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Discover how your experiences as an adult can help you succeed as a student, confront and manage fears about returning to school, develop advanced time-management skills, and create relationships with family and friends to support your role as a student.
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Objectives • Recognize how your experiences as an adult can help you succeed as a student • Confront and manage fears you may have about returning to school • Develop advanced time-management skills • Create relationships with family and friends to support your role as a student • Review and strength your academic skills
“Through education, you hope to give a new direction to life.” —Linda Simon “Believe in yourself and take things one day at a time. —Al Siebert Strategies for Adult Students
Portrait of the Adult Student • Just what is an adult student? • They have one or more of the following characteristics: • Have been out of high school for at least 5 years • Are over the age of 25 • Work either full- or part-time • Have children or other dependents
Come Join the Crowd • Continuing your education will ultimately add to the quality of your life—and to the lives of those around you. But you may be experiencing a number of fears and wondering if you have made the right decision. • One proven way to deal with fears is to share them with others, especially those who are in the same situation. • Another suggestion for overcoming fears is to grit your teeth and face them head on.
Advantages of Being a Mature Student • It is quite possible that you have a number of advantages over more traditional students—those who are entering college directly from high school or who have been out for only a couple of years. In fact, it is likely that as an older adult you have acquired many skills you can apply at school. • If you are a parent, for example, you have undoubtedly taken your children to the doctor. You understand how important it is to have faith in those who are caring for your loved ones. You yourself may have had health problems. These experiences can motivate you to do your best in school to become a truly qualified health care professional.
Meeting New Challenges • The greatest challenge faced by most adult students is the matter of time—having enough of it! Adults have multiple responsibilities that may include running a household, caring for children, and holding down a job. Balancing these demands can be stressful, even overwhelming. • At times your responsibilities may seem like acceptable excuses for being late to class, or even absent. You may feel that your instructors are not caring or understanding if they don't accept your excuses. But you must remember that the goal of health care education is to prepare you for a career.
Personal Reflection • Which of the life skills listed on the previous slides do you believe will most help you in your role as a student? • Can you think of others that you can apply to help you succeed in school?
Time Management – Advanced Techniques • Adding the role of student may require some major adjustments and new strategies. Prioritizing is the key to effective use of time. • Start by determining which activities are critical to your success as a student, and focus on these. • Let family members and friends know your schedule. • Work with your family to delegate tasks. • Schedule dedicated fun time with your family. • Treat your studies as you would a job. • Plan to study each day, even if some days it is for only a short period. • Add 15 minutes to each day, either by getting up earlier or staying up later.
Managing with Children in the House • Being a parent presents special challenges for adult students, especially if you are a single parentand they are and always will be your top priority. • If they are young, finding appropriate childcare is critical. Have a back up for emergencies. • Finding quiet time to study can be challenging when children are present.Work with your kids or explore combining resources with other students. • Finally, if it becomes necessary, try studying before and after classes in the school library. You may accomplish more there in shorter periods of time than if you are at home with constant interruptions.
Maintaining Personal Relationships • Becoming a student can put a strain on the relationships in your life because you will have less time to devote to them. • Being pulled in many directions can be stressful, and it is important to make a special effort to include family members in your decisions. • Personal relationships can cause problems. At the same time, strong support systems can increase your chances for success. • Your personal support system may extend beyond your immediate family and can include anyone who encourages you and supports your goals. • And don't forget to give back—even if you are busy, you can offer to provide support to others.
Combining Work and School • Working full-time while attending school is doable, but it is very difficult. • Enlist the support of your employer. • Take care not to use work time inappropriately. • At the same time, if you are seeking a new job, see if you can find a position that would permit studying while working, such as receptionist or security guard.
Overcoming Academic Weaknesses • If your academic and study skills are not what they should be, the first step is to acknowledge this. * • Then plan to spend a little time each day working on them. • For example, spend 15 or 20 minutes working on math skills or spelling. Over time, you are likely to acquire the skills needed to master your classes.
