Senioritis affects over one billion students per year in America (citation needed). When you’re about to dive into that final year before college, you might see your high school as a “waste of time,” especially if you already have your school picked out.
Stop what you’re doing! This is a disease that plagues many a student. You shouldn’t see this year as something that stands in the way of your future but as a way to make your future better.
There are several actions you can start right now before your year starts to ensure that this year will be more beneficial than wasteful.
Consider Honors, AP, and/or IB Courses:
This is the first step you should do since you only have a few weeks left to make up your mind if you haven’t enrolled in these courses already.
The typical mindset is to simply take “blow-off” classes for senior last year, already shifting to neutral as you idle along. However, even if you’ve been accepted to college, everything can still change in your senior year. If your grades slip or you don’t show that you give a hoot about your education, admissions officers can still give you the boot.
The best way to demonstrate your abilities is with higher-level classes. AP and IB courses are college-level classes that actually reward you with college credit if you score high enough (scores necessary vary by school, so why not aim high?). That’s like taking a class where you are given a bag of money if you get an A.
Honors classes are also a good idea because this is your last chance to make a good impression on any college admissions officers. According to The College Board, the best test of how well a student does in college is how rigorous their high school work was, so honors classes at any time in your education is a great idea.
Seek Out New Schools and Scholarships:
Many students go into their senior year with their ideal school picked out, all wrapped with a bow on top. You might have a favorite, yes, but it never hurts to keep looking. There are hundreds of schools out there, so how can you be sure you have the right one?
Scholarships are the next move. Colleges offer plenty of them, and so do third-party organizations. Scour the country, the world, and Middle Earth for every possibility and apply, apply, apply (at least that many times).
By the end of your search, your guidance counselor should be sick of seeing you due to all the times you pestered them for help.
Start Your College Experience Early:
As much as you can prepare, you still have to face your final year, so why not start taking classes right now?
Your local community college most likely offers classes to high school students in a variety of subjects. You could take classes your high school wouldn’t dream of offering, save money later on, and take the first step in your college life without leaving your neighborhood.
Alexander Diedrick is a writing intern at myFootpath, LLC, a college and career advising company based in Chicago, Illinois. He extensively researches hundreds of careers, finding career professionals to interview in order to share their insightful information with students across the country. As a fiction writing and television writing student at Columbia College Chicago, Alexander uses his skills to help other students search for their career paths.
Note: This is an absolute must watch video. If you are interested in the future of education, this 20 minutes is well worth your time. What Khan Academy is trying to do is unbeliveable. Full post to follow.
Salman Khan talks about how and why he created the remarkable Khan Academy, a carefully structured series of educational videos offering complete curricula in math and, now, other subjects. He shows the power of interactive exercises, and calls for teachers to consider flipping the traditional classroom script -- give students video lectures to watch at home, and do "homework" in the classroom with the teacher available to help.
Who Is Salman Khan?
Salman Khan is the founder and faculty of the Khan Academy (www.khanacademy.org)-- a not-for-profit organization with the mission of providing a free world-class education to anyone, anywhere. It now consists of self-paced software and, with over 1 million unique students per month, the most-used educational video repository on the Internet (over 30 million lessons delivered to-date). All 2000+ video tutorials, covering everything from basic addition to advanced calculus, physics, chemistry and biology, have been made by Salman.
Prior to the Khan Academy, Salman was a senior analyst at a hedge fund and had also worked in technology and venture capital. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, an M.Eng and B.S. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in mathematics from MIT.
Right now on the web we are beginning to see a trend in the education space. Many people are coming to the realization that "average" colleges can cost between $30,000-$40,000 per year to attend (in the US) without the name brand of Harvard or Yale. Picking a random university, say Indiana State University, will set you back $28,000 per year to attend. I'm sure ISU is a great university, but the name power is not that of an Ivy League school. Many education entrepreneurs are beginning to recognize that high tuition costs = high student loans. With student loans now exceeding credit card debt (both being over $1 trillion at last count) we are beginning to reach a tipping point where things just do not add up.
