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I want every kid in the world to know that they don't have to wait until they’re done with school to start their actual lives.
What is the scary thing that you’d really love to do? What can you do today to move toward it?
Too many of us postpone our dreams. We don't even think our dreams are possible in our circumstances.
Read MoreTeens can smell BS a mile away.
And like good old Holden Caulfield, they ignore their own; they’re far more focused on the BS of the adults around them.
They are likely to find a lot of it. On an individual, institutional, and societal level, we give them misleading, disingenuous, or downright scary messages designed to elicit desired behavior and attitudes. And many of them know instinctively that it’s a crock.
Read MoreChallenging problems aren’t the ones that require a lot of labor. They are the ones that require thinking.
It is a huge mistake to focus on labor and think we’re doing such hard work. Maybe we’re actually being lazy by not coming up with a cleverer strategy for avoiding all that work.
We can use math as good metaphor to explain this idea. The brilliant Prealgebra book from The Art of Problem Solving teaches students to think algebraically — that is, strategically — about math, even no variables are present.
Read More“Can you help me with this problem?” Adam asked. His math book was open in front of him.
I looked at the problem. I thought about the work that Adam has been doing over the past week. Really hard work from a challenging, well-written math textbook. Work that, at times, brought tears. He had already tackled two dozen problems like this one.
“I can help in a different way,” I said. “Do you think you can let go of the need to do every single problem in the book?”
Read MoreSchool rewards good penmanship, strong language skills, facility with numbers, social ease, and athletic ability. Bonus points if you are well organized and approval-seeking.
Forgive me for broadly generalizing here: Engineers are often good at numbers. But their other strengths — such as spatial ability, innovation, making unusual connections, finding shortcuts, tolerance for failure, skill at manipulating inanimate objects, and asking challenging questions — can be virtually invisible in a typical liberal arts-based K - 12 curriculum.
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