Every year from 6th grade to 8th grade, my school gave out an academic planner.

Every year from 6th grade to 8th grade, my school gave out an academic planner. All three years, the thing stayed in my backpack, slowly accumulated wear, stains from crayons and pencils, and folds from being smashed by books.

I think there were 4 or 5 girls who used them religiously in my grade. And when they took them out in class, the kids around them instantly sat up a little straighter running a quick mental comparison, but we never took out our own.

Then one kid would mumble, “You use that thing? I’m too lazy.” Laughing, justifying our lack of functional planning under the banner of the rebellious apathy. Remembering stuff was unimportant to us because autonomy was so important to us.

That social justification for their fledgling commitment to developing their executive function skills was at once completely whack and fully accurate, and it explains perfectly why middle schoolers hide inside apathy. “I don’t care because you care.”

But that’s not the whole picture, it’s a reductive label from central casting about teenagers.

The reality is that no one taught us how to fill out the planner, they handed us a working memory tool, but didn’t remember to teach us to use it. Saying, “We got you a tool so you can do this” isn’t instruction. Encouraging or enforcing isn’t instruction either. Complex skills like planning, and organization deserve complex instruction.

I taught a complex skill for 14 years - non-fiction writing. The act of taking a blank page and turning it into a series of justifiable conclusions that represent your thinking in an organized way that allows you to functionally communicate with other humans is hard to do.

Teaching writing requires routine practice, and that practice is layered with demands for cognitive flexibility, persistence, metacognition. But the learning is in the doing, doing imperfectly, doing in different ways, doing a lot and doing over.

And if the adult in the front of the room is expecting it to be done when they say, “I got you the paper and pen, now write” then the child will fail because the adult has failed.

We just want the skills to arrive, parents, so we buy the feelings words chart, we buy the fridge timer, we get the workbook but the skills don’t arrive when the package arrives.

Just like academic executive function didn’t arrive in 6th grade when my homeroom teacher said, "Here's your planner,.” In fact, I don’t use a planner at all, never have, and I don’t plan on starting now in 35th grade.

But I do use tools that I were taught and practiced during that time. I use outlines religiously, I make a mean checklist, and I am very good at underlining books and writing in the margins. Because those tools were taught and learned through repeated practice, the permission to do them imperfectly, revision, collaboration and reflection. Through that practice, I realized they worked, they helped, they made me more capable, more effective, more autonomous and successful.

If we want our kids to plan things out, we have to make agendas and schedules with them. If we want our kids to finish tasks, we need to name the tasks, list them out and check them off. If we want our kids to regulate and resist impulse, the meltdowns must lead back to reflection and repair. We do it together, we do it imperfectly, we do it consistently.

Skills don’t arrive, they develop. And the curriculum they’re learning at home is arguably the most important they will ever have.

This weekend try this

Ask yourself, where does my kid need to grow? How do I help him get there? What’s a simple, stupid thing we can do together that makes this easier? And try it. Don’t expect perfection, ask for participation and reward that with genuine collaboration and connection.