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Should My Teen Take a Gap Year? (If So, To Do What?)

7/1/2019

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It is summer time, and families are taking a break from their busy school-year schedules to try some new activities, visit new places and build stronger relationships. These benefits can be had by students who take a “gap year” too. A gap year is usually thought of as a year-long break between high school and college, but there are other ways to have a gap year experience. In this blog, I will share with you my gap year adventures and what I learned as well as a list of gap year options for your students. 
As I mentioned in my blog last month about Late Bloomers, students mature at different rates, and for many students, the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobe of the brain does not fully mature until they are  in their twenties. This part of the brain is responsible for executive function which includes organizing, planning, and problem solving, and these abilities are pretty important for college success. Giving the brain a little more time to mature might be helpful for some students. College also requires navigating a widening array of relationships with new peers (perhaps from unfamiliar cultures), complicated schedules, and instructors who allow a lot more freedom (and often less structure and help) than high school teachers. Skills needed to traverse this new landscape can be acquired during a gap year. 
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My Japan Adventures! From left to right: 1) I am in the front in my Yukata (cotton kimono) that I still wear sometimes,     2) In a straw hat  (on right), and in a borrowed silk kimono (on left), and teaching the executives at a brake company..
My gap year experience allowed me to become more independent and self-confident, learn about new cultures and build relationships with people very different than myself.
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Although I didn’t realize it at the time, my gap year preparation began during the summer between my sophomore and junior year when I was a Rotary Club summer exchange student to Japan. The trip was an emersion in a culture vastly different than my own yet with people who had the core characteristics of kindness and generosity that were comfortingly familiar. 

​During my senior year of high school, I was asked to go back to Japan to teach English at a Christian high school along with another American woman who was already there. In preparation for a move to Japan for six months, I took a Japanese language class at the local community college at night while attending high school during the day. A week after graduation at seventeen years old, I got on a plane and flew to Tokyo and then took a three hour train ride north to Fukushima. The adventures I had could fill many pages, but the main things I learned are 1) I can communicate with people, even when I don’t speak the language well because people are willing to help and use hand gestures if that is what it takes. All people want to be understood. 2) I can climb mountains and hike through caves (even at Mt. Fuji!), ask for directions (sometimes clumsily in Japanese) and find my way, even when the going gets tough. 3) Baking American style chocolate chip cookies with students while they teach me how to make origami cranes (which I can still make, by the way) is a wonderful way to share individual cultures and make new friends. 
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My Africa Adventures! 1) With my uncle next to the plane we flew from Missouri to Africa 2) At a school in
Soweto, South Africa 3) In my waitress garb, 4) At a picnic with South African friends.
After six months, I headed back home and completed two semesters at a community college and then I took off again for six months for the second half of my “gap year.” This time, I flew in a two-seater Beechcraft airplane with my uncle from Joplin, Missouri to Johannesburg, South Africa. The trip took seven days with day-long stops along the way in the Canary Islands, The Ivory Coast, Gabon and Namibia. Upon reaching Johannesburg, a business associate of my uncle invited me to stay with his family, and I got a job downtown as a waitress. This was at a time when there was apartheid, segregated townships, and separate buses for different races. I learned 1) Even when you don’t agree with government policy, you can still help children in need by traveling to where they are and helping to improve their schools 2) Sometimes strangers sitting at a restaurant table are just good friends you haven’t met yet 3) Working together as a team (even when all the team members are from different countries) makes a project easier for everyone, and it is more fun. 
Not all gap years are the same. While my gap year involved a lot of travel as well as working as a teacher and a waitress, my son took a break from school for two years to work at his full time career. After getting an A.A. in Business and an A.S. in Automotive Technology, he worked as an auto tech for two years, learning his craft and saving his money. He then went back to school and got his B.S. in Automotive Management and graduated debt free. 

Gap years are growing in popularity in the U.S. and are already common in the UK where approximately 200,000 students delay going to college for a year. A number of American universities, including Harvard, are encouraging incoming freshman to take a gap

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year. Many schools are willing to defer enrollment for students, and some even have financial aid available to fund gap years.
Ten Things to Do During a Gap Year:
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1. Take a Break and Get Healthy: A break from academics can help a student feel energized to start school again when he or she returns.  Twelve years is a long time to keep the same school schedule, and a break can allow students to improve their health by getting more sleep, and taking time to exercise, and learning to eat well.

