Like so many important school matters, the talk means more if it's timed just right. Sometimes we'll have it before the winter vacation in December; sometimes, before the Thanksgiving break in November. Occasionally it occurs in October, and once or twice we've needed to tackle the topic as early as the end of September.

The topic: how the school year and the major league baseball season share one critical component. At some point in time for just about everyone involved, both become a grind.The constant routine of both can lead to drudgery, tedium, the feeling that you're a lab rat trapped in a cage, running on the exercise wheel endlessly, sucking on stale water through a metal tube forever.I tell my classes that the most successful baseball players and the most successful students do not deny that feeling when it occurs. They acknowledge it and immediately take steps to minimize it.A major league baseball season consists of 162 games from early April until late September. Every team gets hot periodically, and every team suffers through losing streaks.At the end of the season, however, the division winners usually are the ones who kept the length of the losing streaks to a minimum.Similarly, the school year consists of 180 days from late August to early June. Every student - especially at the start - does well for a while. But just about every student struggles with grades, the grind, or both sometimes.The ones with the highest cumulative averages at the end of the school year, however, are those who have kept the bad times, the bad grades, and the blue days to a day or two rather than a week or two.I write about this in late August to do more than warn students as they begin another school year. Primarily, the column's purpose is to inform parents. And to help them counteract the school grind.By doing everything in your power to keep your son or daughter healthy and fit, you'll make it far easier for him or her to minimize the sure-to-come slumps in any school year. A synopsis of the following studies should help parents do that.For instance, what could you be doing to help your fifth grader already prepare for the math, reading, and science PSSA test administered in eighth grade? According to findings published in Clinical Pediatrics in December 2014, you could be minimizing your son or daughter's consumption of fast food.A research team at Ohio State University analyzed data of the 11,740 students who took part in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study that began when the subjects started kindergarten in 1998. As fifth graders, the subjects filled out an extensive food questionnaire. Later, the standardized tests taken in math, reading, and science in eighth grade were judged against the subjects' eating habits in fifth.The comparison revealed that the children who ate fast food more than four times a week at that time scored up to 20 percent lower on the three tests than those who did not eat any fast food. Children who as fifth graders ate fast food once, twice, or three times a week scored lower than those who never ate fast food, but only on the math test.These results reinforce prior studies that linked high-fat and high-sugar diets with impaired memory.Yet getting a sufficient amount of sleep may be just as important to academic success as reducing the consumption of meals obtained at drive-thru windows.A series of related studies have established that students gather information while awake, but they really "learn" the info during sleep. Helen Emsellem, medical director at the Center for Sleep and Wake Disorders in Chevy Chase, Md, explained the purpose of sleeping in an article first published in the Washington Post this way: "The brain restores the synapses - taking the information worth keeping and learning it [during sleep]. As for the information not worth keeping . . . the brain flushes it out."And if your son or daughter is as reluctant a sleeper as he or she is a student, you can argue the matter from another point of view: any learning, including athletic and musical skills, is developed this way, too. So if your son who plays running back got caught from behind a yard from the goal line, the fact that he played video games until 1 a.m. the night before could be the cause.If your child doesn't really care about sports or music but does care about his or her personal appearance, you can explain the link between sleep and weight control.As previously reported in this column, a Temple University study published in 2013 in Pediatrics found that in a three-week period, when 8-to-11-year-old children slept sufficiently for a week, they ate on average 134 fewer calories a day as compared to a week of the study when the same children didn't. While a 134 calories per day is noteworthy in anyone, it is especially significant in 8-to-11-year olds most of whom weigh far less than a typical adult.