Tuesday, June 4th

INTRODUCTION

My dearest Alethia,

As I think back over the past 14—nearly 15—years of your life, my heart beams with pride as I reminisce about how much you’ve grown and how excellent you are. You’ve been to 12 different countries and experienced a variety of world cultures, foods, and people groups. You’ve shared your blessings with less fortunate children in Indonesia and Mexico. You’ve also explored a variety of different interests, such as video editing, photography, music recording, bracelet-making, slime, piano, guitar, painting, etc. Your life is rich, full, and well-rounded, and you have a knack for creating harmony and love among the people you love. I love watching you connect with your cousins, grandparents, uncles, aunts, and friends. The joy that you experience and bring in those settings is so apparent and infectious, and I love that about you.

Yet, all the activities and experiences that we’ve provided for you have also taken a toll on you. During your Kindergarten year, we took you out of the country five or six times, which means you missed 10-12 weeks of school that year. By the time you got to the 1st grade, you were way ahead of the other students in terms of life experiences, but behind most of them academically. We did the best we could to get you tutors so that you could catch up, but it seems like you’ve been a step behind ever since and have yet to find your academic stride.

Your mother and I have felt the temptation to conclude that academics are not your strength and that your strengths lie in the creative realm. While this may be the case (although, I don’t believe it is), it is certainly not the whole story. You are smarter than you think and far more intelligent than we have seen. You simply have not had the tools you need to jumpstart your academic engine so that you can see what it can actually do. As your father, that is both my fault and responsibility.

This summer, you will catch up. You will no longer feel that you are behind, that no matter how hard you try, you can’t understand things, and that no matter how hard you study, you’ll never get good grades. This summer, we will activate your academic engine and give you the tools you need to thrive in the academic arena. The result of this summer will be that you will start the 10th grade feeling like you’re a step ahead, like you are prepared, and confident that you can handle anything that is set before you through Christ, who gives you strength.

My vision for your 10th-12th grades is that you would thrive as an athlete scholar. You will continue to grow in athleticism and you will continue to grow in academics. You will excel in both arenas, and neither will compromise the other. In the 9th grade, you were the most improved player on your JV team. You will continue to build on that foundation in the 10th grade, and we will continue to work on your game over the summer as well.

But this will take dedication on your part. You will have to follow the plan that I give you every day. You will complete each day’s lesson to the best of your ability by yourself, most days while I am at work. When I get home, we will go over the lesson together to discuss what you have learned or clarify where you may have gotten stuck. If you commit yourself to this, I am confident you will make great progress this summer, and it will radically change the academic outlook of your future.

METHODOLOGY

Before we delve into the lessons, I want you to understand what you will be learning, why you will be learning it, and how you will learn it. I realize that in most of your classes, your teachers just start teaching you stuff without explaining why you need to learn it or how you are to learn it. I want to set you up for a prosperous summer by explaining these things to you upfront.

1. Concepts are More Important than Information

What we are going to do over the next 10 weeks is establish a basic foundation in World History, Spanish 2, Geometry, English Grammar, and Biblical Theology. The first three are classes you will take in the Fall, the fourth is a foundational discipline that will empower everything you do academically, and the last will empower you to grow in your Christian faith and in your personal relationship with Christ.

However, the goal of our summer program is not for you to master all the information in these courses. Instead, the goal will be to establish the foundational concepts and framework of these disciplines in your mind before the summer ends. Why is that important? Because once that foundation and framework are established in your mind, adding information to that framework in the actual courses in the Fall will be quite easy.

2. The Power of Retrieval

What is most important to me is teaching you how to learn; this is far more important than teaching you what to learn. If you learn how to learn, you can apply that to any subject. My first goal is to establish the practice of retrieval in your heart and mind as the first of three learning techniques that will boost your academic efforts for the rest of your life.

What is the practice of retrieval? You’ve already learned how to do it, as it is the method we use to memorize Scripture. We’ve also used retrieval practice to help you memorize Spanish sentences. Retrieval practice is simply the practice of stopping to recite (out loud and from memory) what you have just learned. However, there are two ways in which the retrieval process that you will learn this summer will be different from what you have practiced before:

First, you will use this practice for everything, not just specific sentences.

Second, you will retrieve concepts, not specific words.

For example, when you are working on a reading assignment, you will stop after every paragraph and explain in your own words, out loud, what you just learned from that paragraph. And again, after every 4th paragraph, you will stop and summarize in your own words what you learned in the previous 4 paragraphs.

This practice at first will feel silly and like a complete waste of time. But I assure you, research has shown that it is the most powerful way to boost your reading comprehension and dramatically improve your ability to remember the contents of what you have read for weeks, months, and years to come. If you master this practice over the summer, you will experience an explosion of academic success in the Fall!

3. The Power of Spaced Learning

Remember when we memorized Psalm 27? How did we do it? 1. We learned one verse per week for 14 weeks (there are 14 verses in the chapter), and 2. We reviewed all of the verses from the previous weeks every day for 14 weeks. In other words, we didn’t try to cram the chapter in one day; we gave it some space. And because of that, you easily memorized the entire chapter when you were 7 years old. At 7 years old, you had memorized more Scripture than most adults ever do in their lives, and it wasn’t hard.

Space is what makes learning easy. If something is hard the first time you try to learn it, don’t worry about it; do the best you can. We will come back to it in a week, or two weeks, or a couple days. We will give it some space, then come back to it again.

When you give your brain space, it continues to work on the problem in the background while you rest. And often, when you come back to it, you find that you miraculously are able to understand it just a little better than you did before. Keep coming back to it over the course of weeks, months, and years, and it becomes super easy for you to understand.

What I will try to do in this summer program is provide you with the most important core concepts of each subject so that we can learn those concepts in multiple ways and from multiple vantage points over the next ten weeks. The goal is to use the space of the next 10 weeks to lay a foundation that will set you up for success for the rest of your life.

4. The Power of Interleaving

The last technique that we will use is called interleaving. Interleaving is the process of mixing subjects and concepts with other subjects and concepts that are unrelated. We may begin with a history reading, then jump to a geometry problem, then stop for a Spanish lesson before returning to history. What this does is force your brain to integrate all of these subjects into a cohesive whole that will become your personal knowledge base.

In school, all of your subjects are separate, and this is fine and good. But my summer program will establish within you an interdisciplinary spirit that will enable you to notice connections between subjects and disciplines that others might not see.

You may experience this methodology as a bit confusing at first, but don’t worry. I will not be giving you tests or quizzes during this summer session. This is not about performing to complete an assignment. This is about you diving deep into core concepts that can provide you with a solid foundation.

CONCLUSION

I am very excited by the prospect of what this process can do for you, and I hope and pray you are too. You’ve got your whole future ahead of you, and it is truly bright! Nothing is impossible for you! Nothing is out of your reach! You are smarter than you think, and it is now time for your intellectual engine to activate! I will be right beside you and will give you all the support and help that you need.

But you’ve got to decide to commit yourself to this. This is the opportunity of a lifetime for you, but as Leonard Ravenhill said, “An opportunity of a lifetime must be grasped within the lifetime of the opportunity.” If you miss this opportunity, you’ll look back on it and regret it. But if you lay hold of it and milk it for all it's worth, you’ll look back on this moment as the great turning point in your life; the moment when it all started to come together, when the great power inside of you began to awaken, and when you finally discovered the overcomer within you that nothing can stop!

Loving you with all my heart,

Daddy

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