School began this week all over the Bay Area!  I love the first week of school because students are full of hope and their organizational systems haven’t yet succumbed to a sea of papers.

As an academic coaching, I work one on one with students, but no session is alike. Sometimes it feels like a grand improvisation, encountering new issues every hour and figuring out how to approach them.  Here are some tasks that Week One was filled with:

• Received tours of  backpacks and school supplies. Once student was oh-so-proud of her knew REI backpack which is evidently much more comfortable than a standard backpack.
• Helped binder-hating students figure out an alternative organization method  (the accordion folder or the Circa planners are nice backups)
• Taught students how to use a hanging file system at home to file older papers that need to be saved for final exams
• Brainstormed topics for college essays (the challenge of painting with watercolor and how it is a metaphor for my life; why I’m grateful I stuck with the “torture” of preparing for my bat mitvah)
• Calmed several students down who are anticipating an insane homework load
• Collaged new planner covers (I’m a firm believer that if you decorate your planner, you are more likely to use it)
• Renovated planners for all the students who took my DIY Planner workshop last year
• Problem solved what technology a non-artsy student should use for their first English project, which requires some art-making(we landed on GoogleDocs drawings).
• Convinced a student who has never before used a planner to set up iCal to track all his work
• Practiced a locker combination 6 times with a client until she got it right and could open her locker
• Planning when a student should go to her locker during the course of the day, so that she doesn’t have to lug a day’s worth of heavy textbooks with her
• Uncovered a stack of loose papers in a backpack and helped devise locations for all the homeless papers
• Outlined a student’s first essay of the year

All in a week’s work!