Time, Space, & Memory: Easy Tips to Help Your Middle Schooler with Organization – Part 1
I’ve met very few adults who look back on their middle school experience with anything resembling fondness. Newly raging hormones, along with healthy doses of social awkwardness, complication, and occasional nastiness can make those years a slog. You’re caught in a weird space between childhood and adolescence and it’s hard to figure out exactly where you fit in. When my daughter was an infant, my wife and I apologized in advance to her about middle school. We told her “Sweety, we’re really sorry but someday you’re going to have to go to an awful place called 7thgrade. You may not like it but you’ll get through it.”
School brings on new and formidable challenges as well. In middle school, rather than having a desk of one’s own to use as a home base, students have to store their stuff in a "distant" locker. Rather than staying in one classroom all day, they go from room to room with the expectation that they will arrive on time with all the materials they need. The nature and demands of school work change as well. In elementary school, a student is likely to
succeed if they do a good job retaining discrete facts. A 4th grader who can recite the capitals of every country in Africa is likely to receive praise and success. In middle school, that deep store of facts is likely to be downplayed and the same student may struggle when they are told to write 2 pages about Cairo. All these challenges can be compounded for students who struggle with a set of skills collectively known as the executive functions.
In their excellent book about executive function, Late, Lost, and Unprepared, psychologists
Joyce Cooper-Kahn and Laurie Dietzel define the term this way:
“The executive functions are a set of processes that all have to do with managing oneself and one’s resources in order to achieve a goal. It is an umbrella term for the neurologically-based skills involving mental control and self-regulation.”
Among many others, organization and time management are two critical aspects of executive function that present challenges for many middle schoolers. In elementary school, teachers provide lots of scaffolding for their students around these skills. Middle school students are expected to start handling them independently. The realms of time, space, and memory, big parts of students’ job descriptions. Collectively, though they may seem like chapter headings in a physics text, managing these 3 realms can be exhausting for some students and may seem beyond their capabilities. Fortunately, there are some straightforward things that parents can do to help their kids manage all 3 of them.
Part 1: Time
Time management, particularly when it comes to managing long-term projects, is especially challenging for middle school students. When a deadline is staring a student in the face, he or she may put the pedal to the medal and get the work done. But work that’s not due for another week or two tends to be put on the back burner and often falls off students’ radar screens.
To manage assignments like this, learning how to use a calendar effectively can make an enormous difference. Electronic calendars offer some advantages but using a more traditional desk calendar or academic planner can be effective as well. While the mere act of entering the assignment and its due date is better than nothing, calendars become much more helpful when more information is entered. With a suitable level of thought and detail, calendars can provide enough structure to help students get started and to approach their work in a systematic way.
Suppose your child comes home with the aforementioned assignment asking for 2 written pages about Cairo and tells you he or she has one week to get it done. They insist that they’re not going to leave it until the last minute but you’ve seen this movie before and the ending is unsatisfying every time. You can tell your child that you’re not going to do their work, but you can help them tackle it more efficiently. The first thing to do is to break down the task of writing a paper into its component parts – research, brainstorming, outlining, draft, and revision. Sit down with your child and ask how long they realistically expect to spend on each of those steps and write down their responses. If they’re not sure, have them come up with a range. Then have your child enter each step, along with the time estimate, into their calendar at times during which they expect to be able to do that work. Of course, entering this information into a calendar does nothing to assure that the work will get done but at a bare minimum it can help in a couple of ways. For one, just writing down each step and when it’s supposed to get done can provide some structure for your child. This can help avoid the common phenomenon of kids sitting down to work and staring at a blank screen for an hour, not knowing how to get started. Secondly, it provides your child with a feedback system that lets them know exactly where they stand. If they look at their calendar and find that even though they expected to be done with their first draft by a certain time and, in fact, they’ve just begun their outline, they’ll be aware that they’re going to need to budget extra time for finishing the project. Once they finish, it’s a good idea to sit down with them to compare how long each step took in practice compared to what their initial estimate was.
Does your child need more help with organization or time management? Check out Academy MetroWest's executive function coaching services.
As you're going through this process with your child, remember that organizing is neither easy nor fun for them. What may seem easy or intuitive for you is likely to seem arduous and unpleasant for a child with executive function delays. If your child becomes engaged in the process of becoming more organized, make sure you praise him or her to the high heavens. You may even want to create a reward system for them. Either way, make sure that the praise or reward is contingent upon their effort and engagement in the challenge.
Next week: Space (Part 2)
Want to learn more about time management and other issues related to executive function? Check out either or both of these excellent books. Both provide thoughtful yet practical tips aimed at helping parents help their kids with organization.