With the US government continually pushing college education as the key to success, what choice do young students have? Well, some websites are trying to answer that question. One of the best (and first) sites to offer online learning was Edufire. They were a platform for live video learning on nearly anything, including test prep. More recently, a couple of sites are attempting the same feat - but with a couple more features. Both pre-launch, Learnable and Skillshare are also attempting to help people learn anything from anywhere. What is great about these sites are the fact that someone living in China can get the exact same course and instruction as someone living in Calgary. We'll wait to see what both sites come up with when they launch.
On the more traditional side, we have sites like Lynda that are more professional. While they mainly focus on the digital side of things, Lynda's content is very high quality. Moving into the test-prep sector, sites like Grockit and Knewton offer high-level test prep customized to your needs. Recently, Knewton has made major strides in pushing their adaptive learning engines with a huge partnership with Arizona State University. Their theory is that every student is unique, and so deserves to be treated as such. I heavily agree with their model and think that Knewton is poised to make a major impact in the next couple years.
All of these sites I've mentioned so far cost money in one form or another. Recently, there have been two entrants that have semi-taken the world by storm. The first is the Khan Academy, which as many of you know, is a one-man operation. Salman's goal is to make education available to anyone, anywhere. It's an amazing story, and a testament to the power of online video and distribution. Following along the same lines, University of the People is the world's first tuition free online university. It's amazing what the internet is allowing us to do.
I want to focus on learning & teaching more in this post rather than the blanket term of online education. I believe that while we have all of the aforementioned sites doing amazing things, one site is most poised to capture the learning & teaching space. The site is called TeachStreet - and is a fantastic company run out of Seattle. TeachStreet takes more of a marketing or matchmaking approach to learning, offering a platform to learn anything from anyone. Want to take an online degree? They have an online college finder. Test prep? They can connect you to teachers and tutors willing to help. Most of all, the site offers a platform for any teacher or tutor to promote their services and gain new clientele. The reason I mention TeachStreet as being the leader is because of their maturity (been around since 2007) and recent growth. (see here).
Even though TeachStreet are doing many things really well - there is of course still a huge gulf in the online education space. If they are truly attempting to help anyone learn anything from anywhere, how can they best go about this? It's a massive issue, to be sure - but I'm going to offer my opinion on three areas that they and any other site could tap into.
TeachStreet currently has a large database of classes on a variety of subjects. Want to learn about painting, architecture or metalwork? Just find a tutor and start learning. The problem is, TeachStreet right now acts as a facilitator, not a driver. Think of them as the eBay for learning, you can browse and purchase anything you want, but it stops there. Obviously it doesn't make sense for them to in-house produce all of the content, it's impossible. But students around the world are affected by brand, in a big way. Many people don't bother going to company's websites anymore, they just go to Facebook pages. If TeachStreet could start pushing all of their "piano" content to a single page (they are already doing this - see http://www.teachstreet.com/piano/lessons/68), they could become a singular learning brand. On that page could be all content related to learning piano, including videos, articles that have been written, discussions from the forum, etc... And then you could filter in the tutors based on location onto a spot on that page. Maybe geo-localized? so that when you visit the site, it automatically knows where you are visiting from and recommends tutors in that region. The whole thing boils down to curating content into a major brand. Since TeachStreet is already beginning to do this - I think it comes down to getting the word out about these pages and beginning to build a brand.
Going along with the brand theme, I think that what is severely lacking in the online education space is credibility. Online education has a really bad reputation in the professional workplace. Getting a degree from the University of Pheonix is certainly not the same as getting a physical degree from the University of British Columbia, even though the education could be the exact same. Most of education comes down to branding and reputation. What TeachStreet or another site could do is take their database of knowledge and information and partner with a university, say the University of Washington. From there, they could work together to deliver a full online degree, done through UW's website, but powered by TeachStreet content. If they can develop a really good, say arts degree program, a viable solution could finally be available. I know that universities like Harvard do offer online accredited degrees, but the costs are nearly the same as attending, so what's the benefit? What TeachStreet or any other site can try to do is develop a real reputation in online learning. The site that does this has huge potential. Imagine all the major universities having an online degree that is just as selective as the physical, but powered by an online, crowdsourced platform.
