How to Help Your Teen Actually Excel in a Course: What Worked for Us
The highlighter was the first clue. My son Jack had arranged five colors in a row on the kitchen table, and he was working through his honors biology textbook like it was a coloring book. Pink for vocabulary, yellow for definitions, blue for anything bolded. He’d been at it for over an hour, and when I asked how it was going, he gave me a thumbs-up and said, “Making good notes.” Two days later, he brought home a quiz with a 68 drawn in red ink. “But I studied,” he said. And he had.
That was the problem. He had spent hours doing something that looked like studying but wasn’t doing what studying is supposed to do. There was plenty of effort and almost no payoff. I’m not a teacher, but I’ve watched enough kids sit at kitchen tables to know that highlighting and rereading is a trap. It feels productive. The page turns, the pen moves, the sentences start to look familiar. But familiarity isn’t learning. He had recognized the material on the multiple-choice quiz, then drawn a blank when he had to actually pick the right answer.
I called my friend Rachel, who teaches chemistry at the high school. She didn’t sound surprised. “He thinks he studied because he was holding a pen,” she said. “Ask him to tell you what he learned with the book closed.” So I did. That evening, I asked Jack to explain photosynthesis to me. He got through “oxygen and glucose” and then froze. “I know this,” he said. “I just read it.” He knew the words, but not the process. Rachel had a name for what he needed: the blank page test.
The rule was simple. After reading a section for twenty minutes, close the book and write down everything you can remember. No looking back. Then open it, see what’s missing, and spend another ten minutes filling in the gaps. That’s it. It sounded too basic to make a difference, but Jack tried it. The first time, his blank page had four lines on it. The second time, he had a paragraph that actually stayed on topic. The third time, he started muttering to himself while he wrote, which I took as a good sign.
What surprised me was that it wasn’t easy. Jack was used to reading and feeling like he understood. The blank page forced him to notice the difference between seeing information and being able to produce it. That discomfort is the point, but I’m not sure kids understand that. It feels like failing, so they avoid it. They keep rereading because rereading feels smooth. Retrieving feels rough. Rachel told me to let him feel rough for a few minutes before jumping in to help. “Don’t rescue him too fast,” she said. “Let him not know something for a second. That’s when his brain is actually working.”
The next thing we changed was how he studied with his study guides. Jack had a habit of reading the review sheet and thinking, “Yes, I know that,” before moving on. That’s another version of the same trap. Recognition is not recall. So we turned his study guides into questions instead of statements. If the guide said “Know the stages of mitosis,” Jack wrote “What happens in each stage of mitosis?” on a notecard. Then he shuffled the cards and answered them out loud. He did this at the table, not in his room, because his room had too many distractions. Actually, his room had a phone. We put the phone in the kitchen drawer for forty-five minutes. That was a lot harder than the notecards.
The phone wasn’t evil. He needed it to text his friends and check the weather. But when it was next to him, every vibration pulled his attention away for “just a second.” Multiple times, I caught him sitting in front of an open textbook with his hand on his phone and his eyes somewhere in between. Once we removed the phone from the room, his forty-five minute study session actually became a forty-five minute study session. He still finished early sometimes, but he didn’t pretend to be working while he was really waiting for his next notification.
Then there was the question of what to do with the day before a test. Jack’s usual strategy was to study late into the night, cramming as much as he could, and then stagger into school feeling like he’d earned a decent grade. It didn’t work, especially for biology, which required him to remember a lot of details from earlier chapters. At 2 a.m., he wasn’t learning new material; he was just making himself more anxious. Rachel suggested that he stop two hours before bed, no matter what, and do a short review of his notecards in the morning instead. He groaned about it, but the first time he tried it, he said the test felt less foggy. I can’t prove that sleep was the reason, but he did noticeably better on that exam.
What helped more than any single technique was the shift in his attitude. He stopped saying “I need to read this chapter again” and started saying “I need to test myself.” That sounds small, but it changed what he did with his time. Instead of sitting passively with the material, he looked for the places where he couldn’t answer. That’s where the learning happens. It’s uncomfortable, and I don’t think there’s a way to make it feel completely comfortable. But I started to see him get a little less worried when he couldn’t recall something immediately. It became a signal of what to study next, not a sign that he was stupid.
We still have rough moments. Last week, he had a history test and announced he was going to “just watch a documentary” about the Civil War. I let him try it. He got a B minus. He said the documentary was good, but it didn’t help him write the essay. I didn’t say “I told you so,” because he figured it out himself. The next time he studied, he made a time line of events and then covered it with a piece of paper and tried to fill it in from memory. That’s the blank page test again. It’s not fancy, but it keeps showing up because it works.
I don’t think Jack has become a perfect student. He still forgets to bring his flashcards sometimes, and there are days when the kitchen drawer phone situation feels like a punishment for both of us. But he’s learning how to study, which is different from learning how to read a textbook. He’s doing better in biology, and more importantly, he seems to understand why he’s doing better. That matters. The skills he’s building won’t magically make every course easy, but they’re the kind of skills that transfer. I wish someone had shown them to me when I was in school. I probably would have highlighted that advice.
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