Relax. No, really.

(Victor Nuno/Flickr)

Have you heard the phrase “green collar jobs”?

I hadn’t, until today. But if the governor of Pennsylvania is thinking about trying to orient his state’s economy to take advantage of the coming opportunities in green collar jobs (I heard it on NPR’s On the Media), I’m thinking I’d better start learning!

Here are some of what I’ll be reading as I try to get up to speed:

• Green Collar Jobs, by By Raquel Pinderhughes at Urban Habitat

• Douglas MacMillan’s article in the January 10th issue of Business Week on “Switching to Green Collar Jobs“

• Kevin Doyle’s guest column over at the GristMill

Got any suggestions for further reading? My sense is that these are all pretty positive views… any interesting counterpoints out there?

Some colleges that might be worth checking out if folks are thinking along these lines are over here.

Photo courtesy of Qwirksilver, aka Kristine,
via a CreativeCommons license.

What courses should one take in high school, and why?

When speaking with academically focused rising juniors and seniors about course selection, I feel that I have to share with them the perspective that many years of working on “the other side of the desk” has given me. Highly selective colleges will look for them to have completed four years of each of the five academic “solids.” (English, science, math, history, and language.) These same colleges may place a greater value on AP Calculus than on AP Statistics. On balance, students applying in very selective circumstances may stand a better chance if they take Physics as a senior than that fourth year of Ceramics which meets during the same class period.

Many of the admissions offices at selective colleges in the US are overrun with applications. Many if not most of those applications come from students who are absolutely qualified to do the work. So it’s understandable when colleges express their desire to matriculate a class full of students who have shown a willingness to take on challenge and a desire to have a positive impact on their communities.

What’s problematic is the rush to a “one schedule fits all” mindset. Colleges see AP Calculus as being a more challenging course than AP Statistics, and so students are encouraged to take the former, even when the latter might be a better fit for their current interests or long-term goals. Students join clubs they have no real interest in because they’ve been told that colleges care about that.

What can we can do, in high schools, to move our schools beyond the role of sorting hat? What kinds of outcomes can we aspire to, beyond a list of college matriculations that seem impressive to an outsider who knows nothing about the individual students involved?

What class are you most grateful for having taken in high school?

Me? I fought the powers that be and took typing. Had a hunch that this computer stuff was going to mean something to me.

admissions college curriculum course+selection Advanced+Placement

These from a page in the Spring Branch School District’s employee handbook

Teachers who blog are encouraged to publish information including, but not limited to:
• Weekly reports on what will be taught during the upcoming week, how it will be taught and why.
• Background information on topics currently being taught in the classroom, creating a context for students and for parents.
• Homework assignments.
• Descriptions of projects, including procedures, expectations, suggested parent involvement, assessment rubrics and links to last year’s projects.
• Achievements of students in the class, students in other classes, and other teachers, school support and administrative staff.
• Pictures may be inserted into your blog. Make certain that the image is appropriate for use in a school document and copyright laws are followed. Photos of students MUST be accompanied by a signed release form provided by the district. This signed form should be kept on file with the teacher. Under no circumstances should identifying names or other personal information of any kind accompany the photos.

District Teacher/Employee bloggers will not use their blogs to:
• Conduct or promote outside business activities.
• Promote or advertise for commercial products unrelated or related to instruction.
• Defame or cause defamation of the character of any individual, organization or institution.
• Divulge any personal information about students, or jeopardize their safety in any other way.
• Link to their own personal blogs from their school blog, or vice versa.

Hmmm…

As one of a handful of known adult bloggers on my K12 campus, I’ve been asked by my Upper School Principal to join a few other 2.0-savvy members of the staff in “seeding a conversation” about the challenges of managing one’s online identity as an educator.

I’ve found some terrific resources on acceptable use policies, but it seems that we’ve spent more time dictating to students than we have figuring out what’s acceptable adult behavior.

As the benefits of participating in social networks become increasingly obvious, so too do the challenges of making sure we’re not opening ourselves up to censure. Just ask Jabiz Raisdana, who lost his job when he crossed a line he was trying not to.

What is an appropriate “rule of thumb” when posting in a non-school-affiliated space that is nonetheless open to the public? I have moved from imagining posts appearing on the front page of the New York Times (an old dean’s recommendation) to imagining posts taped to my office door the next morning. If that makes me uncomfortable, I don’t post.

I also like Pamela Livingston’s idea of LARK.

Your thoughts? I hearby nominate you, dear reader, to join my personal learning network.

Update: Here are my notes for the meeting, complete with excerpts from the comments below and a Diigo list of some items that I found helpful. Thanks so much to everyone who pitched in!

This has less to do with the college search process than most of my posts here, but it’s a question I get asked with some regularity, so I thought it might be helpful to try to “think out loud” about it. When I worked in college admissions, alumni who were about to move halfway across the country would occasionally call and say, “I’m moving to Suchandsuch City; what school should I send my student to?”

