'Family' Dinner

While I haven't verified this claim, I feel safe in assuming that most family experts agree that families that have regular family dinners together tend to have a better family dynamic, which in turn positively impacts most other aspects of their lives. If you disagree with this claim, good for you. My question is, if preparing and dining together is good for the family, it probably would also have a positive impact on the culture of an advisory.

At MNCS, most advisors have some type of dining rituals for their advisory. One advisor frequently takes their troops to the local pizza place for lunch together. Another has made an annual tradition out of having the students prepare a large Thanksgiving meal. Today, I had my crew put together a wonderful breakfast off pancakes, eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, toast, smoothies, and did I say bacon? It was delicious.

Obviously this type of activity promotes group cohesion, ala the family dinner hypothesis, but does it teach anything else? I think the potential exists in this situation for tons of beneficial knowledge creation. For one, I like to delegate some responsibility and put students in charge of the whole operation. Typically this is a Jr or Sr, who is responsible for determining the menu, creating an ingredient list, assigning people to bring certain ingredients, and coordinating the cooking situation. Other students learn basic cooking skills, which are always beneficial. If I put some more time into thinking about this, but in the long run my major goals from these meals are advisory bonding, teaching leadership through experience, and some basic kitchen smarts.

Oh yeah, the food is awesome. Be sure to invite the help staff, they always appreciate it.

Planning an Advisory, Part 2

As the school year gets alarmingly close to starting, I feel I'm starting to really wrap my head around this whole advisory thing. I've spent an enormous amount of time this summer wrestling with how I want to approach my advisory this year. I detailed some of that struggle in my previous post on advisory planning, where I debated the idea of thinking of an advisory as a team, and how else to best approach them. All of this debating and ruminating has finally given me the insight that I am not a teacher. I am an advisor, which is the combination of student leader and manager. Pretty simple, right?

Of course, if I'm their leader, which way do they go? At first I thought, '10 Credits'. That's how many MNCS credits students are expected to earn each year, so it seemed like a reasonable direction in which to lead. After some reflection, I think this goal is too small. Some of these kids will hopefully be in my advisory for years to come. It would be a waste of time to just help them hammer out 10 credits a year. They might eventually compile the 70 needed to graduate, but that would not indicate that they've actually gone anywhere meaningful on their educational journey. Clearly, a bigger goal is needed.

I remember in my early years of college, I was obsessed by getting A's. This made sense, since A's were good. Unfortunately, after a few years I realized I was getting plenty of A's, but I wasn't always learning a whole lot. Seems that in todays university, it's pretty easy to slide through with good grades and not really learn anything. This revelation helped me chage my focus. I stopped giving a rat's ass about my grades. Instead, I made it my goal to learn as much as I could from every class. I don't think I missed out on any A's after switching that focus. Plus, I actually got smarter for my dollars. It seems that if you are learning as much as you can in a course, the A will inevitably follow. This is how school should work, is how it was designed to work, but somewhere along the line we took a crap on that idea.

So what is it that I want students to learn? Even more than just learn, where do I want them to be when they are ready to graduate? I suspect that if this end goal is clearly spelled out, and myself and all of my students are on board with said goal, 10 credits will come year in and year out with ease. We will be so busy working together to achieve our goal that they won't even have to think about credit. So what is the goal?

Most people know I'm a bit of an amatuer Rand scholar. While much can be said of the role of family and society on the succes of an individual (see Gladwell's Outliers), I still think effective accountability and succes need to come from the individual level. One of the cornerstones of Randian ethics are the three concepts of Reason, Purpose, and Self-esteem. Rand believed that these three things were the key ingredients to the highest virtue of human life. While I could spill nonsense about these ideas all day long, to make this long story short, Reason, Purpose, and Self-esteem are a great goal for an advisory to be working towards.

I want all of my students to have some mastery of their power of reason. They need to be able to think about life, about how they relate to it, where they are going in it, what they want out of it. Most importanlty they need their Reason as their best tool to navigate life.

They also need Purpose. Reason is great, but like a GPS without a destination, Reason is useless if it's not being put towards something. Whether it's family, college, the military, or any other hobby or career, I want my students to have a good idea of where their interests and passions lie, and to have as many options as possible open to explore them.

Reason and Purpose are awesome, but without Self-esteem, or the belief and conviction that their life has value, and that they are worthy of pursuing it, they will go nowhere. Many people have great hopes and dreams, but lack the self-worth to pursue them, feeling that theirs are somehow less important than others.

Think what you want about Rand, I think that these are reasonable virtues to focus on for all students. If I can get my advisory focused on this objective, I think it will take us places. We'll see. In my next session, I'll back off of this leadership tact and talk a little bit more about advisory and student management.

