Adulting Classes?

This week’s article summary from NPR is Adulting School Teaches Young Adults Grown-Up Skills.

Last week’s article summary focused on how young adults often are not emotionally or experientially equipped to handle the ups and downs and mundane to-dos of post-college life. 

The result is Adulting Classes.

Adulting classes help millennials learn life skills and habits that they haven’t yet developed—like changing a tire, setting up and following a monthly budget, cooking, and ironing.

While in many ways it is sad that young adults need formal instruction in these everyday essentials, the consequence of living in a fast-food/to-go/if-it’s-broken-buy-a-new-one world is many of us didn’t need and weren’t required to learn life skills in our teens and early 20s. (I'm a baby boomer not a millennial, yet I also was ill equipped to live on my own after college, although living off campus as a junior and senior forced me to develop some important life skills.)

Although I’m sure some of you will react to the article with a “give me a break" snort, classes that teach adult life skills (including some important ones like financial literacy) are our new reality. 

Joe

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Transitioning to adulthood isn't new, but there is a more modern way to describe it: adulting.

Get your car's oil changed? That's adulting. Cook dinner instead of order takeout? That's adulting.

And now a new school called the Adulting School is dedicated to teaching skills like these to fledgling adults so they can become successful grown-ups.

Attendees can learn skills like how to network as a pro or how to fold a fitted sheet.

Carly Bouchard, 29, sat among a couple of dozen young adults hoping to uncover their true financial self.

"I'm a financial cripple," Bouchard said.

Although she went to business school, Bouchard said, she now needs the Adulting School.

"I'm still a dolt," she said. "Not an 'A-dult' — a dolt — when it comes to my finances."

Adrienne Abramowitz, 25, watched a demonstration on proper folding and then grabbed a fitted sheet as her friend Emily Rice, 26, coached.

"You put it together, and then you pinch it," Abramowitz said.

But after a futile attempt, they called for help.

Despite the fun vibe, the goal behind the school is serious.

Founder Rachel Weinstein got the idea from her work as a psychotherapist. She noticed many of her clients struggled with the transition to adulthood. Things like paying bills on time and choosing a career were difficult for them.

"You know, when you see 10 people feeling like they're the only one, and they're all struggling with the same thing, you think, let's get these people together so they can learn this stuff and not feel so isolated and ashamed," Weinstein said.

Managing money is a common source of stress for the school's attendees.

They tend to be millennials and women. Lindsay Rowe Scala, 32, said she is trying to figure out how to save for the future and pay off school debt.

"In job interviews, they're always asking 'Where do you want to see yourself in five years?' " she said. "And I never know how to answer that because I'm always thinking on how to survive today and next week and what's coming up."

Holly Swyers, an associate professor of anthropology who has researched adulthood, said this stress goes back generations. She said part of the problem is that classes that teach life skills, like home economics, aren't emphasized and there is no dedicated place to learn adult skills.

"We go through this age-graded system, and it tells us just do this and you'll be fine," Swyers says. "And then you graduate from high school or from college, and suddenly, there's no more rules about, if you just do this step, that's what comes next."

The Adulting School has drawn criticism for its perceived coddling. But Swyers said the school deserves kudos for addressing a real problem.

As adults navigate from dependence to independence, Swyers said she would like to see more proactive approaches in helping them accomplish their transition.

Preparing Students Emotionally as Well as Cognitively

This week’s article summary is Today's Students May be Unprepared Emotionally.

About five or six  years ago I heard a report on NPR that the three primary indicators of future student success were cognitive ability (IQ), parents’ economics status, and self control. Of those three, the only one that was malleable and teachable is self control.

This was a major ‘a-ha’ moment for me as a teacher. Throughout my teaching career,  I had tried to foster whole-child (cognitive, physical, social emotional) development in my students, yet I still placed IQ at the top of the list for why kids succeed in school and life. 

The NPR report followed by Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character radically changed my view of education where today I know that while IQ matters, emotional intelligence (EI) matters more.

The article below focuses on how much pressure and stress students (especially high schoolers) are under and how little we all—parents, schools, society in general—do to help them develop a healthy perspective on life and achievement within today's expectation of  a 4.0 GPA, 1600 SAT scores, and a plethora of extracurricular activities. 

While students today run themselves ragged trying to check off all the boxes above in competition to get into the most prestigious college/university possible, the result is often a child emotionally unprepared to deal with college let alone a global workplace. They’ve focused so much on external achievement while neglecting to develop their sense of self.

Getting As is achievable, but doing the following is a mystery to many students: finding work/play balance in life, embracing the ambiguities/grayness of America and the world at large, productively working with others who have different experiences and beliefs. 

