Sonia Marsh - Gutsy Living

Life's too short to play it safe

Waiting for Superman: a documentary about the state of our education.

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 waiting for superman

 

“Even if you don’t have kids, you should care about public education,” says Lesley Chilcott, producer of Waiting for “Superman.” “If we want to solve global warming, poverty, health care and the economy, we need to have an educated society. Education is ground zero for tackling all these issues.”

Photo (cc) via Flickr user Editor B.
Tuesday was a miserable, wet day in southern California. I felt guilty about taking the afternoon off to go to the movies and justified it as follows: I want to learn more about what’s going on with education in the U.S. and why so many schools are failing. Education needs to be reformed, the standards are deteriorating, and I worry about the future of our kids. Even Bill Gates said there won’t be enough educated young people in the U.S. in 2020, to fill the
job openings.
Waiting for Superman  is a movie, not about Superman, but about the state of our education here in the U.S.

Without getting into a political debate, which is not the point I’m trying to make here, I’d like to share five points that shocked me while watching this movie. You may already be aware of all of this, but I wasn’t.
 

  • U.S. students ranked approximately 24th out of 29th in math and science in the developed world.
  • There have been no improvements in raising overall standards in reading and math over the last ten years. Almost every state is failing to reach minimum standards.
  • Children are placed on a “track system,” the lower track or the upper track, and generally this will follow the student throughout their schooling, from Kindergarten until 12th grade. Lower track kids don’t get the best teachers. Who decides on the track? Well that is left up to the viewer to determine.
  •  Apparently teachers were offered an alternative: get paid up to $122,000/year and give up the “tenure” system, whereby teachers who are lazy, not teaching properly, or are simply not getting the job done, can be laid off. They refused to vote. (This is in the movie, not something I read or heard.)
  •  A student had a hidden camera in his back-pack to film a “lazy” teacher on the tenure system, who read the newspaper and didn’t teach, and the high school kids were playing games and doing whatever they wanted. (I remember one of my sons telling me that his 10th grade teacher was showing videos and making them color in maps, almost every day, instead of teaching. She was getting ready to retire and was so fed up with her job, she didn’t care.) 

There are so many points covered other than what I brought up, as we follow the lives of inner city kids around the U.S. and how many can only attend their “failing” inner city schools.

Those who struggle to get into the “better” schools try the lottery system. One little Hispanic girl, Daisy, wanted to become a vet. She worked so hard every day and unfortunately, her name was not called out during the lottery, so she had to stay in her “failing” school. 

I could feel the frustration of parents trying so hard to give their children a better education, and who are “stuck” in a school where the standards are ridiculously poor. I hope you take the time to watch this movie. As with any documentary, facts may be distorted, however, there is a real crisis in the U.S. educational system today.

I’d like to say a BIG THANK YOU to all the GREAT teachers.

Message from Davis Guggenheim, Director of Waiting for Superman: “We are never going to have great schools without great teachers.

Please see the film. Any thoughts?

You’ve got to find what you love

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Alfie is seventy-two-years old and decides to leave his wife of forty years, and have a good time. He meets a twenty-something call girl, and dates her. So why not a Ferrari instead of a call girl? you may ask, well, Anthony Hopkins who plays the character Alfie, in the movie,You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, says, “Everyone makes mistakes in life and this guy made a big mistake. It cost him his marriage and probably his life. Fear rules so many of our lives, and in our lives we try to accumulate and gather as much as we can because at the back of our mind,the end is in sight.”

(If you wish to listen to the interview, please click the link)

 

Furthermore, Hopkins states the moral of, You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, the latest Woody Allen film is probably,”Carpe diem.”
Anthony Hopkins says, “We live and then we die, so what’s the big deal. Don’t analyze it. I gave up trying to figure it out years ago.” He then quotes a riddle from Yeats and interprets as, “Don’t try to find meaning in life, because you won’t. There may be a meaning, and there may not be one, none of us know, it’s all a mystery, and it’s all a dream.”
I find wisdom in his words, and a sense of relief, that sometimes, when life becomes overwhelming, we create problems that have not yet occurred, and may never happen, so why do we waste time worrying?
Another story taken from Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer, during his commencement address at Stanford University in 2005, also ties in with what Anthony Hopkins says. Jobs talks about death, since doctors initially told him he had three to six months left to live. This changed the way he thought about his life.
“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
I hope you’re already living the life you love to the fullest. I know some people are struggling, however, we need to stop letting different kinds of fear rule our lives.

Have you found what you love?

What stress can do to teenagers

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Craig, a sixteen-year-old hears the voices of his parents and his sister say, “Don’t do it,” and wakes up in a sweat.

