School Without Suffering Blog

Just as your body is built from the foods you eat, your mind is built from the experiences you have. As you have more and more experiences, those experiences slowly shape how your brain works and how you think and act.   But the problem is that to protect us, our brains naturally pay more… Continue reading How Negativity Bias Can Get In The Way Of Your Child’s Success

Many parents contact us after years of having hired tutor after tutor without seeing their child find success. When this is the case, they’re frustrated, the child is defeated, and no one is excited about starting another relationship with yet another tutor with little hope of seeing a different result. In all cases, but these… Continue reading 3 Revealing Questions You’ll Want to Ask Before You Hire Another Tutor

Before I founded School Without Suffering, I worked with two students who deeply impacted who I am as an educator and what would become SWS’s philosophy. I was trained as a traditional public school teacher in the philosophy of high expectations and rigorous standards. Those principles, along with urgency, were to be pillars of our… Continue reading Traditional VS Nontraditional Schools: How to Know Which is Right for Your Child

Your child has been progressing through school, homework assignments have been getting tougher, and workloads getting bigger. You notice your child starting to struggle in ways they never had before, so you signed them up for a study skills course. Which is fantastic! All students need to learn how to learn, and study skills are… Continue reading 3 Reasons Why Your Child Isn’t Really Getting Help from That Study Skills Course

Marion Marshall is an Emerita Professor of Educational Therapy, the principles of which academic coaching at School Without Suffering is based on. In her book Assessment in Educational Therapy, she tells the story of asking her class to list the reasons that one might evaluate a student.    When a list of the class responses… Continue reading Why Getting Your Child Evaluated for Learning Issues Can Spur On Their Success

Named after Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, 504 plans are formal plans that schools develop to give kids with disabilities the support they need. A 504 plan covers any condition that limits daily activities—including learning—in a major way. If you’re considering requesting a 504 plan for your child, here are the answers… Continue reading Getting an Effective 504 Plan for Your Child: What Parents Need To Know

Good Housekeeping published an article last month that I really appreciated. The article’s bottom line was “Students pick up on their parents’ feelings about school performance, and experts say it doesn’t help them in the long run.” It’s unspoken in that statement that the parents’ feelings about school performance are primarily anxious. And it’s incredibly… Continue reading How To Get Your Kid’s Grades to Go Up by Letting Go

Q: Help! My child is bright and I never thought they had a learning disability, but they have been struggling in school for years. They’ve even been working with tutors for years but their grades haven’t gone up. They want me to “get off their back” but they seem totally unmotivated to me. I don’t… Continue reading Never Let These 4 Fears Stop You From Getting Your Child What They Need

Writing is going to come up in a lot of subjects for our students: English Language Arts, History, other Humanities, Social Sciences. Just like with math, we have an Overcome Your Writing Anxiety course, and whenever we start working with a student on their writing, we start there so that students can get a hold… Continue reading How We Emotionally Support Students to Make Them Better Writers