As the article below attests, we aren’t doing enough to help today’s students develop their EI.

Joe

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Regardless of all the honors classes and A.P. courses they took in high school, or the science, technology and engineering classes they cram into their college curriculum, students today will not be fully prepared to compete in an increasingly global business environment.

The problem — and the solution — is not intellectual. It’s emotional.

American teenagers are in psychological trouble. For the first time, college students today are facing more stress than their parents, according to a recent report by the American Psychological Association.

The evidence is all around us. American teenagers attempt suicide more often than youths in most other countries, and they are among the world leaders in violence, binge drinking, marijuana use, obesity and unhappiness.

A  recent survey  found that more than half of college students experienced overwhelming anxiety and about a third felt deep depression during the academic year.

How can they learn and thrive if they do not have the skills to handle their emotions or feel safe and supported enough to talk about them?

Emotions drive learning, decision-making, creativity, relationships and health. Mastering the skills of emotional intelligence paves the way for greater well-being, better relationships and overall effectiveness — for college students, for students from kindergarten through high school and for the adults who surround them, including educators and parents. The Nobel laureate James J. Heckman has written that teaching “noncognitive” skills, including recognizing and regulating emotions, would be a cost-effective way to increase work force productivity and quality.

Teaching emotional intelligence — or what’s more broadly referred to as social and emotional learning — to children and adults has proven effective—-and sorely needed.

Given that, it’s frustrating that policies to mandate and finance evidence-based approaches to social and emotional learning are slow to come. A few states, including Illinois and Alaska, have acted on their own. Leaders in Washington and across the nation need to listen to youth and work to change education to equip America’s youth to be competitive for the global century well under way. Our future — and our children’s future — depend on it.

Our PISA Scores in Math

This week’s article summary from The Hechinger Report is U.S. Ranks Near the Bottom in Math.

Some of you may have heard that PISA scores (an international test administered every three years to 10th graders) for the U.S. dropped in math this year.

Although the drop is troubling, there is optimism in that some schools in the U.S.—like Trinity—have begun to teach math differently, and perhaps we’ll see the PISA scores rise in the coming years.

The article talks about how high performing PISA countries teach math, e.g., focusing on fewer topics but studying them in greater depth, ensuring mastery of one topic at a time before moving to the next topic.

As the work of Jo Boaler at Stanford attests (and many of you have become familiar with her research and subsequent recommendations), math requires flexible thinking—something that many American kids struggle in, which is especially evident on PISA questions requiring multi-steps and creative thinking and problem solving.

American kids are often proficient in one-step computation because this has been the prevailing pedagogy of math for decades. However, research is showing that true conceptual understanding and the ability to approach and solve a problem in multiple ways leads to better confidence and performance in math. Hence the reason we have begin having ‘math talks’ with our kids.

I’m optimistic that this new pedagogical approach will lead to better quantitative results for American students. 

Joe

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The math achievement of American high school students in 2015 fell for the second time in a row on a major international benchmark, pushing the United States down to the bottom half of 72 nations around the world who participate in the international test, known as the Program for International Student Assessment or PISA.  

Among the 35 industrialized nations that are members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the U.S. now ranks 31st.

Both reading and science scores were steady, with U.S. students scoring near the international average in both subjects.

The 2015 PISA results showed that students across the board, from bottom to middle to top performers, were doing worse in math. It wasn’t just one segment of students who brought the national average down.

The weak math performance echoed the results of a second national exam, the National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), on which 4th and 8th graders also posted lower math scores on the 2015 test.

The PISA test is administered every three years around the world to measure what 15-year-old students know in math, reading and science. In the United States, it’s primarily taken by 10th graders. The U.S. has never been a strong performer globally, but has generally scored near the average since the test began in 2000.  In 2012 math scores deteriorated a few points. Now, with the 2015 results in, it’s a clear downward trend.

Math has always been the most difficult subject for American students. Even students in Massachusetts, one of the top performing states in the nation, do no better than average globally.

Higher performing nations structure their math curriculum differently, teaching fewer topics, but in greater depth. They also teach math topics in a sequential order, asking students to master one topic at a time, rather than cycling back to the same concept year after year.

Students are often good at answering the first layer of a problem in the United States, but as soon as students have to go deeper and answer the more complex parts of a problem, they have difficulties.

The timing of these results comes just a few years after the Common Core standards were adopted in most U.S. states. It’s still “too early to judge” if they’re working.

The Common Core concept is quite well aligned with many high performing education systems.

There are two silver linings for the United States. In science, the achievement gap between rich and poor is closing, albeit not by enough yet to raise the overall score of the whole nation.

