Cover via Amazon
“Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”
John Wooden
Below is an excerpt from a NYT article on education. The entire article is a long read, but a good one for anyone interested in truly educating children, and looking outside of the box that we find our kids trapped in today. We are destined to begin hearing calls soon to fully fund MAEP for the next legislative session. But, wouldn’t it be fresh and inspiring to see Superintendents, Teachers, and lobbying groups like the Parents Campaign and the Association of Educators to instead start looking at new ways to educate kids. Our education discussions should be about benefits to children and their contributions to Mississippi rather than just about formulating data and the amount of money that can be thrown around.
Before I begin getting hate mail, let me say up front that I’m a big supporter of teachers. Teachers do an incredible job with resources that never match up to the need. I get it. But, how many have looked closely at the amount of money that is spent on administrative costs? Superintendents salaries? Superintendent’s pensions? That’s money that could be going to fund new and inspiring ways to educate; charter schools, vouchers, and vocational training.
I encourage you to click the link below the article and read the entire article.
Afterward, go to this LINK and vote and comment.
Hat tip to my friend Senator Michael Watson ,a leader in the Mississippi Senate on Education issues, for pointing out this one.
What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? – NYTimes.com
For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”
The most critical missing piece, Randolph explained as we sat in his office last fall, is character — those essential traits of mind and habit that were drilled into him at boarding school in England and that also have deep roots in American history. “Whether it’s the pioneer in the Conestoga wagon or someone coming here in the 1920s from southern Italy, there was this idea in America that if you worked hard and you showed real grit, that you could be successful,” he said. “Strangely, we’ve now forgotten that. People who have an easy time of things, who get 800s on their SAT’s, I worry that those people get feedback that everything they’re doing is great. And I think as a result, we are actually setting them up for long-term failure. When that person suddenly has to face up to a difficult moment, then I think they’re screwed, to be honest. I don’t think they’ve grown the capacities to be able to handle that.”
Randolph has been pondering throughout his 23-year career as an educator the question of whether and how schools should impart good character. It has often felt like a lonely quest, but it has led him in some interesting directions. In the winter of 2005, Randolph read “Learned Optimism,” a book by Martin Seligman, a psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania who helped establish the Positive Psychology movement. Randolph found the book intriguing, and he arranged a meeting with the author. As it happened, on the morning that Randolph made the trip to Philadelphia, Seligman had scheduled a separate meeting with David Levin, the co-founder of the KIPP network of charter schools and the superintendent of the KIPP schools in New York City. Seligman decided he might as well combine the two meetings, and he invited Christopher Peterson, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan, who was also visiting Penn that day, to join him and Randolph and Levin in his office for a freewheeling discussion of psychology and schooling.
Levin had also spent many years trying to figure out how to provide lessons in character to his students, who were almost all black or Latino and from low-income families. At the first KIPP school, in Houston, he and his co-founder, Michael Feinberg, filled the walls with slogans like “Work Hard” and “Be Nice” and “There Are No Shortcuts,” and they developed a system of rewards and demerits designed to train their students not only in fractions and algebra but also in perseverance and empathy. Like Randolph, Levin went to Seligman’s office expecting to talk about optimism. But Seligman surprised them both by pulling out a new and very different book, which he and Peterson had just finished: “Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification,” a scholarly, 800-page tome that weighed in at three and a half pounds. It was intended, according to the authors, as a “manual of the sanities,” an attempt to inaugurate what they described as a “science of good character.”
It was, in other words, exactly what Randolph and Levin had been looking for, separately, even if neither of them had quite known it. Seligman and Peterson consulted works from Aristotle to Confucius, from the Upanishads to the Torah, from the Boy Scout Handbook to profiles of Pokémon characters, and they settled on 24 character strengths common to all cultures and eras. The list included some we think of as traditional noble traits, like bravery, citizenship, fairness, wisdom and integrity; others that veer into the emotional realm, like love, humor, zest and appreciation of beauty; and still others that are more concerned with day-to-day human interactions: social intelligence (the ability to recognize interpersonal dynamics and adapt quickly to different social situations), kindness, self-regulation, gratitude.
via What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? – NYTimes.com.
Related articles
- Schools should develop children’s character, not just their ability to pass exams | Anthony Seldon (guardian.co.uk)
- Should students be graded on character? (theglobeandmail.com)
- State’s-eighth-graders-will-be-asked-to-choose-career-clusters
- hands-on-learning-helps-students-on-mct2
- mississippi-pep-talk-and-issue-survey-education-and-maep-funding-what-do-you-think/
