Tag Archives: education
I’ll Settle for 44K for My Birthday
Well, this Friday, May 11, 2012 I’ll be officially one year older. It’s been quite a journey and I’m so thankful to everyone who has supported me over the years. It was just over 4 years ago with the prospect of turning 40 that I decided to lay everything on the line and pursue what I believed in. I have no regrets. During that time, I have helped to provide educational and career opportunities for over 1500 teachers and students in Central Texas and have dropped 80+ lbs. None of it has been easy, but I can’t imagine doing anything else. Even now, as I face a seemingly insurmountable task of of raising 44K to support the It Could Be U Digital Youth Academy that kicks off exactly 1 month after my birthday, I only get excited about the opportunity to serve others.
I’ve come to believe that the previous 20 years of my adult life were ultimately about my own selfish and gluttonous pursuits. Not to say that I was on a negative track at all. I was a school teacher in priority schools, developed web sites and software, produced and played music, broke into the advertising community and generally had a good time. Nevertheless, I realize that I was indeed fearful of truly venturing out on my own. My entrepreneurial endeavors were half-baked and I was unwilling to deal with the hardships that come with virulent commitment to seeing such things through to their conclusion.
And then their was my physical state. I was obese. I estimate that I was at least 330lbs at one time. I was in serious DENIAL and headed to an early grave. It’s amazing the lengths that one can go through to remain in that state. I have never been skinny. Nevertheless, I was an all state athlete in high school and frankly despite my natural gifts I was lazy. I worked hard on the field and in practice but I never really dedicated my own personal time to getting in shape. Working out was just what I had to ‘deal with” in order to play the sport I loved at the time – high school football. After high school and no real attention from major colleges, I set those dreams aside to pursue a music degree.
I love music but I also came to recognize that performing was not my true passion. I didn’t have a need to be on stage or really even be validated in that way. Again, I had some natural gifts and I worked hard at honing them to a certain extent. Nevertheless, I was often bored with music. In my 30′s I began to discover the art of “producing”… that is facilitating for others. I have a knack for recognizing talent and putting them in situations where they can flourish. Whether it was music, voice over, software development or media production, I began to figure out that was my sweet spot. I prefer to be in the background making things happen for others. That is what brings me joy.
Robotics instructor Mark Barron explains the basketball playing robot his students developed this year.
Some of my best days are visiting classrooms to interact with students and teachers. Great teachers inspire me because they often times toil away in relative obscurity. They are driven by more than money and they really love their students. They go beyond teaching subjects and teach people. That’s the difference. I get excited just being around them because their dedication is infectious. They are the real game changers. All of the things that I have experienced to date have prepared me for what I do today… being an athlete, a creative, an educator, a techie allows me to see connections that others may not. The issues we face today are not going to be addressed by traditional approaches to education because the nature of work has profoundly changed. Modern product development is not done in silos. Great creative without technical infrastructure is virtually useless and the same goes for innovative tech devoid of good design.
The It Could Be U Digital Youth Academy addresses this issue. 20 students who have competed via portfolio submissions come together for 5 weeks to learn from the best and the brightest across media, tech, finance, health and science to develop digital content and applications to promote healthy lifestyles among their peers. Even better, they get to return to their respective communities in the fall to execute and measure the products they create during the summer. This IS modern product development. Harness creativity, technology and science to solve real problems. These tasks are not beyond our youth. It’s just that we’ve never really engaged them in process.
So, if you believe in my passion, I need your help. As little as $10 helps us accomplish our goals for the summer and gets you special perks via our Indiegogo campaign.
Dreams Do Come True
Well, 4 years ago, I set off to live with my parents and begin my trek back into education. I’ve always known that my destiny lay somewhere in that realm but I was never quite sure how. I taught in the classroom for over 6 years and worked on countless educational publishing and software projects. The thing about education and affecting true change is that it is very difficult to do. I mean, you can get starts and fits but there is very little oxygen out there to sustain true innovation.
I’ve always felt like I was meant to have a larger impact beyond one classroom or school. I want to create infrastructure that drives and sustains a culture of achievement among our youth. In 4 years, we have come quite a distance. Sitting in a room surrounded by 9 It Could Be U Camp staff along with Dr, Thomas Darwin (UT Intellectual Entrepreneurship Initiative) and Jannelle Monney (Former SVP, Freescale Semi-Conductor) it was a bit surreal. My dream is coming true. We are making the change that I imagined years ago…
I am so pleased that I am joined by such an impressive roster of people from all walks of life. My challenge now is to let my child grow up and take on a life of its own.
Podcast: Austin Cosmopolitan Rotary Talk
Here’s an audio podcast of the talk I did last week for the Austin Cosmopolitan Rotary Club on Social Entrepreneurship and Initiative Based Philanthropy. I go into some detail about the MCCs partnership with UT Austin and our philosophy of helping youth identify and create value.