An Industry's View on Project Based Learning

Here's a link to a brief article that highlights the relationship of west-coast technology companies to Cal-Poly, one of the top engineering schools in the world. Cal-Poly is renowned for using interdisciplinary project based learning, and it seems that industry leaders thin this gives Cal-Poly grads a leg up on their competition. And I think they stole the 'learn by doing' motto from MNCS. Or maybe it was the other way around...

http://news.thomasnet.com/companystory/564532

Some Interesting Reads...

I'm in the middle of studying two suprisingly related books that deal a lot with education issues that I've yet to hear addressed in other circles. The first, Boys Adrift, addresses some of the issues that young men in our current culture are facing which result in a large number of lazy, unmotivated male members of society. The author, Leonard Sax, cites a number of reasons for the 'failure to launch' syndrome. The most education-relevant reasons involve boys starting kindergarten too soon, and medications for ADHD and depression. Sax cites evidence that ADHD is A.) Mis-diagnosed in numerous instances and B.) Stimulant-based medications for ADHD have been shown to permanently alter ther brain structure in young males, which could have a negative, life-long impact on a person's disposition.

The issue of starting school too early deals with the possibilty that many boys are not mentally ready for structured, academic learning at 5 or 6 years of age. If they are forced into this type of schooling too soon, it can severely damage their perception of schools and teachers. Once they've got it in their heads that school sucks, the damage is done, and the delays in their schooling only compound as the years go on while teachers and parents struggle to get them to accept schooling. Often, by starting boys in school a year later, they are mentally ready for academic work, and will hopefully retain a more positive attitude towards school.

This actually relates somewhat to my other current book of interest, Malcom Gladwell's Outliers. In this book, Gladwell challenges the assertion that succesfull people have special individual traits and attributes that seperate them from their peers. Instead, Gladwell argues that many other societal, personal, or family variables lead indirectly to a person being succesful. I haven't finished the book yet; in fact I just finished chapter one, where Gladwell demonstrates that in high level hockey, being born in the first four months of the year have a greater impact on a player's level of perceived success than individual talent. In most hockey systems, players all born in the same calendar year become a cohort by age. Players born in January, Feb., or March have a significant developmental advantage over their peers born later in the year when it comes time to pick who gets to advance to the higher-level teams, and who stays with the regular cohort. Ten or eleven months of a developmental head start have more to do with a young player's superior skill versus those of his cohort peers who were born later in the year than inborn talent. Hopefully you're following this.

While an advantage in developmental time is the primary means to succes for these young 'all-stars', the fact that they are more likely to be selected over those born in later months eventually turns into a true advantage in skill, as the 'all-star' players recieve better coaching, more playing time, and more practice time. This is relevant to educators in that students are grouped in similar fashion in the traditional school system. A student born in September has a developmental adavantage over grade-level peers who were born in March or April. Come the end of the school year, the September birthdays are mentally more mature, and are more likely to display better academic skills and abililty than those born later in the school year. This leads them to be more likely selected for gifted and talented programs, etc. What starts out as a simple advantage in developmental growth eventually turns into an actual intellectual superiority as these students recieve access to better teachers, curriculum, etc. Two students of otherwise identical starting ability might in the end recieve two totally different educations, and experience two totally different lives as a result of the fact that one was simply born earlier than the other.

Just food for thought, this kind of stuff is interesting too me, and I think it's worth checking out.

Are 'Comments' Killing America?

While I try to keep this blog education-centered, this posting will delve into a serious bone I have to pick. I've railed on people who comment on this blog anonymously on a couple of occasions. This is the result of a pent-up frustration I have with reader comments and the new, interactive internet in general. Today I shall vent my anguish with 'comments' at large, and perhaps contribute some insight into how they are contributing to the decline of our country. The particular editorial that spawned this diatribe is acutally education related and can be found here: http://www.startribune.com/opinion/editorials/52551702.html?page=1&c=y

1. Comments Are Anonymous
If you have something to say, and think it's something meaningful that other people might benefit from, then have the confidence to put your name on it. Unfortunately, most of us well-meaning citizens who would like to benefit from the insights that others might offer are no longer able to read comments on blogs and other internet media because so many spineless nitwits who would not have the guts to spill their senseless drivel in real-time, face-to-face public forum have no problem publishing them on the internet anonymously. Think of the hay-day the KKK would've had with your online news source's comment section in the 1950's. Anonymous comments are the modern day equivalent to a white sheet and pointy hood.

