by Richard Holmes

Created on: March 25, 2009

A few years ago when I was a junior-senior high school principal, I always posted our school academic honor rolls outside my office. I also mailed home a personally signed letter of congratulations to the family of students on the various honor rolls. Besides the honor rolls, we also recognized students whose academic progress improved at least five points over the previous quarter. Sometimes that meant improving from a 62% average to a 67% average. Not great but an improvement. Letters of congratulations went to the families of those students as well.

I remember one winter afternoon when I was posting the honor rolls. We had three levels, highest honors, high honors and honors. It dawned on me that day that the top student in the tenth grade had been on the top of the highest honor roll for the past year and a half. I wondered what her secret of success had been. I decided to find out.

The next day around two o'clock I had our school secretary call Regina to my office. Ordinarily when a student gets summoned to the principal's office, it's for a pretty high level infraction that is so serious that it bypasses the assistant principal who makes his living dealing with routine disciplinary issues. So when Regina walked down the long hallway from the secretary's desk to mine, she walked slowly and look very, very somber. When she reached the front of my desk I, in an equally somber mood, told her to be seated. Then, because I'm really not a bad sort of guy, I broke the ice and told her that I wanted to personally congratulare her on her academic achievement this marking period. She looked relieved to say the least.

But I then told her that I wanted to ask her a question. She said, cautiously, "All right." So I asked what the secret of her success was. I told her I wanted to know how she managed to be in the number one spot on our highest honor roll every quarter since she started ninth grade.

She thought for a long minute and then said simply, "I pay attention in class, I do all my homework...and I study for my tests." I said, "That's it?" She said softly that, yes, that was it. I thanked her for that information, congratulated her again and sent her back to class.

I gave Regina's success formula a lot of thought in the following days. It made sense. And I have used it dozens of times in speaking to students and to parents. Of course, I elaborated on each point. It usually went something like this.

Students need to pay attention in class. When I speak to parents,

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