Video and Podcast: MCC & Intellectual Entrepreneurship (IE) Collaboration
I sat down with Dr. Richard Cherwitz & Dr. Thomas Darwin, founders of the University of Texas Intellectual Entrepreneurship Initiative, to discuss our collaboration on It Could Be U: Intensive Mentoring & College Readiness Program. I made a short promo video based on that conversation and decided to post the full interview as a podcast for those that want a deeper understanding of our partnership and philosophy. Enjoy!
From Gang Banger to Mentor & Graphic Designer
David Frias speaks of his transformation from being an active gang member to working as an It Could Be U Mentor and graphic designer.
SXSW Dewey Winburne Community Service Award
I’m very pleased to receive this award. Over the last three years, I have pursued my true calling of empowering youth and small business leaders. I’m so thankful for all of the people that have believed in my vision and been willing to support me in this endeavor. I’m excited about all of the new things on the horizon – unveiling work our students have been doing for local businesses and non-profits, preparing to employ up to 50 youth this summer working with UT Intellectual Entrepreneurship graduate mentors and showcasing their work at our first E4 Youth Summit. These are just a few things on the horizon. Big things indeed!!
E4 Youth: Engagement, Education, Employment & Entrepreneurship for Youth
Throughout my 20 years as an educator, I have often wondered about the state of our education system and our youth. With almost 40% of Texas high school graduates in need of remedial reading, math and/or science in order to attend college, there appears to be a lack of leadership in making youth and their educational success a true priority. This is not to say that there aren’t many examples of innovation and plenty of dedicated people across the country doing amazing work. It only belies the lack of in depth discussion beyond sound bytes needed to deal with one of the most dire issues of our time.
We are not being honest with ourselves in how we debate the solutions to reforming our educational system. Results matter. Beliefs matter. A good idea is a good idea no matter who first thought of or rediscovered it. These statements may give you pause but I am not here to proselytize. I hope that we can all agree that we want the best for our youth.
The world is rapidly changing and we are being left behind. The US is currently ranked in the lower half to third of developed countries in the 3 Rs – reading, writing and arithmetic. Is that to say that our students are dumber? I certainly don’t think so. I believe that our students are simply less Engaged in the educational process because they fail to see relevancy in what we are teaching them. The 3 Rs are important, in fact essential to the long term well being of our society. However, the process of how we get students to learn them has to fundamentally change.
The industrial age model of education. You know, the good old fashion learning by wrote worked pretty well 40 – 50 years ago. After all, the nature of work was very different back then. America was made great by the factory model – standardized parts and standardized tasks that if scaled properly could become extremely profitable. You could support a family with a relatively limited set of repeatable skills. You could expect to work for a company for 10, 20 or 30 years and retire with a gold watch and a pension. Those days are long gone.
The nature of work has profoundly changed. We are preparing students for jobs that don’t even exist yet. We have to train them to be critical thinkers that can constantly learn new information and skills in order to remain relevant. E4 Youth, that is Engagement, Education, Employment & Entrepreneurship for Youth is an approach that I have coined to address the 3 Rs.
When I taught sixth grade science, about 2/3rds of the students in my classes were 2 to 3 grade levels behind in reading and comprehension. My job as the “science” teacher was to get them to learn concepts and processes such as the scientific method. Now, I could model a process such as mitosis (that’s cell division) and get them to describe it verbally and even draw it out. However, there was often a disconnect when it came to students reading and writing about that very same process. Decoding scientific terms when you don’t even quite have a grasp of basic english is a daunting and frustrating task. So, it becomes virtually impossible to demonstrate critical thinking or mastery on written or multiple choice exams due to the fact that many students simply can’t read them.
To combat this, many schools have become quite adept at preparing students for standardized test. After all, the basic objectives and questions used to test students don’t really change much from year to year. Standardized test are meant to assess mass groups of students and making significant changes to them is wrought with political and logistical issues. Questions are often recycled every few years and each year, schools receive access to past exam questions. So, schools essentially have all of the questions that students may be asked to answer and if they are savvy, they can develop a good strategy for wrote teaching those specific questions and “improving” standardized test scores. That is test scores that are supposed to measure critical thinking.
This type of learning is detrimental to students long term growth. They are conditioned to give pre programmed answers and consequently, they find it hard to place what they are “learning” in context. They are so preoccupied with decoding language that there is very little attention paid to critical thinking – that is analysis, application, evaluation and synthesis. Education is something that is being done TO them as opposed to students educating THEMSELVES. Their dreams and aspirations seem very far removed from their educational pursuits and therefore many perform in a very mediocre manner in the classroom. There is very little intrinsic motivation to want to spend the extra effort it will take to get their reading and comprehension skills in order and acquire the math and science knowledge so many of our students are sorely lacking.
I believe the role of the teacher in the 21st Century has profoundly changed. Rather than thinking of ourselves as teaching SUBJECTS first, I believe to be truly effective, we must think of ourselves as teaching STUDENTS first. Every student is a different person and a good teacher must be able to listen to and observe them in order to truly have an impact. I know this may seem somewhat contradictory. After all, we are evaluated on how well students understand specific content and concepts. A math teacher is still a math teacher, right? Indeed they are.
