Incidentally, Ginny teaches 4th grade and is not allowed to give grades or discipline her students. Can you believe that? What is the public school system coming to? Since when is it ok for kids not to get GRADES!? Or be punished when they screw up severly?
To anyone with kids of any age, here's some advice. Bill Gates recently gave a speech at a High School about 11 things they did not and will not learn in school. He talks about how feel-good, politically correct teachings created a generation of kids with no concept of reality and how this concept set them up for failure in the real world.
Rule 1: Life is not fair - get used to it!
Rule 2: The world won't care about your self-esteem. The world will expect you to accomplish something BEFORE you feel good about yourself.
Rule 3: You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
Rule 4: If you think your teacher is tough, wait till you get a boss.
Rule 5: Flipping burgers is not beneath your dignity. Your Grandparents had a different word for burger flipping - they called it opportunity.
Rule 6: If you mess up, it's not your parents' fault, so don't whine about your mistakes, learn from them.
Rule 7: Before you were born, your parents weren't as boring as they are now. They got that way from paying your bills, cleaning your clothes and listening to you talk about how cool you thought you were. So before you save the rain forest from the parasites of your parent's generation, try delousing the closet in your own room.
Rule 8: Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life HAS NOT. In some schools they have abolished failing grades and they'll give you as MANY TIMES as you want to get the right answer. This doesn't bear the slightest resemblance to ANYTHING in real life.
Rule 9: Life is not divided into semesters. You don't get summers off and very few employers are interested in helping you FIND YOURSELF. Do that on your own time.
Rule 10: Television is NOT real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
Rule 11: Be nice to nerds. Chances are you'll end up working for one.
7 comments:
Go Bill! I may use some of his points for my students.
This is also why keeping score in youth sports is important. You need to learn how to lose, that you gave your best, which was important, but you came up short, but that is o.k., go shake the other guys hand and try harder next time. You also need to learn how to win, that you were the better one today, but tomorrow you may get your butt beat, so go shake the guys hand and be nice, because tomorrow it may be you on the losing end.
Love that list. Wish I could copy it and pass it out at a PTA meeting!
This should be mandatory reading for all the sailors we get straight out of boot camp. If only we could actually run the ship like that...
This is actually by Charles J Sykes. See http://www.snopes.com/language/document/liferule.htm. Still, that doesn't make it any less worthwhile. KFB
http://journals.aol.com/mavarin/MusingsfromMavarin/
I started to comment on this, but it got too long. So I'm putting a post on my own blog.
A friend of mine pulled her kids out of school when she was told that there are no right answers in math. She replied that there certainly were - right answers get you to land on the moon, wrong ones get you lost in space.
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