The last suggestion I would make is to batch content together to form online lessons. There are a number of people already doing this online, but once again, it comes down to brand. If I am a young student in Nairobi and I have internet access, I may want to better my English skills. In this case I'm not concerned with an accredited degree, but rather learning. Google currently provides messy results for learning anything because of the mass of content online. If TeachStreet wants to be able to deliver learning anywhere, they could try and batch their tutoring and learning content into packages that are well known. Once again, it all comes down to establishing a branding reputation.
Overall, there is a lot of room in this space and lots to do. Do I think we will ever replace offline education? Not by a long shot. We will always have traditional institutions for learning. But I don't think that we need so many, and I don't think the cost justifies the education. Many students that are going to a college because they "have to" could be better off learning from a crowdsourced, accredited platform. This article is just focusing on learning & teaching, in which I think TeachStreet has the ability to do very well. But there are other aspects of education that I'll save for later posts.
Can anyone think of any better uses for platforms like TeachStreet or the Khan Academy? How do you see their influence affecting the future?
There was a fantastic article on the ROI (return on investment) of a law degree by the New York Times this weekend. Why did they pick a law degree? Because many people view it as a "prestigious" degree - and we automatically assume that any person with one must be successful. And if you read the article the main example - Michael, got his JD for exactly that reason. The idea that being an attorney would make him more successful than his friends is the main reason why he got the degree. By the way, he's $250,000 in debt.
Is this to say that degrees are bad? Absolutely not, instead we are going to attempt to understand whether the statement "more education is better", is actually true. As we all know, finding your passion is extremely important, but there needs to be a financial consideration to your career selection as well. For some people, it may be sufficient to have just enough money to do what they love. For others, their debt and student loans require them to have a substantial salary. But who is to blame? Is it the universities and colleges that keep increasing tuition every year? Or is it us, the general public - thatpushesour students to pursue higher education?
First of all, let us understand that in the United States - many people judge the value of a university by its US News College Rankings. In Canada, we have the Macleans National University Rankings. In England, the Times issues their yearly rankings, same thing in Asia, central Europe, etc... And if you dig even more - you will find rankings on the best business schools, best law schools, best medical schools, etc... It seems that we've become a world obsessed with higher education. What people don't realize is how higher education works - even on the simplest level. The book Higher Education (which I will review soon), is an awesome look into the depths of the higher education world. But for now let's take a high-level approach.
Let's say you are a senior student, attending a middle-class high school in the United States. Your parents are both working-class citizens that pay their bills, contribute taxes and go to church. They have been saving up for your college tuition since you were a baby. When it comes time to apply for university, what do you and your parents do? Most parents will navigate over to the US News Rankings and take a look at some local colleges and where they stack up (or they can look at sites like http://unigo.com). Or, if their child is exceptionally gifted academically, athletically or artistically, they will look at the top ranking universities. Add to this, is the fact that America's politicians keep pushing college, college, college. All of this hype causes a major issue.
The Business Model
Universities have the greatest business model in the modern world. Every year, millions of students apply to universities. Picture this like millions of clients offering to give you, the "big business", around $40,000 per year. What do you do? In the business world, of course more money equals a bigger company. But colleges don't work this way. You see, because of reputations, the top schools do better when they let fewer students in.To a rational person, this sounds insane. So, are they turning away potentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of business? Yes - but they are always planning for the future. By letting in on average 7% of applicants, Harvard can afford to raise their prices, year after year.
The scary thing is that a lot of colleges that are not Harvard charge similar tuition per year. If you just glance over the tuition rates in the US News report, you will see the $40,000 figure come up a lot. Keep in mind, this does not include other expenses, like books, boarding, food, etc... All in all, even lesser-known state schools can still cost $40,000-$50,000 per year. This is insane.
Academic Inflation
The other factor that very few people consider is the value of a degree. Back when institutionalized degrees were a big deal (Generation Y's parents) the value per degree was very high. If you had one, it was a big deal. But soon, governments around the world quickly figured out that universities could be a major cash cow. And so they morphed from institutions of higher learning and knowledge to what we have today - a mass produced industrial model of education. At some point, we stopped basing a degree on requirements of knowledge, just like we took the dollar off of the gold, then silver currency. What do you have left after removing these standards? You have inflation.