His parents love him. They’re nice people, so what’s the problem? Stress. He doesn’t want to disappoint his family, especially not his dad.
This is his life, and one Sunday morning at 5 a.m., he wakes up from his recurring nightmare, shaking.  He’s standing on the metal railing, getting ready to jump off a bridge, and this time, he doesn’t wake up before the jump, he wakes up as he’s falling.While his family is still asleep, Craig gets dressed and walks to a hospital. He tells the receptionist, “I want to commit suicide.” She hands him a clipboard and says, “Fill this out,” and laughs at something her friend says on the phone.

Craig is admitted to the adult psychiatric ward, and is placed in a room with a middle-aged Egyptian man, who does nothing but sleep all day. He decides he made a mistake and wants to be released. He cannot. He is forced to stay for a minimum of five days. Everyone is much older, except for one teenage girl who cuts herself.
His parents show up, and his mother is happy he admitted himself. They bring some clothes and toiletries and leave him there. What happens during the five days is amazing. Craig rediscovers his love and talent for drawing. He also finds out he’s a great rock singer when forced to sing.

He bonds with a man in the ward, who has an eight-year-old daughter. They play basketball, and he gives Craig the positive attention and advice that he is not receiving from his own father. Through this, Craig also changes people in the psychiatric ward, and when he leaves after five days, he’s a different person. He’s learned to become a kid with a passion for life.

To some of you, this may sound like a Hollywood movie, and yes, “It’s Kind of a Funny Story.”

In an article on teenagers and stress, I found the following as major causes of stress:

  • high expectations placed upon them by
  • parents and teachers
  • participating in extracurricular activities
  • being over-scheduled

Now I know Craig is a bright sixteen-year-old with goals, and there are also many examples of teenagers without goals, however, have things changed that much? Are there more young people stressing out today? Is it harder to be a teenager today than when you grew up?

Your grades are for you, not for me

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YOUR GRADES ARE FOR YOU, NOT FOR ME.

Flickr

What prompted my post today was part of a radio interview I heard this morning with the title: The Blessing of a B minus, by Wendy Mogel Ph.D. I happened to turn on my radio when she talked about how many parents expect their kids to get straight A’s, be on the varsity team, put in ridiculous hours of community service, belong to numerous clubs, and of course, it doesn’t hurt to be slender and good looking, all in the hopes of getting admitted to a great college.

Mogel’s book, which I have not read, is based on Jewish teachings, but that was not the focus of my post. I was interested in what she had to say about, not every kid fits the mold, and parents should not expect the same for each kid. I know that many parents want their kids to excel in Academics, but it really is a pity that we do not seem to value other professions, such as trade schools as much.
As a child, one of the best gifts I received from my parents was to realize that my grades were not a gift to please them, but to please me.

The reason I bring this up is because I see too many parents either bribing their kids with money to improve their grades, or rewarding them for getting good grades with purchases. I disagree with this. Please don’t take what I say to the other extreme of saying, “Kids deserve something for doing well in school.” Everyone deserves something once in a while, it’s just the “bribing” that I dislike.

When my sixteen-year-old son told me he didn’t do well on a test but did well on his homework, I said, “I thought homework was supposed to make you learn what’s on your test, ” and left it up to him to figure it out.

I know many of you live around the world and different parts of the U.S., and I’m curious to hear your thoughts, whether you’re a parent, a grandparent, or without kids.

Do you fall for hype?

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After closing myself off from the cyber world for a month, I noticed something I hadn’t paid attention to before. As I read through all the blogs I subscribe to on how to improve your blogging, yourself, your parenting skills, your life, etc. I asked myself, “Do we really fall for hype?” and if so, “Why?”
Standing back made me realize the amount of pressure we receive to become better at everything, faster than anyone, all of it has to be painless of course. Some examples I saw in my Inbox:
How to set and achieve your goals faster than ever before.
Perhaps if I stopped sleeping, I could achieve my goals faster.
Learn How You Can Start to Age Backwards!
If I was born old, I could age backwards. That might work.
How to Create lasting Love.
With a lot of effort, compromise and not nagging my husband.
How to Enjoy greater success, wealth and happiness quickly and easily.
If I got everything I wanted, and got it quickly and easily, would I appreciate it? What would be the point of trying?
And strangely enough, as I started writing this post, I came across the following title: Hype Copy that Sells and How to Write it, by ProCopyTips
I read the section on: How to turn bad hype into good hype,
I’m going to summarize what needs to be done according to the article in ProCopyTips.
Say you have a headline that claims the following:
All your wrinkles will miraculously disappear overnight!
Well not only do you need to let your reader have proof, but you have to place the proof wisely, so you can  “ambush” the reader. Wow, that sounds a little scary to me.
“When you finally do present your hype – your claim to have the biggest, baddest, best product on the planet, it won’t be mistaken for or accused of being hype (of the bad kind), but rather it will be seen as a descriptive and accurate statement of the obvious and the proven (hype of the good kind).”

So, my friends, do you fall for hype? If so, can you give us an example, and why it worked for you?

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