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Teaching Tips March 2010 |
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Let's face it. This title is a bit of an oxymoron, a contradiction in terms. Organization and global learners mix about as well as vinegar and oil. You can throw the two together for a bit, but when things settle down, chances are the organizational system you tried to impose separated out of your child's life.
Here's the kicker. Without organization, your global child's life will be as useless as a dry salad without dressing. It's just not good. Most global children work best in a clutter-free environment, despite the fact that they generate clutter by the boatload. The irony in this is that they have the amazing ability to overlook the clutter they make, yet be distracted by it when they try to focus on the task at hand. Go figure. If you have a global child – or spouse – no doubt you have experienced the sense of cluelessness when you ask whether a task has been completed. Or where an assignment is. Or if they remembered to bring along their ________ (fill in the blank). Or what time they have to be at a designated spot. It's as if they operate in another time-space continuum. In many ways they do. They think differently; they think outside the box. They approach life through their own little view of the world. And what's important to them is usually not what's important to everyone around them. Yet organization is a vital skill for success; you need to instill some form of organizational skills into your student. Even if they seem like necessary evils to your child. The key is to find a system of organization that matches your child and works on a regular basis. Most of the books on organization and the tools available are designed by people who are great at organizing – aka: sequential learners. They write books and can offer workshops on organization because it's their life. Unfortunately, most of these tips reflect their logical, sequential way of approaching a task. The effect is like speaking an unknown foreign language to your global learner. Typical class organizers, planners, and room organizers usually don't work with global learners...at least for the long haul. So what's a parent to do? Use these as launching points and as idea-generators. Show them to your child and turn him or her loose to come up with something roughly based on them, yet totally unique to your child. Remember that these children think differently, so what they think goes together will be quite different from how you would put things together. To organize my daughter's room, we used a variety of colorful, portable containers and cubicles over the years. She would decide how the cubicles got put together and what went in them. Inevitably, her system was not the way I would have planned, but that's the whole point. It made sense to her. At the same time, I learned to be realistic about living with a global child, which meant I had to let some things go. Even with her self-designed organizational system, her bedroom was still more cluttered than I preferred, but at least I could walk through it without feeling as if I had fallen into a black hole. Most of the time, I let the clutter remain. But when company was coming and the clutter had to disappear, at least we had a predetermined place for everything, which made clean up go faster. As far as planners go, I found visual charts worked best when my daughter was younger. BIG visual charts – which she designed and decided how they would be completed (with my guidance, of course!). As she got older, a loose-leaf notebook binder and “in-box” worked better. Any slip of paper that pertained to her went into her in-box. At the beginning of the day or week we would go through the stuff in the box and decide how to handle it and where to record it. She divided her notebook into sections that made sense to her, and even designed the cover art (I love see-through cover binders). Eventually, she learned how to go through this process on her own. Now she even uses a typical planner and calendar, and has trained herself to use it diligently. Miracles never cease.
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