Wk3 Reading Activities Blog Post 2 - Response to Brian Thomas

My response to Brian Thomas.  His post will be below my reply in its entirety.

"BUT" is one of the words that I NEVER allowed my students to utter in my classroom. I would usually follow up a student saying the word with "are for sitting" or "are for ashtrays". In my opinion it is a truly defeatist type of word. I'd rather see a student say "What if" and then follow up with some sort of support for their position.

The thing that sticks at me with leadership Brian is the fact that schools are doing away with practice of 'recess' in the elementary setting. It's these informal periods where students work on the original social networking and build leadership skills through pretend play and other non-coordinated activities. It's these activities that inhibits students from gaining confidence in themselves. I think if we as educators would take a step back and look at educating the whole student again a new crop of empowered leaders might be harvested.

What I’ve observed from the readings this week (especially from Chapter 6) is that many of Ben’s philosophies about putting others first and living your life in a positive way have been in the Bible for thousands of years. The problem is, most people (including me) have not been so good about reading these principles and applying them to our lives. I believe that if we all spent more time reading and applying THAT guidebook that we would be able to show much more love and genuine concern for each other.

That aside, I particularly liked the discussions in the book on opening up your thinking to possibilities and using the word “and” instead of “but” to describe our current situation. I think it’s this type of positive thinking that can really help make or break your day and your outlook on your current situation. I also liked the discussion of leading from any chair. I think this idea is especially important to share with a classroom of students that might have confidence issues (which, for most teens, is almost a given). To understand that your contributions are valued no matter what your role is, is a very important concept to get across to a class and I appreciated the authors insights and stories about this idea.