Today we started off with a question asking, "what is the role of high school?" in our society? The answers I came up with was that it needs to be a safe place, it needs to prepare students for their next step, be it college or another endeavor, and lastly, high school should be a stepping stone for kids into another part of their life where more responsibility will be harnessed by them.
From there, we were asked to think of teaching and the purpose of school in the way a person would think about the purpose of a business. So in that line of thinking, Kay, the director of Harvard's Graduate School of Education asked us to think about three questions:
-What is your business (as an educator)?
-Who is your customer?
-What does your customer value?
During the second part of today's session, Tom Payzant asked us to think about the question of, "what should a high school diploma certify?" His answer was that it should deem that a student is ready for "post-secondary education without remediation." In order to supplement his example, he added that in the 1940s, a person could have an 8th grade education and go work at the docks in Quincy and buy a home and provide enough for the family so that he could provide his children with a better life and opportunities. But nowadays, that wasn't the case. There is no job that doesn't require a high school diploma, in which someone would be able to buy a house and provide a better life for his familly.
All of these items got me thinking about what are we doing as educators to help students make a transition to work or higher education? What programs are we implementing for high-risk students?
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