W7, #6: CURIOUSLY

Set-Up: Author Dorothy Parker once quipped:

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

Challenge: React to this quotation.

Think of your life, both in the classroom and in the real world.

• Where do you become profoundly curious?
• Where do you find that you can’t shut your brain ‘off’ when your imagination takes over?
• Is this something that teenagers still do, or is curiosity just child’s play?

Length: 7+ sentences

W6, #8: MODERNIZING DALE CARNEGIE’S IDEAS

Set-Up: During our “Last Friday” advisory meetings this week, we finally had a chance to consider the summer reading: Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

Challenge: I’m curious about what you see as valuable/useful about Carnegie’s ideas and examples.

• Pick at least 1 idea from the text.
• Explain how it may be relevant to your current and future life.

Length: 5+ sentences.

Note: For anyone in Mr. Long’s advisory, feel free to comment on the Skype video chat we had Friday morning with Megan Hustad, the author of How to Be Useful: A Beginner’s Guide to Not Hating Work. I’d love to hear what you thought before the weekend is over.

BTW: I’m hoping to ‘bring’ her to class in the coming weeks to talk about the writing/editing process, so your responses might give the rest of my 10th graders a hint of what she’s about and why it was worth talking with her today. Oh, and here’s the link to her blog, in case you’re curious (wink, wink; nudge, nudge).

W6, #2: YOUR DIGITAL FOOTPRINT

Set-Up: Your generation is the first to naturally have 2 lives:

one on in the real world and one on-line.

Some would even call you “digital natives”.

While there are remarkable thing about being born in an age where the Internet, cell phones, IM’ing, etc is commonplace — staying in touch with friends/family 24/7, being creative with amazing new media software, getting published at the touch of a button, etc. — it also means that everything you do on-line has the potential of one day being viewed by the colleges you apply to, companies interviewing you, etc.

As you can imagine, this creates some interesting issues that your generation will have to face.

Challenge:

• Consider 2 of the 3 following articles that cover how colleges are exploring applicants’ digital files and accounts: 1) “College Admissions Offices Using Facebook…to Block Students”, 2) “Schools Use Facebook for Admissions, Disciplinary Action”, 3) “Facebook, MySpace, and College Admissions”
• Write a reaction considering the impact on you and your classmates in the coming few years.

Length: 7+ sentences

W4, #8: THE OVERACHIEVERS

Set-Up: Alexandra Robbins — author of a NYTimes Bestseller, Pledged, a complicated look at the culture of college sorority life — has also written a book entitled The Overachievers: The Secrte Lives of Driven Kids that chronicles what life is like for more and more high school students given today’s pressures to achieve and be accepted by top colleges.

Snippets: From the inside book jacket, these caught my attention:

“You can’t just be the smartest.  You have to be the most athletic, you have to be able to have the most fun, you have to be the prettiest, the best-dressed, the nicest, the most wanted.  You have to constantly be out on the town partying, and then you have to get straight As.  And most of all, you have to appear to be happy.” — C.J., age seventeen (one of the real students followed for this book)

and

“High school isn’t what it used to be.  With record numbers of students competing fiercely to get into college, schools are no longer primarily places of learning.  They’re dog-eat-dog battlegrounds in which kids must set aside interests and passions in order to strategize over how to game the system.  In this increasingly stressful environment, kids are defined not by their character or hunger for knowledge, but by often arbitrary scores and statistics.” — editor’s comment

Challenge:

• Share your reaction to these two ideas given what you’ve already experienced in school up to your 10th grade year.
• While some of this may reflect what you’ve literally experienced at this specific school, you should feel free to refer to ‘life in general’ as an adolescent in our society.
• Just make sure you are keeping in mind the implications re: school and the pursuit of college (and life after high school).

Length: 7+ sentences