2. Become More Independent: Most high school seniors have spent the last four years with the same set of peers, dependent on detailed daily instruction from teachers with an ever present family safety net. Trying something new or going someplace you have never been before - all on your own - will teach you to trust yourself which builds self-confidence. 

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Is My Child a Late Bloomer? (If So, What Can I Do to Help?)

6/1/2019

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We live in a world obsessed with early achievement. We read articles in Forbes and Times about the “Top 30 under 30” super achievers. We applaud seventeen year old Malala Yousafzai, the youngest Nobel Prize winner.  We are awed by young tech founders like Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Evan Spiegel of Snapchat. Parents pay $20,000 to $40,000 a year for 
​full immersion second language courses and rigorous academic curriculums – for their preschoolers. 

There is nothing inherently wrong with early success. But my concern is that because everyone learns and grows at different rates, with the societal emphasis on early achievement, we leave behind a large group of children who just need more time to bloom. Many of these late blooming students lose hope, and we have to ask ourselves – what can we do?
I am the mother of a late bloomer. My son did not talk until he was two years old, and he did not read or write until he was ten. He was your classic (and normal) hyperactive boy with dyslexia. I was parenting and homeschooling this young child over twenty years ago, and part of what gave me patience to wait for my son to bloom on his own time schedule was reading the book Better Late than Early by Dr. Raymond Moore. 
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Moore’s research proposed that children are not psychologically ready for formal learning until ages eight to ten, and he suggested waiting for formal study until students had the maturity and logic skills necessary so they did not become frustrated and discouraged from trying to handle material they were simply not ready to understand. 

But just because my son couldn’t read did not mean he was not exposed to books. As a family, we read out loud every night. We started with picture books, but soon we were reading the Little House on the Prairie series (all of them) the Chronical of Narnia series (all of them), plus other classics like the Hobbit and Treasure Island. My son built things, put things together and took them apart, cooked, gardened, helped his Dad at work and was learning all the time. He enjoyed fixing things and was often tightening screws, looking at the plumbing under the sink and helping his dad work on motorcycle engines. He was learning to love learning, he was gaining skills, and he was laying the ground work so that when the time came, he would be ready to bloom.


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​According to Rich Karlgaard, author of Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed with Early Achievement, “a late bloomer is a person who fulfills their potential later than expected; they often have talents that aren’t visible to others initially.  The key word here is expected. And they fulfill their potential frequently in novel and unexpected ways, surprising even those closest to them.”
He goes on to say, “Think about a starting point for a late bloomer. In all probability, his or her talents and passions were overlooked by a culture and educational system that measures for a cruelly narrow range of skills. It closed off the person’s paths of discovery and encouragement and potential. It did not open the doors to a successful future for them because it didn’t even see them.”

As a tutor, I work with a lot of these unseen students, and it is heartbreaking to hear and see the discouragement and lack of hope many of them suffer. One of the challenges for many students is that the prefrontal cortex in the frontal lobe of the brain is the last part of the brain to fully develop, and this often does not happen until an adult is in his or her mid-twenties. This part of the brain is responsible for executive function with includes: organizing, planning, problem solving, memory recall and attention allocation. Executive function has nothing to do with talent, IQ or potential, but without it, it becomes difficult for a person to fully bloom.

Is there hope? Yes!

Here are Nine Ways You Can Help Late Bloomer Students:

1. Help with tasks that require executive function.
While waiting for a child to fully bloom, parents and others can step in and assist with tasks that require executive function until a youth is ready to take on more of those activities his or herself. With my son, I coached and tutored him through high school, and when he started at Cuesta College, I helped him with time management and planning his classes, and I tutored him through many of the classes as well by helping him organize his class notes in a way that he could learn the information. This allowed him to continue to gain skills that he could not have done without help. He slowly acquired basic writing skills, the ability to understand math patterns, and knowledge of history, art, science and economics through his high school and college classes. These skills would provide pivotal when the time came when he did bloom.

2. Help your child to keep learning.
Many students have difficulty in loud and distracting classroom environments. They may need a parent or another person to reteach material they missed in class. Other students have difficulty reading, and they may need material summarized or outlined for them so they can better organize the material in their brains. Some students process by talking and need a listening ear so they can talk over the material they are learning. It is important that late bloomers keep learning.

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    Debra Newby has over thirty years of experience in education and parenting, and she delights in answering questions and helping others see and understand the intricate
    ​patterns of life.

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