How High School Really Prepared Us for College
My two favorite statements are -
You will get your heartbroken ... and life will go on
Now I'm not thinking just in terms of relationships here. What is great about high school is that you have a relatively safe place to experience this. Where else can you learn to cope with such "devastating" losses as getting the final out in your sophomore year of baseball or misreading an essay question on a final exam and losing out on an A in Western Civ or getting dumped your senior year.
Those are all tough to deal with . . . at least when you're still in high school, but the great thing is that you learn the sun comes up the next day, regardless of how traumatic the loss was. Our girls' sports have learned that lesson this year. In volleyball, hockey, and basketball, our girls' teams have all be ranked at the top of their classes in the entire state. Yet, all suffered devastating losses in the post season. And they still had to come to school the next day (well, almost all . . . for some reason most of the girls' hockey players found a reason to miss the next day). Life goes on.
It's better to experience this in such insignificant things as sports instead of significant things later in life, such as losing a parent. Life does indeed go on for us.
You're always going to know more in the future than you know now
I love this. And it's so true. I'm reminded of Oscar Wilde's famous quote, "I'm not young enough to know everything" when I read this bit of advice.
I teach the best and the brightest that LHS has. And often times the fact that these students are so good and so successful and so bright obscures the fact that they are so young and have never been in a situation (at least academically) where they are not in the top 10 percent of their class.
Oh how that will change. Keeping this bit of advice in mind, which is something I try to stress to all my students, is vital. It also ties in well with what we've been studying this year as a staff, the Growth Mind-set.
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5 Things Teachers Wish Parents Knew: Your Children Can Do More Than You Think
#2 - It’s not healthy to give your child constant feedback.
#5 - Teach your children that mistakes aren’t signs of weakness but a vital part of growth and learning.
Are my favorites, though, lord knows I struggle with them with my kids all the time.
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What My Students Think Makes a Great Teacher
A teacher records what some of his students think makes a great teacher. Some of these are brilliant.
Here is a sampling -
In my opinion, as long as they can get lessons into our heads without making us fall asleep they're good enough.
If a teacher doesn't believe in what he or she is saying, then the students won't either. A great teacher is also patient and cares about the students well-being.
Teachers are meant to be great, and a great friend. They're like superheroes, and they are always there for you.
Some things that make a great teacher are coming to work every day looking forward to teaching. Another is that they actually care about their students.
That doesn't sound so hard, does it?
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This is why I love Leon Botstein -
College President: SAT Is Part Hoax, Part Fraud
Here is a sample -
The blunt fact is that the SAT has never been a good predictor of academic achievement in college. High school grades adjusted to account for the curriculum and academic programs in the high school from which a student graduates are. The essential mechanism of the SAT, the multiple choice test question, is a bizarre relic of long outdated twentieth century social scientific assumptions and strategies. As every adult recognizes, knowing something or how to do something in real life is never defined by being able to choose a “right” answer from a set of possible answers (some of them intentionally misleading) put forward by faceless test designers who are rarely eminent experts. No scientist, engineer, writer, psychologist, artist, or physician—and certainly no scholar, and therefore no serious university faculty member—pursues his or her vocation by getting right answers from a set of prescribed alternatives that trivialize complexity and ambiguity.
You tell 'em Dr. Botstein!
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Found this on Facebook, 20 Terrifying Two-Sentence Horror Stories.
I don't know if they'er all terrifying, but if I teach creative writing this summer, we are definitely going to try and come up with some of our own. Or we may use these two sentence stories as story starters to create a longer story.
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Twitter is My Teacher Superpower
You know I'm all over this one!
And this one goes right along with the previous link, Why Learning Through Social Networks is the Future.
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One thing I work a lot with my College Comp I and II classes on is finding their passions. I want them to have careers that give them meaning. I want them to positively impact the lives of others in whatever fields they venture.
There seems to be two sides to the passion hypothesis.
One is like this article, follow your heart and work really, really hard and everything will be okay.
We read Ken Robinson's The Element, which focuses on this take of the passion hypothesis.
Another take is by Cal Newport in his So Good They Can't Ignore You, which we will be reading for the first time in College Comp II. Newport's take is that passion isn't in your heart. We aren't actually born with great passions that just need to be discovered. His main point is that passion comes from being really good at something. When you're really good at your job, you develop rare and valuable skills. This leads to more freedom from your employer, more creativity, and greater impact. These three things, in turn, lead you to develop a passion for your job and to love what you do.
Here is another article that counters the follow-the-passion-that-is-in-your-heart hypothesis.
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