[GloryDayz]

I learned a long time ago that you can't do it all. As educated as my wife and I are, and surrounded by folks in our lives who are equally as educated, it's still tough. I'm a network engineer by trade, my wife's a middle school math "coach" (district level math strategy type and teaches teachers how to teach better), and she has a major in English too (!!!!), and it's still tough helping a high schooler who takes four AP/IB classes in one year. Add to that he's on the tennis team, in the band AND deeply involved in Robotics and your parental head can explode when you travel like I do. At some point we all need to get over ourselves and think outside the box when you're blessed with kids like these, I know I did. I'll do anything and everything to help them because they are better than me, and that's all I've ever really wanted. Sheesh, mine just left in MY truck to go airerate lawns....a full-on business run by the high school robotics team to afford all the parts they want to build backup robots and travel money. Yeah, these kids are AWESOME!

This may not help in the short term but one thing I've found works REALLY well is to spend time finding local college kids for tutoring. I had an intern who worked for me, she was smart as a whip, nice and late for an upgrade one night because she was toutoring and forgot!!! I was mad, but it turned out to be a good thing! These college kids are SMART, so go get the smartest of the smart for your kids. Not an add on the cork-board in a dorm, but a call or email to the head of the respective department at the college and ask if they have any kids they'd recommend for tutoring any specific class/discipline. They come at the right price, it give the college kid a skill they probably need, and because of the age of the kids, it's easy for the college kid to relate. Find one in athletics and I'll bet you'll find somebody who wasn't always a whiz at everything and understands schedules that aren't set! In my case I was talking about it at a F2F in Dallas two years ago with some of the folks work for me and were thinking the Cumon and Sylvan were pricy (and they are!), and many have tried it. In one case, not only did her son's grade go up by two letter grades in six weeks (C-to-A), he also went from not liking math to loving it. Plus, he got into all the NDSU games he ever wanted to, of any discipline, because the tutor was a student athlete. Bonus them when your kid succeeds and they'll work even harder after that... Once she graduated, she set him up with his next tutor (at $15 an hour once or twice a week, why stop). I've done it here too, and some other who work for me have done it in Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and soon in San Antonio. While some didn't get that two letter grade jump, none found it to be a bad deal either.

So, in short, if you can get through the short term, look to the local colleges if the need continues...

GloryDayz out....