What Are Grades?
What are grades? Easy, right? They tell how good you are in a subject. My experience with students however has been that grades are not what you know but how well you communicate what you know.
I’ve seen students that know the material get poor grades and students that don’t know the material as well get good grades. My interpretation is that grades are a form of communication. When you’re taking an exam or a quiz, you communicate to your teacher the knowledge and understanding. So you know the material, but you’re still getting bad grades. How do you communicate to the teacher that you know the material? Of course, there are some basic things that you can do like be neat and check your work, but what is key here is confidence.
Communication does not happen without confidence. This is where students that have confidence get better grades even though they don’t know the subject as well. So it seems like a catch-22 problem here. You need good grades to gain confidence and you need confidence to get good grades even if you know the subject. This is where the parent comes in. It’s the parent’s job to help the child gain confidence even if it’s in an area outside of math. If you notice that your child is good at something, develop that talent and the confidence will follow. This confidence will then spill over to math and the grades will follow accordingly.
Happy Zen Math!!
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