And second, even though only a small portion of U.S. students hit the most advanced level on the science test, the country is large enough that it still produces 300,000 high-performing 15-year olds in the subject. Among the four regions in China that currently participate in the PISA test (Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu and Guangdong), a higher percentage of test-takers hit the advanced level, but that still produces fewer top science students — roughly 180,000.

The U.S. actually improved its rankings in reading and science, because other nations did worse and slipped in status. Among the 60 nations and regions that took the PISA test in both 2012 and 2015, the U.S. ranked 15th in reading and 18th in science, up three notches in each subject.One of the nations that slipped considerably was Finland, which had been a beacon to education reformers for its strong results in previous years.

Singapore regained its top slot. It had been temporarily dethroned by Shanghai, an elite, wealthy region in China, where the scores were extraordinarily high during the previous testing cycle. But now that Shanghai’s scores are combined with three other Chinese regions, mainland China has slipped to sixth place.

The Importance of Self-Evaluation

This week’s article summary from the New York Times is The Secret Ingredient for Success.

Although the article is about how a chef became a restaurant magnate through self-examination of what was and wasn’t working in his first restaurant, it resonated for me because it confirms the importance of giving our students ample opportunities to develop and practice self-assessment and reflection--in areas such as My Learning and student-led conferences.

The article—and soon to be a full book—shows the importance of self-awareness and critical examination in success. The authors of the article interviewed successful people in business, sports, etc. and found that while talent, persistence, and luck are obvious factors in eventual success, so is the ability to look at oneself.

The article talks about the difference between ‘single and double loop learning’ with the latter including the ability to look inward and critically examine one’s own decisions, missteps, biases, etc.  rather than only looking (and blaming) outward factors to become more successful in any endeavor.

I like seeing real-life and research-based affirmation of what Trinity believes and practices!

Joe

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What does self-awareness have to do with a restaurant empire?

David Chang’s experience is instructive.

Mr. Chang is an internationally renowned, award-winning Korean-American chef with eight restaurants from Toronto to Sydney. He says he worked himself to the bone to realize his dream — to own a humble noodle bar.

He spent years cooking in some of New York City’s best restaurants, apprenticed in different noodle shops in Japan and then, finally, worked in his tiny restaurant.

Mr. Chang could barely pay himself a salary. He had trouble keeping staff. And he was miserably stressed.

He recalls a low moment when he went with his staff on a night off to eat burgers at a restaurant that was everything his wasn’t — packed, critically acclaimed, and financially successful. He could cook better than they did, so why was his restaurant failing?

Mr. Chang could have blamed someone else for his troubles, or worked harder, or he could have made minor tweaks to the menu. Instead he looked inward and subjected himself to brutal self-assessment.

Was the humble noodle bar of his dreams economically viable? Sure, a traditional noodle dish had its charm but wouldn’t work as the mainstay of a restaurant.

Mr. Chang changed course. Rather than worry about what a noodle bar should serve, he stalked the produce at the greenmarket for inspiration. Then he went back to the kitchen and invented recipes, crowding the menu with wild combinations of dishes. What happened next Mr. Chang still considers “kind of ridiculous” — the crowds came, rave reviews piled up, and awards followed.

During the 1970s, Chris Argyris, a business theorist at Harvard Business School began to research what happens to organizations and people, like Mr. Chang, when they find obstacles in their paths.

Professor Argyris called the most common response single loop learning — an insular mental process in which we consider possible external or technical reasons for obstacles.

Vastly more effective is the cognitive approach that Professor Argyris called double-loop learning. In this mode we — like Mr. Chang — question every aspect of our approach, including our methodology, biases, and deeply held assumptions.

This more psychologically nuanced self-examination requires that we honestly challenge our beliefs and summon the courage to act on that information, which may lead to fresh ways of thinking about our lives and our goals.

In interviews we did with high achievers for a book, we expected to hear that talent, persistence, dedication and luck played crucial roles in their success. Surprisingly, however, self-awareness played an equally strong role.

The successful people we spoke with — in business, entertainment, sports and the arts — all had similar responses when faced with obstacles: they subjected themselves to merciless self-examination that prompted reinvention of their goals and the methods by which they endeavored to achieve them.

No one’s idea of a good time is to take a brutal assessment of their animating assumptions and to acknowledge that those may have contributed to their failure. It’s easy to find pat ways to explain why the world has not adequately rewarded our efforts.

But what we learned from conversation with high achievers is that challenging our assumptions, objectives, at times even our goals, may sometimes push us further than we thought possible. Ask David Chang, who never imagined that sweetbreads and duck sausage rice cakes with kohlrabi and mint would find their way beside his humble noodle dishes — and make him a star.