Ultimately, we do need to make sure that our students understand the content for whatever subject we are helping them learn. It’s just that I believe we can be more effective if we focus on engaging them first. That is finding out what motivates students, empowering them to pursue those interests and therefore making them accountable for educating themselves. I believe that by pursuing the 4 Es of engagement, education, employment and entrepreneurship, we can be more effective at getting students to master the 3Rs.
This is the process that I have developed with the outreach program Media Xperiments - a supplemental enrichment program open to students from 13 – 20 at no charge. In fact, we are paying teachers and parents up to $1000 stipends to have their students participate in the program. Teachers and parents help students use media to show mastery of key concepts and select a field of interest (Fields of interest include Media Communications, STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics), Entrepreneurship and Music/Visual/Performing Arts. Students are able to attend tours of businesses within those industries, build professionally evaluated portfolios, participate in educational planning sessions and during the summer work directly with professionals to provide goods and/or services to real businesses and non-profits.
We Engage students by letting them choose their field of interest, then empower them to Educate themselves by using that field of interest and media to show mastery of concepts. We work with them through UT graduate student led summer service learning projects to give them Employment experience and we involve them in a network like minded peers, professionals and business leaders so that they may eventually become Entrepreneurs.
The E4 Youth Summit, tentatively scheduled for the mid to late July 2011, will showcase the accomplishments of these and other students around Central Texas through performances, screenings and panel discussions. The summit will also feature panel discussions and workshops for those organizations that serve youth, schools, educators, business and political leaders. Our hope is to bring people together to talk about what is working in education and recognize those students that are doing great things. We also hope to foster new and enhanced relationships between educators, schools, non-profits and the business community that will benefit all of us create new models of Engagement, Education, Employment and Entrepreneurship for youth.
It Could Be U Recruitment Kicks Off
Well, we’ve begun recruiting for the first full class of It Could Be U: Intensive Mentoring & College Readiness Program. 25 students. 10 middle school and 15 high school students will start off working with our Media Proteges (program alumni) as they go through the Media Xperiments on-line curriculum – making a series of six media media mash ups for which they must show mastery of key concepts such as the scientific method, consumers vs producers and cultural capital. Below is a video on the scientific method written, shot and edited by some of our Media Proteges. In fact, our Media Proteges are spearheading this entire program – making the fliers, going out into neighborhoods, visiting schools, mentoring students themselves and documenting the entire process.
The media mash up topics take the students through a broad range of fields and once students complete them, they choose a field of study and are paired with a University of Texas at Austin graduate student in that same field. The student then signs a contract with the grad student and their parents to work out an educational plan and portfolio within that field. It is my belief that as we have with our past students, we can make a significant difference in these students’ lives by focusing on engagement.
We watch and listen to our students in order to help them discover what truly motivates them. Then, we build a team (the student, parent and grad student) to set goals and a plan to reach them. We do not focus on test taking techniques or academic drills. We expose students to what their dreams and aspirations look like in the real world and help them make tangible products that move them further towards their goals. Yet we are confident that we will boost their academic performance. In fact, our expressly stated goal is to raise their standardized test scores by 5 points or more over the course of the year. I am confident that we can do this and as we have done with 2 previous classes of Media Proteges have these students become leaders and integral parts of taking this program to the next level.
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Report Details Black Male Achievement Gap : NPR
Disturbing story from NPR. We need a great deal more conversation about this topic.
November 9, 2010Black male students are nearly twice as likely to drop out of high school as their white counterparts. A new study says that statistic and others call for a different approach to help black men and boys succeed.
As head of the Council of the Great City Schools, Mike Casserly has seen lots of depressing numbers about achievement for minority students. But he says performance for black males is shockingly low.
Read The Report
“African-American male students who were neither disabled nor poor were doing no better than white students who were disabled and/or poor,” Casserly says.
The new report by the group analyzed test scores from the National Assessment of Educational Progress to get at other depressing truths about achievement for African-American men and boys. They are twice as likely as whites to be held back in elementary school, and three times as likely to be suspended from school. That trend follows black men right into adulthood: They are half as likely as white male students to graduate college in four years.
The council hopes these numbers will lead to a White House conference focusing on achievement for black males. But many other studies have drawn attention to this problem with few results.
The Schott Foundation has produced four reports on this issue over the past decade, including a recent report released in August. Michael Holzman, a consultant for Schott, says the problem is simple: Most black male students go to lousy schools.
“If we look at schools that are predominately black, and we look at the achievement of white kids who are in those schools, we find that the white kids don’t do well either,” Holzman says.
The Schott study points to New Jersey districts that have been successful in reducing the achievement gap, thanks to extra attention and extra funding brought about by a lawsuit.
Some black leaders, however, feel that the problem goes beyond funding. Michael Wotorson of the Campaign for High School Equity says black students enter kindergarten less prepared, and that means black home life plays some role.
“Until we address our own culpability, we’re going to be making very, very slow progress,” Wotorson says.
The Council of the Great City Schools says the numbers are so bad for black male students that Congress needs to establish a special program.