Overcoming Academic Weaknesses (Cont’d) • There are many ways to strengthen your study and academic skills, examples: • Investigate learning resources at your school: learning center, review courses, tutors, writing lab. • Look for helpful classes open to the public in your area: computer literacy, basic skills, using the Internet. • Organize a study group with other students. • Most important, don't hesitate to ask your instructors for help. They have chosen to teach because they want to share what they learned working in the health care field. They want successful graduates—in other words, they want their students to succeed!
Overcoming Academic Weaknesses (Cont’d) • Many adults have trouble admitting when they don't know something or when they need help. But think of it this way: you are paying for your instructors to help you learn. That is their job, and seeking this help is one way to ensure that you are getting what you pay for, just as you would with any service. One difference with education, of course, is that you must do your part, too, by reading assignments, attending class, and doing the homework. • Achieving academic success is important. At the same time, a common cause of stress among adult students is striving for perfection.
Case Study & Trouble Ahead Group Work & Questions
“Surround yourself with English; practice it, study it, and you will learn it.” —Kathy Ochoa Flores Strategies for English-as-a-Second-Language Students
English For the Non-Native Speaker • You may have heard the term “global economy,” which is evidence of just how interconnected the countries of the world have become. • The United States is often called a melding pot because people come from a variety of countries and cultures. • Large numbers of people living in the United States do not speak English well. Some do not speak it at all. • Knowing at least two languages can be a real advantage in this environment. • This is especially true in health care.
Personal Reflection • What are some reasons you want to improve your English? • How would better English help you in school? • In your future career?
Strategies for Improving Your English • Mastering another language is a gradual process, taking time and effort. Be patient with yourself. • Set learning goals for yourself. • To learn or master another language, you need to spend some time—even if it is only 10 to 20 minutes—studying or practicing every day. • Try to make your language study fun.
Improving Your Speaking • If you are serious about improving your English, you need to look for opportunities to use it. Here are some suggestions: • Make friends with classmates who speak English only. • Organize or join a study group in which the majority of the members speak English. • Speak up in class to ask and answer questions. If this is too difficult at first, speak with your instructors outside of class. • Talk with everyone you can, such as people you do business with: clerks in stores, the librarian, or the receptionist at the doctor’s office. • Speak aloud when you are by yourself: describe what you are doing as you go about your tasks at home; read what you are studying aloud.
Improving Your Speaking (Cont’d) • Give yourself permission to make mistakes. If you only repeat what you already know and don’t try new things, you won’t learn anything new. • If your instructors make you work in groups, this is an excellent way to practice. Health care involves working with others and interacting with your classmates is excellent practice for this on-the-job skill. • Practice at home. If you have family members who are interested, teach them new English words and phrases.
Improving Your Listening Comprehension • Just as in the case of speaking, the key to improving your understanding of spoken English is to practice listening. • In class, don’t hesitate to ask the instructor if there are words you don’t understand. This is especially important if these are vocabulary terms or words you will need on the job. • When listening in any situation, start by listening for the main ideas. • Don’t try to translate from English to your native language. This distracts your attention from the speaker and can cause confusion as you try to translate and listen at the same time.
Case Study and Trouble Ahead Group Work and Questions
Increasing Your Vocabulary • Suggestions for increasing your vocabulary: • Set a goal of learning a certain number of new vocabulary words each week. • In a notebook or on your computer, list new words as you encounter them. • Make posters of your new vocabulary and put them up where you will see them every day. • Record (or have a native English speaker record) your new words along with a sentence for each one. • Study word lists such as vocabulary, key terms, and the glossaries in your textbooks. • Use online dictionaries for both everyday words and medical terms.
