27 Skills...

Here are 27 skills a student needs to know, according to zen habits. Any feedback on this?

The interesting thing is we agree with a lot of the list and that is why we started our company. For example, we've always felt financial skills (investing, budgeting, frugality, etc.) are incredibly important and that we've both gotten a leg up because our parents taught us these skills. It's still unfortunate that these skills aren't taught and developed in school, though with (mostly) declining school budgets I can see why administrators aren't rushing to add these classes. I actually volunteered to teach a leadership/teamwork skills class at Galloway and was shut down about a year ago - I was shocked at how the idea was quickly shot down! Oh well... happy readings from vacation (I'll be in and out through July 4th).

The perfect (sic) public high school

Credit to the Trenches of Public Education blog for this attempt at describing the "perfect public high school" - however, I feel this is just describing the private school I went to (Galloway). If you try your hardest, you can reasonably expect a G (a G was the equivalent of a B). For most classes you had the option of the regular class or AP, depending on your level of competence.

At Galloway, I know the Upper Learning principal would always teach 1 class per quarter - but why would someone working in a staff function need to teach a class? What makes sense is having the highest administrators teach a class, so having the principal, assistant principal, and maybe a few others teach classes in their core competency.

And we never had this problem of having to kick students out of class:

Every student is also under control when it comes to behavior. That doesn't mean that the students are all a bunch of little angels. That doesn't mean that there are no students who cut up in class or who talk too much from time to time. It does mean that students know that if they don't at least try to control their behavior, the teacher has the power to kick them out of class and the principal has the power to kick them out of school. Once again, because they know that--in other words because they know there are limits--drastic measures by teachers and principals are rarely necessary.

Now I do concede that my high school was a private school, so the comparison between her post and mine is more apples to oranges than apples to apples... but the point is that such an ideal high school does exist and is an attainable goal for most public high schools. But in a private school setting, how do you give "power" to those in charge so that they can make sweeping changes to improve the public school's performance?

One potential solution is having parents get involved, but it doesn't seem like the Trenches blog favors that idea. The middle ground would be if parents all voted to give a good principal more power than they currently have to make these positive changes (and then stick to those changes) so that there are more "perfect" public high schools.

Motivating (with money?)

I was thumbing through Mavericks at Work after having read it for the second time and this quote really stuck out:

“There’s another lesson that’s really obvious,” he continues. “You cannot motivate the best people with money. Money is just a way to keep score. The best people in any field are motivated by passion. That becomes more true the higher the skill level gets. People do their best work when they are passionately engaged in what they’re doing” (91).

It really got me thinking about motivating students. When I was younger, I was partially motivated by money. Let me explain. So my parents would reward my brother and I with $10 per A in a class. This usually meant $60 pay days at the end of the "quarter" (I put it in quotations because at my high school they were actually trimesters but called "quarters") or, at worst, $50 dollars. Now, if I knew I was going to get a B in just 1 class, I wasn't going to kill myself over $10 extra bucks - let's face it, for a 12-16 year old (the age I was in high school) $50 is still a large amount of money. So how much did money really motivate me? Or was it simply passion for learning (or getting good grades, or even the recognition that accompanies good grades) that motivated me?

Looking back, I'd say the positive feelings of getting good grades, and the accompanying recognition, are what really drove me. Sure, I love learning, but there's nothing quite like having people recognize you for your achievements. In fact, I read that in a national employee survey, employees value recognition and compliments over pay. Yeah, no one is going to work for free - but they'll probably stick around longer if they know they're valued and are going to be recognized for their achievements.

So now the question is this - how do you motivate a student who may not have a passion for learning and doesn't care for recognition? At that point does it come back to money?

These two questions got Orion and myself thinking a few weeks back - why aren't there hybrid scholarships that "pay for grades"? Say $20 for each A, $5 for each B, $0 for each C, -$10 for each D, and $-25 for each F. I put in negatives because if someone gets 3 A's, 1 B, and 2 F's, I'd want them to be "punished" for F's by taking away some of the money they "earned" for the A's and B's (in this specific case the student would make $15 instead of $65 if they weren't "punished").

OK, so besides the fact that people would complain about students only focusing on good grades, and not focusing on learning per se, what else is a negative of this method? It's something I've been looking into, because all too often I've seen very bright students who just don't care about school getting poor grades. Any other ideas about "hybrid" scholarships or other ways to motivate students?