2. Comments Contribute Nothing to Society
Comments are political action for two kinds of people: A.) People who know what they're saying is wrong, but say it anyway because it's anonymous. See the above heading 'Comments Are Anonymous'. B.) People who have good ideas, are willing to put their name on them, but mistake a comment on the local news site for actual action. It takes little effort to post a comment. It takes hardly any more effort to write or call your local political representatives and share the same thoughts with them. For some reason, most people are unwilling to take this second step. It might be directly tied to the whole anonymous situation described above, or it might be due to a simple mistaken belief that someone who has the power to change something might actually read your comment, be swayed by it, and do something about it. They won't. C.) People who just like to tick people off. While I have great respect for a contrarian mindset, typically these people haven't put any real thought into their statements, they just repeat the garbage that successful and wealthy contrarians like Rush Limbaugh get paid big money to spew. Newsflash: Rush Limbaugh does not actually believe that any of his ideas are helpful or effective, he just understands that people who don't like to think for themselves will pay big money to read and listen to his garbage, and has made a ton of money through this understanding. As a fairly libertarian dude, I should agree with at least some of Rush's insights, but for some reason, none of what he says makes any sense to me.

3. It's All the Government's Fault
This relates directly to section 2:B above. Once upon a time, people in this country who thought something was wrong with the way things were being done would acutally meet somewhere (the proverbial 'Town Hall' for example) and do something about it. If citizens were that concerned about the way their local schools operate, they would all get together and force meaningful change. Somewhere, somehow along the way, we've all been led to believe that this thing called 'government' is a magical system, that will solve all of our problems, while at the same time causing them. I'm not sure where exactly this perception came from, but I'm sure plenty of democrats would love to comment on here about how it's all the replubicans fault, and the republicans would love to scream that them darn socialist democrats caused all of our problems. Newsflash #2: Whining about who's at fault for all of our problems never gets us anywhere. Doing things to solve our problems gets us somewhere. Stop wasting your time with comments, and start working together to solve your problems. Everybody seems to think that their brand of legislator is going to fix everything. They're not. They're working on behalf of the special interests that paid to have them elected. If you want meaningful solutions, you'd better come up with some yourselves. Oh yeah, you'll probably have to stop watching TV for a little while if this strategy is going to work.

Anyway, I feel better. People need to stop believing that comments on news article, blogs, whatever, are meaningful contributions to the political landscape of our country. I value comments when people are willing to share things that they have put some thought into, articles germane to the discussion, helpful links or contacts to follow up on, etc. When people use comments to blindly spew rhetorical political filth and mindless trash about republican this, democrat that onto a website, they degrade the quality and utility of comment-based discussion for us all. Rather than commenting, these people need to band together and put their energy into trying to equalize the will of the populace against the will of the corporations. But that's the topic of another post, I'm sure.

Feel free to post hateful, politically biased comments here. If you leave your name, I might just publish them.

Planning An Advisory: Part 1

This fall, I will be embarking on my first journey as a full-time advisor with 12+ live, in school students. I've had some smaller groups in the past, and been an unoffical sub over the past three years, but I'm hitting the big-time on August 29th. While I greet this opportunity with excitement, I am also experiencing some moments of sheer terror: how will I effectively manage these students so that all of us achieve success? I am using this here blog to record the process I am going through to help create some sort of plan to approach the school year with, since everything feels a little less terrifying if you have a plan. Writing will help me process my thoughts, and I figure it could help some PBL newbies out there, and hopefully provide a good journal of do's and don'ts for myself in the future.

Part One: The approach

How to approach the challenge of creating a quality advisory? I suppose it's good to step back and begin with the end in mind, as all the Zen masters say. Ideally, my advisory provides the framework for myself and the 12 to 15 students that dwell within it to succeed in school and in life this year. This means that each student earns a good chunk of credit, is in a good emotional place most of the time, has fun learning, and that their basic skills grow from the beginning of the year to the end of the year. For me, it means I haven't torn all of my hair out by next June.

It's hard to describe a quality advisory on paper, but I can brainstorm some terms that might help define it: welcoming, organized, warm, buzzing, productive, teamwork, successful, interesting, challenging, fluid, structured, respectful, honest, cooperative, enlightening.

I could probably go on, but that's a good start. I've also taken some time to visualize what a good advisory looks like. This sounds crazy, but it does work, sort of. I'm sitting at my desk while doing this, which seems to help. Students are coming and going. They are generally working on projects, although the occasional distraction is normal. Students talk and laugh, although they generally focus on projects, and the volume level is tolerable. If a student needs help with something, they don't hesitate to seek out another student, and students are willing to give help when asked in return. Some desks are empty, because a lot of projects happen outside of the physical advisory area.

Not sure if that activity is helping me a lot. Let's try another approach: In many ways, an advisory is like a team: A group of people working together to achieve a common goal. This is kind of an odd approach, since their common goal is not really common, but they all are working to succeed in the same areas. Some are all-stars, and might at times feel burdened by the lower performers. The lower performers might be a little intimidated by the all-stars. Ideally though, the whole group might commit to the idea that together they all can perform better than they would individually. By mutually supporting each other, they can fill in gaps in strengths and weaknesses, help each other stay focused, and provide backup in times of trouble. I like that approach; not sure if it's a reallistic or effective way to view an advisory, but I'll run with it for a while. If it falls apart, I can try something else. I'll ponder this approach, and see where it goes in the next installment.