I found it very necessary to help my students see the difference between excellence and perfection.  Seeking perfection is a fool’s errand.  Excellence, however, comes with attention to detail and practice.  Our school is currently tied with another school for the title of best private or public K-12 school in our county.  The other school is the school my mother spent 30 years at as a teaching, principaling, superintendent.  I think there’s a common thread here!  Kay knows and practices excellence, and she requires it of her staff. 

     Each owner of Lawton Academy, all members of our family, practice excellence daily.  Oh, sure, we still make plenty of mistakes, but we’ve made it clear that mistakes are inevitable and not the end of the world, as long as the mistake-maker is willing to admit the mistake and learn from it.  That is the kind of action that leads to excellence.

     Your gifted child is highly competitive.  He/She wants to win everything, to be best at everything.  Ironically, though, gifted children rarely want to put in the time it requires to be the best at those events they choose.  They sit at the awards assembly and listen as the winners are read, anticipating their names to be read at any moment.  When they are not, many times tears come.  I don’t know how many times I’ve had to take gifted students on a “reality walk” through what others have done to prepare.  For instance, speech students in public schools have speech classes every day of the week, and they practice in front of their peers repeatedly.  My kids want to memorize the piece a week or two before (if that far out), block it a little bit, and win.  There are times they can, but not at regional or state level.

    So, the question for parents is where the line is between demanding excellence from our kids and making them obsessive-compulsive.  Again, the key is to demand excellence, not perfection.  Okay, here’s an example:  You tell your child that you expect nothing lower than C’s from his/her on the semester transcript.  Bringing home D’s or F’s will have consequences, and you outline those consequences.  The first time your child makes an F on an assignment, you discuss the failure.  You point out that the consequences are only for the semester grades, and sometimes we have bad days within the semester.  You look at what was done wrong and make a plan to not let it happen again.  You also take them through an averaging of pretend grades, showing them how hard it is to recover from low F’s. 

     What ends up happening is that your child joins you on the quest for good grades.  Our kids do actually want to meet our expectations.  It’s only when meeting those has gone repeatedly unrecognized or when severe punishments have been given for mistakes along the way that a kid stops trying to please the parent.  Good students all over the world have a clear picture of what their parents expect and often have the same expectations of themselves even without a talk.  I guarantee the groundwork was laid before the child knew what was happening!  It’s never too late to start, though. 

     I would warn you, though:  you cannot demand excellence of your gifted teen if you do not demand excellence of yourself.  Your gifted teen is too smart to fall for that.  I sought out my mother’s knowledge of teaching to teach my students.  I saw her standards of excellence, and many times I bucked what my degree professors were saying in lieu of her methods.  I have never regretted that!  My commitment to excellence means that I pretty much work every day of the year, but the return on my investment is tremendous.  Yours will be, too!                                          - Michelle

    Excellence is the goal of Lawton Academy of Arts and Sciences.  One may ask, “Excellence in what?”  My answer to that is “Everything!”  Maybe that sounds unrealistic to most people, but I think it is a worthwhile goal.  The key to this is not to number how many areas of excellence we are seeking, but to set the standard that “Everything I do, I will seek to do to the best of my ability and certainly above the status quo.”  If that is my aim, I will never settle for things to “just remain the same.”

    I can’t think of one area of my life that is so great that nothing could be improved.  There is always room for improvement.  So, if each day I modeled one area of improvement in a consistent manner, others probably would join in.  We would get used to seeing the new standard set and practiced.  Once we have seen it modeled, it would become the new status quo.

    Michelle and I grew tired of students being taught math at a poor level of achievement.  We couldn’t believe how the textbook companies broke down math skills for students to achieve.  In reality, it gave the textbook publishers more books to sell and more profits to make for their companies.  However, if we taught a child to ride a bike in the same manner, it would take months for the child to learn the complete process.  So, we rewrote the curriculum into seven strands which we began to teach in complete concepts.  Then, we allowed students to work through the process at their individual paces.  After all,  learning is a continuous process. As we carried out this method of teaching, it became the path of excellence.  Our students saw higher math scores and achievement.  We surpassed other schools on national tests as well as state tests.  Now, no person in our school questions learning multiplication and division as early as second grade.  We made it a possibility by providing the methods and means…the student achievement made it a reality!  Now, we are known for excellence in math instruction.

    My aim this year has been to do the same with social studies.  All the time I was getting my degrees in education, I listened to professors complain about how we were trying to cram too much information into the social studies textbooks for kids to learn in a school year.  So, I am currently on a mission amalgamating geography, history, civics, and economics so that our students achieve excellence.  Just listening to interviews on public TV shows helps us to recognize how poorly most students were taught these important subjects in school.  Have I found the “magic bullet?”  I won’t know for a while.  We are making this a two-year course of study in fifth and sixth grades.  I can say that this first semester has produced an advance in map skill achievement.  However, it’s not hard to stand out in geography since a great many schools do not teach social studies skills, just as they have given up spelling and writing instruction!

    Excellence is a standard by which we measure administrators, teachers, students, staff, parents, and the community.  If we keep our aim high, and we do our part each day to reach one step closer to excellence, one day we might be able to say, “Mission accomplished!”     Kay