When you have something replicated over and over again, its value will decrease over time. As we print more and more money, the value of our dollar goes down. And as we keep awarding more and more degrees, the value of an undergraduate education also goes down. As we can see via the NYT article above, this inflation has also crept into graduate programs such as JD's and MBA's. Jobs that previously required BA's now require MA's; MSc's now require PhD's. When does it stop?
--
To be clear, this is not an education-bashing article. Most high-level professions require a specific degree, and this is correct. You wouldn't want your surgeon to have just walked off the street. But many professions rely on more individual abilities rather than acquired knowledge. In our modern world of the Internet and mobile phones, there is no reason that we are still using this antiquated version of education. There are other options, and we need to know about them.
Part two of this discussion will talk about the amortization of a degree:
Did Michael end up with $250,000 worth of "good" debt?
How long will it take him to get that money back?
What professions have the best Return on Investment, and what professions require no investment? (hint: one of the highest paid professions today - software developers - can be completely self-taught and earn the same as a university graduate).
What role does the Internet play in equalizing the value of degrees?
Only by becoming informed can we make good decisions. Stay tuned.
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems of education -- the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.
In 1999, Sugata Mitra and his colleagues dug a hole in a wall bordering an urban slum in New Delhi, installed an Internet-connected PC, and left it there (with a hidden camera filming the area). What they saw was kids from the slum playing around with the computer and in the process learning how to use it and how to go online, and then teaching each other.
In the following years they replicated the experiment in other parts of India, urban and rural, with similar results, challenging some of the key assumptions of formal education. The "Hole in the Wall" project demonstrates that, even in the absence of any direct input from a teacher, an environment that stimulates curiosity can cause learning through self-instruction and peer-shared knowledge. Mitra, who's now a professor of educational technology at Newcastle University (UK), calls it "minimally invasive education."
"Education-as-usual assumes that kids are empty vessels who need to be sat down in a room and filled with curricular content. Dr. Mitra's experiments prove that wrong." Linux Journal
I discovered Eric Thomas' videos the other day on Youtube and was blown away. Here is a guy that was homeless at the age of 17 for two and a half years on the streets of Detroit. He had dropped out of high school after his mom kicked him out of the house. So what did he do? He woke up one day after being on the street, straightened himself out, and got his GED. From there, he made it his goal to complete college. Nobody in his family had ever done that before. Not only did he complete college, but he is now working on his PhD in educational studies.
This is no-nonsense personal development advice at its finest. You need to at listen to both videos to see his style of teaching. You will become inspired. We need more people like this in our school systems inspiring our students. Enjoy the videos and let me know what you think in the comments below.
In aprevious post on transforming education, we discussed Howard Gardner's multiple intelligence theory as well as the effects of kindergarten teaching. We began to understand that we need to "transform", not "reform" the education system, starting at the kindergarten level. This is because those who do not build the necessary base at the kindergarten level will always be at a disadvantage, never being able to catch up. One way that we suggested this could change is through teaching based on multiple intelligences.
In part two, we are going to discuss how we can attempt to build world-class, passionate students that can compete at the world level. Next we will discuss how we can customize the system to each child's strengths. Let's begin.
Building World-Class Students
As we discussed previously, the current system is in dire need of an upgrade, and fast. With people like Michelle Rhee and Geoffrey Canada in the USA, there is a push for major change. But let's take a look at the full sized image from above. This is a graph from The Atlantic, measuring proficiency in math across the world, and then subdivided into American states. The immediate thing that may pop out is: where's the USA? Shouldn't they be near the top? Even with the problems that they are having, they are the most powerful nation on earth, right? Surely on something simple like a math test they would be able to compete at the world stage. But this is not the case. At the top of the list are: Taiwan, Hong Kong, Korea and Finland. Each of these nations has at least 20% of their students able to produce advanced level mathematics. Canada is somewhat near the top at 15% next to Japan and Macao-China. And the USA? Down near the end of the first graph at a very poor rate of 6%. And at the bottom? Countries like Kyrgyzstan, Jordan, Indonesia and Columbia all with rates less than 1%.
