Category: Summer Learning

How to Succeed at Skipping a Year in Math

Posted on by Chris Loper
Reading Time: 3 minutes

a child jumping over a gap

Long-time readers will know that I generally advise against skipping a year in math. For many reasons, it’s usually a bad idea. Nonetheless, many students continue to make this choice, so let’s talk about how to do it right.

Most people just figure that the school said they were smart enough to jump ahead, so that’s good enough. This approach often leads to serious problems down the road: a snowballing accumulation of knowledge gaps and a growing feeling that you’re not really a “math person,” which ultimately leads to giving up on STEM.

Skipping Ahead in Middle School

The most common version of skipping a year is jumping from 7th-grade math to Algebra 1, effectively skipping over 8th-grade math. If that’s your path, then you should spend this summer learning the course you’re skipping.

Make a Khan Academy account (it’s free) and work your way through their 8th-grade math course. Do every single exercise in every single unit. Watch the videos on topics you don’t know yet and take notes.

Khan Academy's 8th grade math dashboard

If something is hard for you, print worksheets from Kuta Software (also free) and work the problems until you’ve really mastered the topic. Take Khan Academy’s quizzes and the tests. Retake them after more practice if you do poorly. Even if you think you already know the material, prove it by doing the work.

If the math comes easily, great, but learning the math is only part of the reason you should do this. The other part is practicing doing more work than you’re required to do. Succeeding in advanced math doesn’t just require intelligence and math knowledge; it also requires diligence and grit. Skipping ahead usually means more homework and more difficult homework, but it also means you’ll frequently need to study and practice beyond the homework. Doing regular math practice over the summer is a powerful way to build this habit.

All of this is doubly important for those students who skip two years – jumping from 6th-grade math to Algebra 1 in 7th grade.

Skipping Ahead in High School

The other way people skip a year in math is by taking a course over the summer. Most commonly, students take an online Geometry class in order to jump from Algebra 1 to Algebra 2. This is, actually, not a terrible idea. It avoids the “Geometry sandwich” that is often problematic for students, and of all the regular high school math courses, Geometry is the least connected to the others.

(A less common – and far worse idea – is to take Algebra 2 over the summer to skip from Geometry to PreCalc. Algebra 2 is the foundation of higher math, and shortcutting through this course is likely to be disastrous. Math is an upside-down pyramid, and all of the layers are important, but Algebra 2 is uniquely important. It effectively serves as a gateway to higher math.)

a gateway at the bottom of a staircase

If you’re taking an online class over the summer (or retaking a class in summer school), you should keep in mind that you’re cramming a year’s worth of content into a couple of months. This makes it much harder to engage in mastery learning, so you’ll have to do more work on your own. I know that’s a tough sell, since it’s summer vacation, and you’re already doing the work at a faster pace than you would during the school year. But if you want to retain the knowledge, you’re going to have to earn it.

What if it’s too late?

What if you already skipped a year, and you’re starting to feel like you’re drowning? Then it’s time to patch the holes in your math knowledge, so you’re actually ready for what comes next. This investment will pay off enormously during the school year.

Imagine if all those lingering areas of math where you’re unconfident – fractions, long division, factoring – were as easy for you as addition. That can be your reality; you just have to earn it. Oh, and those things that were hard to learn when you were young? They won’t be as hard now. You’re smarter than you used to be.

The Case for Learning to Type

Posted on by Chris Loper
Reading Time: 2 minutes

a middle school student typing at home

The young people of our world have been described as “digital natives” because computers and the internet have been around their entire lives. So it might surprise you to hear that many of the high schoolers I work with don’t know how to type.

They get by via finger typing: punching each letter with their index fingers while looking at the keyboard. It’s a survival technique, akin to counting on your fingers to perform addition. And it’s terribly inefficient compared to real typing.

That inefficiency slows them down whenever they have to type an assignment. It makes the homework they already don’t like more tedious. And whenever something you don’t want to do is more difficult to do, the odds of procrastination go up. Essays are difficult enough to write; the struggle to type shouldn’t be an additional obstacle.

high school students typing essays in the library

And much like having not memorized your multiplication facts, being unable to type is a constant source of frustration for these students. For some, it produces a feeling of inadequacy. So we owe it to kids to teach them how to type. It will increase their sense of self-efficacy and make their lives easier as students and as adults.

The ideal time to do this is during elementary school, before finger-typing has become a habit, but it’s never too late. There are numerous free, gamified learn-to-type websites. (Typing Club is a popular option.) Summer is an excellent time to start, but efforts should be maintained year-round until the skill is mastered.

Older students are more likely to resist being asked to learn to type. They’ll argue that they’re getting by just fine with finger typing. Indeed, switching to real typing as a high schooler would temporarily slow you down because you’ve practiced finger typing for so long. Making the switch is an investment in your future. It’s one of those classic things you’ll feel a great deal of resistance to, but which you certainly won’t regret doing.

If you’re a parent wondering how you could possibly motivate your teenager to practice typing this summer, check out our class: Motivation and Behavior Change: How to Really Motivate Teenagers.

You’re Smarter Than You Used to Be

Posted on by Chris Loper

A middle school student working hard

There’s an old math topic that was really hard for you. Maybe it was fractions. Maybe it was long division. Maybe it was memorizing your multiplication facts.

Now here you are in middle school or high school, and this topic still haunts you because new math is always built on old math. You know it would be helpful to patch that hole in your knowledge, but you don’t think you can. You think it will still be too hard for you.

But you’re wrong.

You’re way smarter than you used to be.

How could you not be?

That “super hard” math topic was from years ago, and your brain has been getting stronger the whole time. You’ve learned far more difficult things since then. So you’re more than capable of going back and learning that old topic.

Put in a few minutes a day until you’ve got it down, and you’ll have easy access to that knowledge for the rest of your life. I promise you won’t regret it.