The 7 Things

After reading "Rigor Redefined" by Tony Wagner, many thoughts came to my mind. When Wagner states that there are seven skills our students need to master to thrive in this world, I thought to myself, "Really? Only seven? Life seems so much more complicated then to only have seven skills." However, as I read through the list of these skills, it appeared to me that he is absolutely right. Even though life and careers are extremely complicated, the solutions don't have to be.

When he mentioned "Yesterday's answers won't solve today's problems." It really made me think. My generation is going to have problems that we haven't even heard of today, so we won't have that guidance to help us through these problems. We will have to think for ourselves what to do. Are our schools teaching us the skills we need in order to do that? I think that they are. Even though there is always room for improvement, I think our schools, Arapahoe in particular, are doing what they need to do in order to prepare us for what's ahead.

Collaboration and leadership in my opinion is one of the most important skills we can have. Along with that I think goes agility and adaptability. When we are working with others, it is so important to be able to collaborate peacefully with the people we are working with. We also need to be able to keep others needs and ideas in mind as well as our own.

When he says that the person needs to have effective oral and written communicational skills, this made me think back to much of our earlier conversations this year. Could the grammar, punctuation, and spelling mistakes that a lot of people (especially the younger generation) make have anything to do with our current forms of communication. I think it does. Texting and emailing affects us more then we think it does. We abbreviate and say things without even realizing. When we text its easier to type things like u, luv, cuz, etc... I could go on forever with text talk, but we don't realize is that text talk is becoming part of our regular talk. This is affecting our ability to speak and write, and could potentially change the standards of what is good. As our teachers develope our ability to think for ourselves, are these standards changing along with our lessons, our technology, our education, and the rest of our world?