Autumn is the season to harvest the bounty and give thanks for the abundance. The season has us storing up for the winter and counting our blessings for all that has come into fruition over the planting and growing season. This autumn, as I begin my last year in this journey with the SWS graduating class of 2020, it occurs to me that there is the spirit of autumn in the eighth-grade year. The planting and growing has been occurring over the course of the last seven years, the harvest time is now, and there is a lot to be thankful for. My feelings of gratitude find themselves neatly dividing into three distinct categories: for my colleagues at the Sandpoint Waldorf School, for the parents of my students and all of the Sandpoint Waldorf School community, and for my students and all of the students here at the Sandpoint Waldorf School.
We all want to raise smart, successful kids, so it's tempting to play Mozart for our babies and run math drills for kindergartners. After all, we need to give them a head start while they're still little sponges, right?
"It doesn't quite work that way," says Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, a professor of psychology at Temple University and co-author of Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children with Roberta Golinkoff. She's been studying childhood development for almost 40 years.
So how does it work? NPR Education reporters and Life Kit hosts Anya Kamenetz and Cory Turner talk with Hirsh-Pasek about the "6 C's" that kids need to succeed — collaboration, communication, content, critical thinking, creative innovation and confidence — and why raising brilliant kids starts with redefining brilliant.
One of the myths about the Sandpoint Waldorf School is that we have no relationship with technology. It is true that the teachers directly deliver the curriculum to the children and do not rely on computers in the classroom. In fact, the Sandpoint Waldorf School classrooms have no computers, with the exception on occasion in sixth, seventh, and grades. The school believes that enthusiasm for learning is best fostered through the human to human relationships and hands-on experiences.
An education is supposed to prepare you for the future. Traditionally, that meant learning certain facts and skills, like when Columbus discovered America or how to do long division. Today, curriculums have shifted to focus on a more global and digital world, like cultural history, basic computer skills and writing code.
Yet the challenges that our kids will face will be much different than we did growing up and many of the things a typical student learns in school today will no longer be relevant by the time he or she graduates college. In fact, a study at the University of Oxford found that 47% of today’s jobs will be eliminated over the next 20 years.
In 10 or 20 years, much of what we “know” about the world will no longer be true. The computers of the future will not be digital. Software code itself is disappearing, or at least becoming far less relevant. Many of what are considered good jobs today will be either automated or devalued. We need to rethink how we prepare our kids for the world to come. Read full story on Digital Tonto