System Help

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Helping the Underachieving Student

Although I enjoy tutoring students in secondary mathematics – and I certainly don’t want to put off parents who want their children to learn – I feel I need to make the point that not every student is in the right frame of mind to benefit from tutoring. My purpose for writing this article is to try to explain to parents that tutoring sometimes has limits. When I am tutoring students in mathematics, I want my students to learn, and I want their parents to feel that, for their hard-earned money, their children are receiving effective tutoring.

Tutoring may not work for different reasons, but the student I want to focus on in this article is the underachieving student. I have had several experiences where parents have pushed their underachieving student into tutoring which often just doesn’t work and may even exacerbate the problem. The students in question resented tutoring, resisted help, and put little to no effort into learning. Being a parent myself (my wife and I have three sons) of boys who were not stellar students in school, I am very aware of some of the challenges and frustrations.

In an attempt to offer some help, I am citing the work of Dr. Michael D. Whitley who is a nationally-known psychologist specializing in helping children, adolescents, and adults overcome underachievement and discouragement. Dr. Whitley’s book, Bright Minds, Poor Grades: Understanding and Motivating Your Underachieving Child, (Penguin Putnam Inc., New York, N.Y., 2001), contains some good strategies in the opinion of many experts. [Disclaimer: I have never communicated with Dr. Whitley, nor have I received compensation in any form for this referral.]

On Dr. Whitley’s website (www.docwhitley.com) you’ll find Podcast 2: Joyous Living
(Friday, July 7, 2006), which is a video that introduces his basic program – The Six Pillars of Personal Success – for helping the underachiever (both adult and child). Below is my summary of his podcast:

[Dr. Whitley speaking] “…I call these six personality skills the six pillars of personal success because they hold up the entire house of a person’s achievement life….If any one of them is weak or undeveloped, …there’s going to be a problem with achievement – it’s inevitable.

When I first went to college, some upperclassmen, who took me aside, asked me if I wanted to graduate. I said, ‘Well, yes, of course, I do!’ Then they asked me what kind of grades I wanted to get. I said that I wanted to do very well. ‘Then, you will have to learn to love studying,’ they said. ‘College is full of distractions, worries, problems; there’s always trouble, and if you love studying, then you will find a way to do what you need to do anyway, no matter what happens. If you don’t love it, if you are negative about it, if you’re anxious and nervous, or you hate it or you don’t enjoy it, then you will find a way not to do it.’ That made sense. I decided to give it a try. It worked! It worked so well it carried me all the way through my program. In fact, I still like it today. Once you really learn something like that, you don’t let go of it. It taught me a lot about life.

When I started my practice and starting working with underachievers, guess what the biggest deficit was? They hated school! Underachievers of all stripes, whether they’re children, adolescents, young adults, or adults in the workplace, who cannot find a way to connect positive feelings with their everyday lives and work, are going to be miserable. They are going to take that misery wherever they go. Some of the most unhappy people I’ve known in my life are friends of mine who cannot transform those feelings, cannot learn to love and work and combine those two skills into one. They are not very happy people. In fact, some of them are tremendously unhappy in both their personal lives and at their office. It’s a miserable life. I would not wish it on anyone and I devoted my life to changing the destiny of the kids I work with, and I want you to change the destiny of your children and maybe yourself and learn these six basic pillars of success – these six skills. Once you learn them, you have the magical ability,…the mental health, of learning to work and to love and, combining the two, to have a rich, rewarding life. The six pillars are:

1. Self Control – the ability to delay the desire and drive for the immediate gratifications in life in order to work for long-term gain and the gratification and satisfaction that comes from that delay.
2. Independence – the ability to work consistently to task completion, organize it, get it in on time, whenever it’s due. Underachievers cannot work independently and cannot delay the desire for immediate gratification – they usually seek it out.
3. Will Power – the power of will to force yourself to do things you know are the right things to do…even if you don’t want to do it, even though you may be very afraid, getting overwhelmed, you may even be down or depressed about something, but you force yourself to get the work done that you need to get done. That’s what adults need to be able to do and the role that children need to take on by working at it step-by-step. They need to learn that emotional skill of willpower.
4. The Spiritual Side of the Work Ethic (these are called transformational skills) – the ability to take negative moods, negative feelings, negative attitudes, and work them around into a positive framework that you can use to connect your everyday need to work and to achieve a long-term goal. That is a major skill and it is fundamental to a rewarding life.
5. The Radical Sense of Personal Responsibility – is the feeling that I alone am the one who must do something to make my life better, to change my destiny, if I’m unhappy, it’s me, it’s my problem to solve, not my teacher’s problem, not my mother’s or my father’s problem, not my work place, not the world – it’s something I must do.
6. Development of a Rational Soul – the ability to be able to think rationally about one’s life – to have rational thoughts, rational feelings, a rational life that commits one to dealing with the real world out there. The ability to meet problems head on and, if you realize current solutions aren’t working, the ability to recognize that and come up with create solutions to the challenges you face. Underachievers cannot do that. They keep running into the same problems, they keep creating the same problems over and over again, whether they’re adults or adolescent children, it doesn’t matter; sometimes whole cultures are that way. Whole political systems become that way, unfortunately. A rational soul is the ability to see that my instinctive reactions, my natural reactions, are hurting me; my reactions are not right or adaptive, and they’re not creating a problem-solving effort. So, I need creative solutions and a rational world to be able to recognize that and use rational thinking to help myself work, survive, prosper, and become happy.”

Having an underachieving child can be very difficult for caring parents. I present this resource to parents as only one possibility to help their child/children, because I think Dr. Whitley’s advice has value. There are other books and materials on the same and similar subjects. As a parent it is important to persevere. The effect of your efforts will most likely manifest itself positively, given time.

Dennis The Constitutional Peasant