Do we see a problem? Even our winning country - Taiwan, is only able to produce 28% of their students at a high level of math proficiency. 28% is a failing mark in school, on all tests and in many day to day activities. And yet we treat it as a monumental achievement. I realize that no country will ever be able to produce 100% of students at a high proficiency level, just as you will never be successful on 100% of your investments. But we need to raise the standards.
Focusing on the USA at the moment, since it has the most press as of right now - let's do some simple calculations. If we assume there are around 300 million people living in the USA right now, and we multiply this by 6% - we can assume that approximately 18 million people in the USA operate (or did in school) at a high mathematic proficiency. Now obviously the number of students taking this test each year is not 300 million, that's the total population. But if we take the students writing and extrapolate to the entire nation, we can arrive at the 18 million. What this means is that the rest of the nation, 282 million, are NOT up to the standards in mathematics. Now proficiency in mathematics does not equal success in life, but it gives us an overview of the issues that the country faces.
Compare this to Taiwan - the leader. They have a population of 23 million x 28% = 6.44 million individuals that are proficient in math. That number is pretty good considering how small of a nation Taiwan is. They have 1/3 of the number of proficient students with about 1/10 of the population of the USA. There are many more metrics that we can use to measure, this test in mathematics was just used to show how on a "measuring basis", the USA is starting to lag far behind. And when you get into massive nations like Mexico and Brazil that have extremely poor rates (~2%) we can see how education is a global problem. But how do we attempt to fix it?
Customizing The System
The main issue with the stats above is that we are measuring everyone using the same stick. It's as if we believe that we can measure a nations success by the height of its residents. The issue when it comes to students and people is that they are unique in nature and develop at different rates. Human life is an organic process - like the four seasons. We use our youth to learn and blossom, much like spring. We then use the main period of our working life to maximize productivity, gain status and create wealth. This can be considered summer. When we begin to slow down and head towards retirement, we have reached fall. And finally, in the last years of our life, winter has arrived.
The issue with education is focused on spring, as that is when we do the majority (if not all) of our formal education. The issue is that if we don't use the spring season to blossom properly, there will be no fruitful fall. We can never really catch up. And this is why it is so important to nail education. Using the organic example as our base, we must begin to develop individual, unique systems that match students learning patterns. Instead of measuring everyone with the same stick, we need to create separate sticks and measure using those.
I personally believe that we are just at the tip of the iceberg when it comes to individualized learning based on the seven intelligences. But I'd like to share two examples of companies that are beginning the journey in creating these unique experiences. The first company is Knewton, currently an online test prep business that has a much larger mission. Here is their description from the website as well as a video demonstrating how they are trying to build a customized system:
Knewton is developing the industry's most powerful adaptive learning engine, customizing educational content to meet the needs of each student. Whereas traditional classrooms and textbooks provide the same material to every student, Knewton will dynamically match lessons, videos, and practice problems to each student's ideal learning arc.
Knewton works by tagging all content down to the atomic concept level. The system further tags the resulting content by structure, difficulty level, and media format. Then we can dynamically generate for each student, each day, the perfect bundle of content based on exactly which concepts she knows and how she learns best.
The second company I'd like to mention is more of a program. It is called School of One, put on by the New York Department of Education. Here is some more info:
The mission of School of One is to provide students with personalized, effective, and dynamic classroom instruction so that teachers have more time to focus on the quality of their instruction.
To achieve this mission, School of One re-imagines the traditional classroom model. Instead of one teacher and 25-30 students in a classroom, each student participates in multiple instructional modalities, including a combination of teacher-led instruction, one-on-one tutoring, independent learning, and work with virtual tutors.
To organize this type of learning, each student receives a unique daily schedule based on his or her academic strengths and needs. As a result, students within the same school or even the same classroom can receive profoundly different instruction as each student’s schedule is tailored to the skills they need and the ways they best learn. Teachers acquire data about student achievement each day and then adapt their live instructional lessons accordingly. By leveraging technology to play a more essential role in planning instruction, teachers have more time to focus on doing what they do best - delivering quality instruction and insuring that all students learn.