Idioms • Idioms are phrases composed of words that when used together have a different meaning from the dictionary definitions of the individual words. Here are a few examples: • You are pulling my leg = You are trying to trick me by saying something that is not true. • I can’t keep my head above water = I have so much to do that I can’t manage this situation. • She spilled the beans about Maria = She let out a secret about Maria.
Improving Your Pronunciation • Pronunciation can be a problem, especially if you learned English as an adult. • Perhaps even more important than the pronunciation of individual words is how they are combined into sentences and on which words and syllables (parts of words) the stress (emphasis) is placed. • If you are working on developing an “American accent,” it is a good idea to model your speech after television newscasters. This is because they speak what is considered standard or neutral American English rather than one of the many regional ways of speaking found throughout the United States.
Combining Sounds • A common custom in spoken English is to link words together when there is a vowel sound between them. • An example is the sentence “I want an apple.” If each word is pronounced carefully and separately, this results in a “foreign” sound. Spoken by a native speaker, this sentence sounds like “I wannanappul.” The words are run together, and the letter “t” disappears. • Another example is “Would you like an apple?” which becomes “Wouldjuhlikeanappul?”
Combining Sounds (Cont’d) • Examples of English pronunciation characteristics: • The common use of the sound “uh” for vowels: mother—muhther; the—thuh. • The letter “t” pronounced as a “d” when the word requires a faster sound: little—liddle; anatomy—anaduhmy; thirty—therdy. (Note, however, that “thirteen” retains the “t” sound. This is because the word parts before and after the “t” in “thirteen” are longer than in “thirty.”) • Many words are pronounced differently from how they are spelled: have to—haffto; bright—brite.
Combining Sounds (Cont’d) • Some words are spelled the same but pronounced differently to convey different meanings: “read” is pronounced “reed” when meaning the present tense and “red” when meaning the past tense. • Combinations of consonants. In many languages, there are vowels between consonants that give a kind of running start to the tongue. For example, the word just used—“start”—begins with two consonants, s and t. When first learning English, speakers of some languages may say “e-start”—they need that extra first vowel to get the word going.
Improving Your Reading Comprehension • Reading has the advantage of time—you can take your time and read a sentence over and over. You can stop and look up new words in the dictionary. At the same time, this can create a problem because you may be tempted to look up every word you don’t know and end up spending hours reading. • It is recommended that students read an entire assignment first without stopping. • Your purpose during this first reading is to look for the main ideas. This can be difficult to do if you are constantly stopping to look up words.
Improving Your Reading Comprehension (Cont’d) • When reading textbook assignments: • Review any key terms listed at the beginning of a chapter • Read the learning objectives. • Once you have finished the first reading, write a list of the main ideas as you understood them. • Read the chapter again, this time listing and looking up the words you don’t know. • Later, you can practice the words by writing sentences and using your preferred learning method, such as flashcards.
Improving Your Spelling • Spelling is difficult for both native and non-native English speakers. The spelling of English words is difficult for several reasons: • One letter can be pronounced in different ways, depending on the word. This is different from languages such as Spanish, in which the letters do not vary much in sound. Note the variations for the letter “o” in the following words: • once • only • woman andwomen (These last two words can be really confusing! The words are almost identical, but in the plural form the “o” sound changes to “i”!)
Improving Your Spelling (Cont’d) • The same combinations of letters can be pronounced in different ways, such as in lie and relieve. The letters “ough” have a variety of pronunciations, none of them including the letter g: • tough—pronounced “tuhf” • through—pronounced “throo” • dough—pronounced “doe” • bought—pronounced “bawt”
Improving Your Spelling (Cont’d) • Different spellings can be pronounced the same way. Consider the following examples with the sound “ee”: The following are a few more examples with the sound “oo”: • me • meet • meat • chief • people • food • rude • crew • group • through • blue • shoe
Improving Your Spelling (Cont’d) • In some words, not all the syllables are pronounced when a native speaker talks quickly.
