Some disturbing observations

Today is Sunday so it's not a travel day. But I felt the need to log in. I read a very disturbing article today titled "American kids, dumber than dirt/Warning: The next generation might just be the biggest pile of idiots in U.S. history." It was by By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist. You can read it here.

It's a sad look at how teens our leaving our educational systems today. Looking at it from my vantage point of teaching for many years and visiting so many schools, I know many of the basic components needed to turn things around are either in place or in need of some basic tweaking. We have beautiful schools in many places, teachers who I know from experience give up so much of their lives for kids, innovative programs that have the ability to inspire kids.

What we lack is additional teacher training to help teachers connect with students so that they want to learn, want to go to school, want to succeed. I was lucky enough to train with some of the most successful busines people in the world and I was able to test out their strategies first hand in my own classroom over 25 in over 25 different classes. The difference in traditional training vs. these methods was stunnning.

We also lack a place in each school for teens to turn to for a positive compass, one that teaches them the common sense strategies that they often now miss from busy parents and the omnipresent media. I saw the advantage of this first hand as well when I taught my Strategies of Success program.

I had a conversation this past weekend with a twenty something. I told him about my program and he said that even though he felt he went to a good high school, young adults and teens his age were lost souls with no compass, two parents working, no positive guidance. His eyes lit up with the idea of what it would have been like to have been in a class such as mine.

If you've read any of the comments on this blog, you know that my journey is to place this program in every high school in th US. I will train the teachers, create a positive website for the teens to communicate with me for guidance, whatever it takes to turn the message of the article in the beginning of this blog around.

If you're a parent, a principal, a teacher, a teen, a media source....won't you help me make this a reality?