In the next part of the series, we are going to explain how we believe the theories mentioned above can be placed into the education system in order to make an impact. The goal, remember, is to not just facilitate success at the top level of students (the 6% that are proficient) but for the 94% that are currently NOT proficient. Thus, trying to figure out how to best implement this system will give most countries a chance to greatly improve the education and knowledge of their students. The macroeconomic impact of raising the proficiency rating even by 1% is massive, and so it is a worthy goal to work towards.
--
Important Points
Many countries are lagging behind when it comes to proficiency
Even those who are succeeding are still "failing"
We are all being measured with the same stick
Humans are not robots, we evolve organically
Thus we need to create individualized learning
Some companies are attempting to break into this process right now.
A farm kid from Wisconsin, Diana Laufenberg set out for Kansas 11 years ago and then onto Arizona 8 years ago. She has taught all grade levels from 7-12 in Social Studies. Laufenberg’s latest adventure finds her at the Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia. SLA, one of Philadelphia’s newer high schools, in partnership with the Franklin Institute. The approach is both old and new.
SLA is an inquiry-driven, project-based high school focused on 21st-century learning. SLA provides a rigorous, college-preparatory curriculum with a focus on science, technology, mathematics and entrepreneurship. Students at SLA learn in a project-based environment where the core values of inquiry, research, collaboration, presentation and reflection are emphasized in all classes.
From rockets to stock markets, many of humanity's most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why do kids lose interest in it? Conrad Wolfram says the part of math we teach -- calculation by hand -- isn't just tedious, it's mostly irrelevant to real mathematics and the real world. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.
Who Is Conrad Wolfram?
Conrad Wolfram is the strategic director of Wolfram Research, where his job, in a nutshell, isunderstanding and finding new uses for the Mathematica technology. Wolfram is especially passionate about finding uses for Mathematica outside of pure computation, using it as a development platform for products that help communicate big ideas. The Demonstrations tool, for instance, makes a compelling case for never writing out another equation -- instead displaying data in interactive, graphical form.
Wolfram's work points up the changing nature of math in the past 30 years, as we've moved from adding machines to calculators to sophisticated math software, allowing us to achieveever more complex computational feats. But, Wolfram says, many schools are still focused on hand-calculating; using automation, such as a piece of software, to do math is sometimes seen as cheating. This keeps schools from spending the time they need on the new tools of science and mathematics. As they gain significance for everyday living, he suggests, we need to learn to take advantage of these tools and learn to use them young.
"What he's saying is that enough time is wasted in math classes on JUST calculation, that often the underlying concept is lost anyway."
What do you think of people in poverty? Maybe what Jessica Jackley once did: "they" need "our" help, in the form of a few coins in a jar. The co-founder of Kiva.org talks about how her attitude changed -- and how her work with microloans has brought new power to people who live on a few dollars a day.
Who Is Jessica Jackley?
Seven years ago, Jessica Jackley heard a speech by Grameen Bank founder Muhammad Yunus, an economist from Bangladesh who had developed the idea of microcredit: loans offered to entrepreneurs too poor to qualify for traditional bank loans. She says, "I was so completely blown away by the idea that I quit my job, dropped everything and moved to East Africa to help." In late 2005 she co-founded Kiva.org with Matt Flannery.
Kiva uses a peer-to-peer model in which lenders sort through profiles of potential borrowers -- be they a farmer in Cambodia, a pharmacist in Sierra Leone, or a shopkeeper in Mongolia -- and make loans to those they find most appealing. The minimum loan is $25, and the interest rate is 0%. The repayment rate for loans is more than 98%, Jackley says, and since the group was founded almost 700,000 people have pledged $128 million in loans to more than 325,000 people. Jackley's latest project is ProFounder, a new platform that helps small businesses in the United States access startup funding through community involvement.
"Kiva mixes the entrepreneurial daring of Google with the do-gooder ethos of Bono." -Knowledge@Wharton report, Forbes
){kind=link}