Improving Your Grammar • Grammar is a language’s set of rules for constructing sentences, using verbs, punctuating, and so on. When using our native languages, we don’t think too much about grammar. We just speak and write out of habit. When learning or improving our skills in another language, it can be helpful to learn grammar rules. • Rules help to organize a language to make communication easier and increase understanding.
The Challenge of Leaning Disabilities • You may have been diagnosed with a learning disability or you may have simply wondered why you have had, or are having, certain difficulties in school or even in learning on the job. • It doesn't really matter if you “have” a learning disability. What matters is that if you have noticed you have more difficulty than most people with certain tasks and this gets in the way of your learning and living productively. • There are positive actions you can take. As an adult, you have self-awareness and can monitor your own behavior and work to make changes.
The Challenge of Leaning Disabilities (Cont’d) • First there are some things you should know about learning disabilities: • They are not related to intelligence. • They are based on biologic factors, mostly involved with certain specific brain functions. • They are not always obvious and can result in puzzling contradictions. • They do not prevent people from having successful and high-level careers. • Some people with learning disabilities are creative and able to come up with innovative ideas. • Being learning disabled has nothing to do with a lack of effort or laziness. • Having a learning disability does not mean you can't learn. • There are many strategies you can use to overcome the challenges of learning disabilities.
Challenges Associated With Learning Disabilities • Being unable to manage time realistically • Being unable to stay focused for more than very short periods of time • Being unable to handle sequential or serial information • Seeing letters and numbers in the wrong order • Experiencing great difficulty remembering oral instructions • Having trouble judging distance and determining direction, such as left and right • Always feeling disorganized and out of control • Being unable to write legibly or neatly, even when you try • Experiencing great difficulty in communicating thoughts orally or in writing
General Suggestions • Make your physical health and fitness a priority. • Get adequate rest. • Break up your study sessions into chunks of 20 minutes or so, taking short breaks between sessions. • Research services for learning disabled students that may be available in your community • Study in groups with a variety of students • Seek for learning centers and tutors who help with specific academic skills and subjects • Seek help from your instructors.
Specific Suggestions • Communication • Focusing • Hyperactivity • Memory • Note-Taking • Numbers • Organization • Reading • Taking Tests • Time Management • Writing
Meditation, Yoga, and Guided Imagery • Meditation: a process for quieting the mind. • affects brain activity • decrease blood pressure • other health benefits. • Yoga: an ancient practice of assuming certain body postures and focusing on breathing. • Guided imagery: a method of visualization that involves focusing mentally on peaceful, pleasant scenes.
Accommodations • Knowing yourself and your needs is the first step toward self-advocacy, which means seeking solutions to your learning difficulties, trying alternate ways of learning, and asking for appropriate and necessary help. You may need to explain the nature of learning disabilities to people who don't understand them. • Accommodations are often available for students whose learning challenges prevent them from learning in traditional ways and who cannot demonstrate what they actually know through typical testing methods.
Learning Disabilities During the Job Search • Personal organization and good oral and written presentation are important aspects of a successful job search. • If writing is a problem, have someone proofread your resume and any letters you send out. See if potential employers have applications you can fill out online; if not, ask if you can take the application home to fill out so you can check it over carefully. • If you are called for an interview and communicating orally is difficult for you, ask for help from your school's career services personnel or an instructor. Perhaps they can spend some extra time helping you prepare.
Learning Disabilities During the Job Search (Cont’d) • A question many students have is if they should disclose their learning disability to a potential employer. The opinion of experts is that if your disability does not affect your job performance, then it is not necessary to mention it. If, however, you plan to request accommodations, you must disclose it to be eligible. (Do note that if you are not legally defined as “disabled,” you may not be entitled to accommodations.) • The important thing is to identify your own weaknesses and work to find ways to overcome them. People with learning disabilities have successful careers and productive lives. Sometimes, it just takes a bit of extra effort.
Case Study and Trouble Ahead Group Work and Questions
