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How To Have  Successful Parent-Teacher Conference
The parent-teacher conference is a wonderful opportunity to discuss your child's progress. Make the most of it by preparing yourself both emotionally and intellectually for this special, brief time with your child's teacher.

As a parent and a teacher, I have been on both sides of the parent-teacher conference. Sometimes I have wondered whether we were discussing the same child. Most of the time, parents have listened intently as I pointed out their child's strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally I have had to deal with defensive parents and parents with unreasonable expectations.

Read the excellent article entitled Tips for Parents on Parent-Teacher Conferences on the National Education Association site. Against this backdrop, here are a few suggestions to help you have a successful parent-teacher conference.

This video offers an example of a parent-teacher conference.

Show up.

You have to show up to have a successful meeting with your child's teacher. That sounds so obvious, doesn't it? I can clearly remember times when the parents with whom I wanted to meet were no shows. Perhaps there was a good reason why they missed their parent-teacher conference. However, in most of those cases, I don't recall receiving a phone call or a note explaining what happened. As soon as you receive your parent-teacher conference appointment, save it in your smartphone's calendar and Google calendar. If you cannot attend for some valid reason, text, or email your child's teacher as soon as possible. Ask to re-schedule the conference.

Arriving for the conference.

Arrive at the school at least 10 minutes early for your conference. If the conference before

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How To Enrich Your Child's Education

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How To Enrich Your Child's Education
We parents are responsible for expanding our children's horizons. We are responsible for showing and explaining things, concepts, and places they have never thought of. This article contains my roadmap for enriching your child's education.

It doesn't matter what grade your child is in or, for that matter, if she has not even started formal schooling. We parents are responsible for enriching our children's education. We are responsible for expanding our children's horizons. We are responsible for showing and explaining things, concepts, and places they have never thought of. What follows is my roadmap for enriching your child's education. While I am not a psychologist, I have raised four amazing children following the principles which I lay out in this essay. I was raised this way. So was my late wife. We knew our method worked.

The Early Years

Playing classical music and reading are the foundations of an infant's education as far as I am concerned. I never believed that classical music made my children smarter. Indeed, The Mozart effect: Classical music and your baby's brain debunks that notion. But I do know that the music of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart, and Beethoven soothed my girls when they were infants. Furthermore, I continue to hear from listeners at the classical music radio station with which I am affiliated about how our classical music programming lulls their children to sleep.

In this video, Erica Goms fromeHow Health discusses how cognitive development in babies can be stimulated by simply playing with the baby and showing them toys.

Reading to your child develops her imagination. Those books which you read over

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A Guide To High School Issues

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A Guide To High School Issues
This hub page lists over three dozen articles dealing with issues in high school such as academics and discipline.

We have written these articles to help you and your children navigate the high school years in private school. We hope that you will find them helpful.

4 Best Studying Apps for Students and Teachers
These apps are changing the game in education. Check out the 4 best studying apps for students and teachers.

5 Metrics For Choosing A College
Choosing a college is one of the rituals every family with a junior in private school needs to cope with. These five metrics will give you an overview of the process.

5 Things You Must Not Do With Personal Technology
Young people take personal technology devices for granted. We parents and teachers must make them aware of how such devices are used in the real world.

5 Ways To Protect Your Child From Bullying
Bullying lurks everywhere. Learn the warning signs and how to protect your child.

7 Ways to Improve Your Math Scores
Add things up and you'll quickly find the answer- math is crucial both in academics and the real world. By following these strategies and following personal training programs, students can uncover their weaknesses and conquer math.

10 Things To Do Before You Graduate
This is a very practical list of things you must do before you graduate. The items on this list will enhance your college applications.

The 21 Secrets of A+ Students
Ever wish you could pick the brain of A+ students? Well, we did it for you — we spoke with

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School Safety

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School Safety
Seemingly never-ending school shootings prompted me to find out whether private schools were safer than public schools. Some answers and opinions on the matter here.

Wikipedia has a list of shootings which have occurred in our schools dating back to the 1840s. Sadly, most of the shootings in the past several decades since the mass shooting at Columbine High School have taken place in public schools. That led me to ask why private schools seem to have been spared these senseless killings.

Before we look at some of the reasons why shootings occur, let's find out what percentage of shootings occur in private vs. public schools. In Are Shootings More Likely to Occur in Public Schools? Corey A. Deangelis notes the following research:

"Hyewon Kim—a Cato Center for Educational Freedom Intern—compiled information on school shootings in the United States from 2000 to 2018 using the Tribune-Review database. The database is limited to legitimate school shootings; that is, shootings that occurred on or near a K-12 school campus while classes were in session or when students were present. The list also excluded suicide-only incidents."

"Hyewon found 134 school shootings from 2000 to 2018. Only eight of these occurred in private schools while 122 occurred in public schools. The type of school could not be definitively classified for 4 of the shootings. As shown in the figure below, about 94 percent of the shootings that could be classified occurred in public schools while only about 6 percent occurred in private schools."

This TEDTalk discusses how school shootings can be prevented.

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5 Ways To Use Social Media To Market Your School

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5 Ways To Use Social Media To Market Your School
We look at ways in which your small to medium-sized private school can use social media to make families past, present, and future aware of your school.
Social networking for business

I was an early adopter of social media so I can tell you that the growth of the genre which I have witnessed has been remarkable. The instant communications and universal accessibility of social media have powered revolutions around the world as you and I both know. Sadly, social media has been manipulated and abused by governments and political movements that seek to undermine and destroy institutions.

For the purposes of this article, we shall set aside those negative aspects of social media and look at ways in which your small to medium-sized private school can use social media to make families past, present, and future aware of your school. If your school has the budget for professional social media curators and a fully-integrated marketing program, you are all set. However, if you have limited resources for marketing your school and are not certain how to proceed, I have written this article with your school in mind.

Before we look at some suggestions for using social media, I want you to set aside any misconceptions which you might have about social media. I run into people all the time who say "I don't use Facebook." "I can't be bothered with Twitter." "YouTube is a waste of time." Interestingly enough, they never seem to mention Instagram or LinkedIn which are popular with millennials and the business community respectively. Social media is essentially an electronic form of socializing. Years ago we sent postcards to our friends and family when

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