high school student can feel like this. Even with a mapped out transcript, you’ll often be plagued by the concern you’ve forgotten some vital lessons.

A well-rounded academic-focused transcript is splendid. A good high school check-list insures students take the requisite classes and complete those necessary credit hours. You’ll soon learn getting into college is only the first little battle. Your high school student also needs to develop proficiencies to help her stay in college for the long haul. Here’s a short list of skills that must be practiced throughout high school to guarantee a smoother path through college. If you’ve failed to work these into your curricula: Now is the time to add these to your learner’s existing studies.

1. Note taking

Home educated students are rarely great at note-taking unless they have intentionally sought lecture format courses. As much as parent educators love to offer lively, interactive, hands-on, out-of-the-box teaching opportunities, most first and second year classes at college will have a traditional lecture format with large lower level course sizes. I was once a TA for a 700-student mythology course! Will your student be good at note taking?

Conventionally schooled parents may have spent many youthful hours in lecture-format high school classes and wrongly take this skill for granted. Note-taking must be learned, practiced, and perfected. Your student can start to master the skill while reading or listening to sermons at church, vlogs, or podcasts. Later have him participate in lecture-based courses in which he is responsible for mastering what he hears. Don’t let college be your child’s first high-stakes note-taking experience.

The best students know that note-taking is more than just busy work and transcription skills. Good note-takers are also active listeners. The practice of organizing and processing data during a lecture is the first huge boost to learning that data. The second sensible move is to train a student to always recopy her notes right after each class. If she does so, she’ll seldom do poorly on an exam. Fleshing out ideas right after a lecture means far more than just neat notebooks. If she is diligent, a good note-taker will process the data a second or even third time without spending much extra time on the class. By the time she must prepare for the test, she’ll already have much more information neatly stored in her long-term memory. The best way to study for even the most difficult topic is to take notes, recopy those notes, and then copy them a third time. By then, recall will be a breeze.

2. Typing

Parents might be hunt-and-peck typers with short-form abbreviated texting habits. If this describes you, this will likely describe your students. Take some important time in early middle school actively working on typing accuracy and speed. There are several really fun apps on the market to help build both. No student should still be using the hunt-and-peck approach to typing nor the “look at every keystroke” method by the time they go to college so why wait that long? Get those skills going before high school so that it comes naturally when typing is needed the most.

3. Time management

Teens are notorious for being poor time managers while others seem on-the-ball at birth! Some kids are born behind schedule, always rushing to finish projects, chores, and responsibilities. But the secret is basically this: Time management can’t be taught so much as modeled and practiced through personal experience. Parents naturally want to take up the mental load of constantly reminding kids who have a more relaxed approach to life’s schedules instead of letting their children quickly learn what happens when time is not managed adequately.

Start early and never stop stressing the importance of getting things done on time without drama but resist the temptation to DO the managing. Raise the bar for high school students. Give your child the chance to work on a variety of long and short term projects while navigating a normal schedule. State your expectations up front, set firm due dates, and be prepared to live with the consequences of occasional failure without drama. Mom and dad often sabotage real growth in time management skills by softening the blow of real consequences, especially when consequences impact grades. Don’t rationalize offering flexible deadlines to save your learner’s GPA. Poor time management skills in high school will eventually damage college, career and interpersonal success. Start early (well before transcripts are at risk) and stick to your stated schedule and your stated repercussions.

The best students know that good time management will let them pack more into each organized and prioritized day.  If they put goals, school projects, exercise, spiritual development and relationships ahead of interruptions, time-wasters, games, and short-form content. They’ll experience the fullness that high school and college have to offer during truly free time opportunities once they know how to finish obligations first, not last. Encourage students to volunteer for community service projects or major family ventures in which they take leadership in planning and implementation. They can see how time management skills pay off while working in service to others. Ever wonder why colleges like to see community service on a high school transcript? Time management is one big reason.    

4. Mature Communication Skills

Each semester I teach several hundred home educated high school students live online. I encourage them to communicate questions and concerns about the material at hand rather than asking mom or dad to do this chore. If they don’t understand something or need help, they must communicate that to me instead of having a parent become a translator. When I hear their questions, I get to know them, and they learn to express themselves and even advocate for themselves if they think I need to revisit a score or grant some type of extension. The whole process makes them better students while I become a better educator.

Not every student develops even these communication skills. I will sometimes have a student for 2, 3, or even 4 years of Latin. Out of shyness or due to limited experience in self-advocation, they never step up. Consequently, I never communicate with that student directly. How sad when such a student asks for a college recommendation! All I can do is rave about good grades. College recommendation forms don’t ask teachers much about grades because that’s what transcripts are for. Top colleges and universities want to know how well a student interacts with teachers and students, how well she reacts to adversity, his warmth of personality, her sense of humor, his leadership qualities, character, and extracurricular accomplishments. Colleges especially want to know if a student responds well to setbacks. If I’ve never had a chance to communicate with a student, a whole letter about good grades is worse than no recommendation at all.  

