One of the questions I always ask my returning students is what can we have done better to prepare you for your college experience. The other day one of my favorite students told me that we needed to teach her how to fail. When she arrived at college as a Pre-med student she had a difficult time handling a "B". It made her doubt herself, made her wonder was she following the right career path and brought about general doubt.
Carol Dweck writes a lot about the power of a growth mindset. The type of person who does not seeing mistakes as failures but as an opportunity to grow. That many of us get so focused on the grade that we do not look at what we can learn from our mistakes.
Our new Chinese teacher, a great addition to our school, gave a talk about failure the other day. He mentioned that nobody start a computer game and masters it the first round. That the truth is that you play the game and constantly learn from your mistakes. As you master these mistakes you then go to the next level. The trick is the ability to transfer the skills from the computer games to real life.
When talking to another former student they told me how much they enjoy the gratitude page but also told me that we need to encourage our students to share their weaknesses and insecurities. That we need to open up the lines of communication so that we can help each other overcome our problems.
All of us, even the angry old man, sometimes gets lost in the day to day battle we call school. This alumni gave the advice that we need to walk away from that grind, make sure that we are doing things that we enjoy and finding friends that we can trust to help us.
I proposed a couple of years ago to teach a positive psychology class to all the ninth graders. The first response was not to our GT kids, like they are immune from stress, anxiety and depression. Now with a new person in charge maybe it is time to introduce that idea.
How do we make our school a safer (mentally) place for our students? How do we improve the well-being of our student body?
This may not be a particularly good idea, but what if we had one or two classes each year that didn't count toward our overall gpa? I know lots of people who avoid taking classes that they'd enjoy because it would bring down their grade and ranking. Of course, that would create many complications, but the idea is just giving students time during the school day to do something they like. In addition, I think that in our school, there's a large gap between the standard, honors, and gt/ap kids, partially because we're stuck only with other standard, honors, or gt/ap kids depending on where we are. Maybe having some extra time in the middle of the school day could help people meet and understand each other and the different perspectives they carry.
ReplyDeleteI think that would be a great idea but I do not know if the school can do that. I guess we could make a couple of classes P/F. My guess is however someone would want to get the edge on their GPA. I do think we could offer some good electives if we were not worried about GPA/Baltimore County standards
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