Hello and Happy New Year!
I hope wherever you’re reading this is warmer than where I sit and type, -22 🥶
With grades from the Fall finalized and the second term underway, I’m hearing the same thing from a lot of parents: “My teen is bright. They’re trying. Why don’t their grades reflect that?”
Watching our teens put in effort but not seeing results that match their potential can be frustrating and confusing. Here’s what’s important to know:
Underachievement is rarely about laziness or lack of ability. It’s almost always a gap in skills or strategy - both of which they can learn.
Here are two of the most common reasons students underachieve, and what we can do about it.
#1: They don’t have a daily routine.
A lot of parents have told me their teen needs better study strategies and time management skills, that they need help focusing or have trouble getting started. But when I ask whether they have a daily routine they follow consistently, the answer is no.
Or, if they do have one, it’s not academically supportive. It’s along the lines of get home, chill for a few minutes, have a snack, do the homework they think they have. This is reactive, transactional and ineffective when it comes to improving learning and achievement.
The right daily routine facilitates focus, time management, task initiation, and effective studying. It helps students:
Shift from mood-based work completion (“I’ll work when I feel like it” -inconsistent and self-defeating) to routine-based, system-driven work completion (“I start when it’s time, motivation is irrelevant” - predictable and empowering).
Learn how to autonomously manage their workload. They start getting work in on time, building awareness of what they actually understand, and catching small problems before they become report card surprises.
The simple, powerful afterschool daily routine I teach my students is the Check - Plan - Do. It takes a couple minutes to complete and is an antidote to late work and stress:
Check each subject in your LMS (e.g. Brightspace, Google Classroom) one at a time for any newly assigned work.
Plan out the completion of each item in your calendar.
Do the work you’ve planned.
Any student can implement this daily routine. Its power isn’t in perfection. It’s in repeated practice that results in fewer panicked nights scrambling to catch up, less parent-teen conflict around school, and students who feel genuinely in control of their workload instead of reactive and stressed.
(Last year I worked with a student who was stuck at a 2.0 GPA. After implementing this daily routine and using a calendar (see #2) to practice said routine, their GPA shot up to 3.8 and stayed there.)
#2: They don’t have their own calendar.
Most teens are managing multiple classes, rotating schedules, tests, quizzes, projects, extracurriculars, and life. When all of this lives in their head, school feels overwhelming. This mental load creates constant low-level stress and almost guarantees things will slip through the cracks.
One of the most powerful shifts a student can make is externalizing their plans: getting deadlines and the steps to meet them out of their head and onto a calendar they own. Not a family calendar you manage, not the school's online calendar, but a calendar they own and update regularly (Google calendar is free and easy).
There’s a huge difference between your teen:
Knowing they have a test next week and planning to study when they have time or feel like it (which is often the night before or morning of), and
Having 3 specific study blocks scheduled out so they’re prepared a couple of days before the test.
When work is scheduled in a calendar, students don’t have to think about what they should be doing. They have fewer opportunities to rationalize why they can delay the work just a little more (…and a little more…and a little more). The decision-making is already done. The time has been spoken for. This frees up mental energy and makes follow-through far more likely.
This is also where scoping skills are built.
Instead of seeing an assignment as one big, intimidating task, students learn to break it into realistic chunks and map those chunks to actual time. That’s a skill many bright students have never been explicitly taught, and it’s transformative.
Using their own calendar to practice their daily routine leads to higher grades (often within a week or two), less stress (clarity reduces stress) and more autonomy with work completion (big win for parent-teen relationships).
To summarize: students who underachieve lack foundational pillars of a learning system.
A daily routine and tools like the calendar are not complicated. They strengthen your child’s capacity to learn and achieve to their true potential. They’re free to create, implement and sustain. And they can change the trajectory of your child’s educational journey.
That’s it for today, though do check out the cool opportunities below!
Happy Saturday,
Kelsey
I have two 1:1 spots opening toward the end of February for high school and college students.
This is for teens who are ready to change their situation with school, not through pressure, tutoring or overworking, but through learning how to learn across subjects and creating a reliable system.
To explore if this is a fit, book a call here.
Resources & Opportunities
Walt Disney’s National Geographic Cartography Internship. Based in Washington, D.C., this paid, full-time summer internship is for college students studying Geography, GIS, or Environmental Science. Fun fact: my husband is a Cartographer, working with FIFA to produce their maps for the World Cup. While it’s a fairly niche field of study, the career possibilities are surprisingly vast and very cool.
John’s Hopkins Center for Talented Youth offers in-person and online courses for middle school and high school “students seeking academic-mentored summer work.” Many of these are classes we don’t see in most schools, like “Be The Doctor: The Science Behind The Symptoms” or “Creating Fantasy Worlds.” Great options if you want your kid’s brain flipped on and engaged over the summer 🤓
Fred Hutch Cancer Centre Summer High School Internship Program. This is a “a competitive, eight-week, full-time paid internship for students between 11th and 12th grade…specifically designed for students who haven't had extensive research experience.” Students must have strong scientific interest and reside in or near Seattle. Deadline is March 13th.
Caltech’s Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship (SURF). This is on-site, 10 weeks, with a $8,110 stipend for participants. They specify students must have completed at least one term of university studies, but also note that high school seniors are eligible if they will be “an undergraduate student the term following the SURF.” This is definitely easiest for existing Caltech students, as non-Caltech students need to find a Caltech mentor to support their work. Deadline is February 22nd.
The Stanford Accelerator For Learning. They hosted a summit centered on the theme of “Future-Ready Learning By Design” and I really liked the format of their report (.pdf below). They ask a bunch of experts from different sectors the same 3 questions - about what our teens need to be ‘future ready’ and how schools can support them - and profile the perspectives of each person. You can check out the .pdf of the report below or their website here, which has more resources.