The best students overcome a shy or tentative nature by learning to interact with trustworthy adults, educators, youth leaders, and coaches. The best parents not only encourage their children to interact with adults but will insist that their child do all the talking and negotiating when there is a question or dispute. Once at college, professors will interact with students as adults or quickly grow to discount students who don’t act like adults. Parents should never communicate with college professors (or potential employers) on behalf of their students. If you have a shy student, make sure the communication skill has been well rehearsed before freshman orientation begins.   

Student Email Etiquette Primer

Communicating in the Email Age: How Does One Get the Instructor to Answer Emails? 

-- By Regan Barr at The Lukeion Project, The Sassy Peripatetic #30

The subject line read “Welcome to Greek History – Instructions Attached.”
Clearly, someone had hit “reply” on an email that I had sent out several months ago. I was going through my morning office ritual, which begins with wading through 75 or more emails that had filled my Inbox while I was sleeping. I kept scanning until one email caught my attention. “Help! I can’t get into my quiz!”
I immediately jumped on that email. Here was a student who needed my help, and it was time-sensitive. The subject line might be a little over-dramatic, but it did its job; it clearly communicated the nature and urgency of the content and the frustration of the student who sent it. I opened the email, found out what the problem was, and shot back a response that the problem had been fixed.
I continued scanning. There’s another one with a months-old subject line: “Welcome to Greek History – Instructions Attached.” “That’s odd,” I thought, but it certainly didn’t look like a priority, so I kept scanning. By the time I encountered that same subject line a third time, I decided that I was dealing with one of two situations: either someone’s email was malfunctioning, or someone didn’t understand this new-fangled invention called email. I reluctantly and begrudgingly opened the email. “Why aren’t you answering me? I CAN’T SUBMIT MY RESEARCH PAPER! I’ve tried for hours and I sent you a message last night. Now the deadline has passed!”
Well, perhaps using a subject line that was 3 months old wasn’t your best move.
This kind of debacle (complete with accusations of blame, emotional distress, and crushed hopes and dreams) is far too common. Sometimes laziness is to blame, but sometimes people really don’t understand email etiquette. If you don’t want the recipient to completely ignore your email, or worse yet, be irritated by it, you should follow some simple email rules:

1. Always include a RELEVANT subject line.

This is more than just being courteous; it’s also the key to getting the recipient to open your email. Now I know that some people don’t understand this because they only get three emails a week, but gone are the days when people eagerly watched their computers awaiting the “You’ve got mail!” notification. Most people aren’t sitting on the edges of their seats hoping for an email from you. Instead, they’re rolling their eyes at the deluge of email garbage that assaults them each morning when they sit down at their computer.
Instructors, bosses, clients – people who wade through lots of email every day – usually approach the laborious task of email wrangling by focusing on two questions: what needs my immediate attention? and what can I delete without even opening it? An inappropriate subject line can land you in the second category, no matter how important the content of your email.
Those who are new to email are thinking, “Well, how rude! I can’t believe someone would delete an email without even opening it!” The rest of us, however, do it dozens of times a day just to maintain our sanity. Rude is expecting others to perceive the importance of an email that has a deceptive subject line.

2. Always IDENTIFY YOURSELF.

The email read “Mr. Barr, our electricity went out in the storm while I was entering my homework. Can I submit it a second time? – Frodo Baggins.” I was surprised to learn that I had such a famous literary character in my class, so my response was, “Although I’m very fond of hobbits, I’ll need to know who you actually are before I can answer.” The reply floored me: “Well, my mom says that I can never use my real name on the internet.” That makes re-setting homework very difficult.
When sending email to family or close friends, you often don’t need to identify yourself. I know and recognize any email that comes from a family member or close personal friend. But when emailing someone who receives dozens or hundreds of emails a day, like your teacher, your boss, or a customer service representative, give them everything they need to immediately gain some context. I ask my students to give me their full name, class, and time: John Doe, Greek 2, 10:00 am.
When you fail to include vital information, the result is usually a good deal of delay. If I’ve got nothing better to do, I might wander through my class rosters or wade into the student database on a quest to discover the identity of the mysterious sender. But here’s the thing: I ALWAYS have something better to do. My response is usually, “who is this, what class are you in, and which homework assignment are you talking about?” Several hours are usually lost while we play email tag – a game that most instructors really don’t like very much.

3. Always INCLUDE DETAILS.

“Mr. Barr, I can’t see the class recording.” There are many reasons why this might be the case. Here are a few that immediately come to mind: there’s a cat between you and your computer screen; your contact lens prescription is out of date; your computer monitor is turned off; you don’t know the password for the recording; you can’t find the recording link; you’re getting an error message; your power is out because of a storm… should I go on?
There’s simply no way to help this person until I’ve got more information. A lot of time would be saved by simply including that in the first email. If you’re getting an error message, please include what that message says in your email. If your cat is in the way, you’ll have to be creative and solve that one for yourself.
Failure to follow these three rules will result in frustration, wasted time, missed deadlines, and lost opportunities. Perhaps even more important, your recipient may become very irritated. That’s not something you want, especially if the recipient is your boss or your teacher!