Many people won’t have any real choice in the matter. But if you do, here is the most current version of my answer to that question:

1) Before you start considering schools, consider your student. How has his/her experience with the current school been? To what would you attribute his/her success or struggles? And think about how much of a “vote” in the final decision your student is going to have. If you’re going to be the one making the decision, make that clear from the outset. If the process is going to be more collaborative, spend some time thinking about what that will look and feel like. How you choose this school might end up serving as a sneak preview for how you’ll go about choosing the NEXT school; intentionality and extra listening will go a long way.

2) Gather information.
Once you’ve figured out how the decision is going to get made and what the school options are, start gathering data. Spend time on each school’s website. Ask each school for a copy of their profile, which is a document that typically gets mailed out with every transcript sent to colleges. This is one iteration of that school’s public persona, and it can sometimes be telling. Some of the things to look for are 1) courses offered, 2) curriculum structure, 3) makeup of the student body, 4) average class size, 5) grading/ranking policies 6) range and diversity of college matriculations, and 7) counselor : student ratio. (Of course I think that last one is important!)

3) Assess for leadership.
The more time I spend in schools, the more convinced I am of the importance of leadership. The best folks to assess this are those inside the building, so put some time and energy into figuring out how to get that perspective. Schools with clumsy and/or non-existent leadership can quickly devolve into disaster zones.

That might do it. Depending on how many options you have, just those three steps might get you there. If you’re faced with the problem of too many great schools to choose from, then you can do a little more winnowing along these lines:

4) Require flagrant creativity.
Are students in the schools you’re looking at being encouraged to think of themselves as artists? Do students take art and music classes all the way through to graduation?

4) Demand cutting-edge tech-savvy.
Technology is transforming the way some of the best teachers think about their work. It is also leaving a lot of teachers in the dust. Find out if teachers in the schools you’re considering are leading the way or being dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Ask about Moodle, blogs, podcasts, wiki’s, and which conferences teachers have attended or presented at in the last few years. Skeptical about how much this tech stuff really matters? See this video or this recent blog post describing a job search.

We all need an occasional reminder of the importance of taking responsibility, right? Here’s one of my favorites:

Q: My son has an interview at Out of State School next week, and I’m wondering what to tell him in terms of his attire. Does he need to wear a jacket and tie?

A: The short answer is no, I think. I usually tell students to keep a few things in mind when preparing for a campus-based interview:

1) The person interviewing you is likely to be someone who spends a fair amount of time looking at college students. It may not take all that much to make a positive first impression!

2) One of the most important goals of an interview from the interviewee’s perspective is comfort. The more comfortable you are, the more likely the interview is to go smoothly. If your son has previously only worn a tie and jacket maybe twice a year, donning those clothes for a college interview might give him cause to feel ill-at-ease during the interview.

3) By the same token, students should work to make sure that their choice of interview outfit evokes a spirit of “I really care about this school.” Students should wear something that would pass the “good impression” test… imagine that you’re going to visit an elderly and sharp-eyed aunt for the first time in several years. This should translate to no jeans, no untucked shirts or unbelted pants, no flip-flops (I don’t care how “cute” they are, girls!), no baseball caps, no plunging necklines or revealing shorts, and nothing overtly disheveled or wrinkled.

I understand that there are students out there who are so devoted to their sense of personal style that any suggestion of modifying their appearance for an interview is met with a combination of horror and outrage. To these students I say, “Make whatever choices you need to make, but be sure that they are ones that you’ll be able to look back on without a sense of regret.”

Q: I am very close to my grandson, and now that he’s a junior in high school, I want to help him with his college search, but I don’t really know where to start. What should I do?

A: It can be a challenge for a loving grandparent or uncle or other extended family member to be truly involved in a young person’s college search process; the “team” is usually really the student, their immediate family, and whoever they’re working with in their school.

If I were an extended family member looking to be involved, I think I would first try to talk with the family about my desire to be involved, so that I could carve out some kind of helping niche for myself… grandma gets to take junior to college visits, grandma gets to proofread essays, grandma gets to research D II lacrosse programs, grandma gets to look for scholarships, grandma gets to pay for the student’s books, etc. etc. Establishing some agreed-upon guidelines and then keeping the lines of communication open amongst all the interested parties are important components of a successful search process.

Q: We’ve started the college visiting process and while visiting a college this past weekend the admissions person told us that the school only looks at the highest individual score for SAT’s – meaning the highest verbal, highest math etc. I’m wondering how widespread this policy is.

A: The vast majority of colleges and universities operate under a “best of all sittings” policy when it comes to considering standardized test scores. This is done both because it gives candidates the opportunity to put their best foot forward, and because it helps the schools when it comes time to “brag” about their incoming class.

In fact only exception that I’m aware of currently is Penn State; PSU’s process looks at the best individual “sitting,” and does not “mix and match” test scores for candidates.

Q: I surfed around on the internet for anthropology departments at colleges across the country and came up with some information. However, we’ll need to narrow down the list, somehow, based upon someone’s expertise and/or inside information or contacts. Let me know if you have any ideas on how we might go about this.

A: I think that at the end of the day, you may be less in need of someone else’s expertise than you think. After all, even if Claire (a pseudonym) does decide to major in anthropology, there probably will be many other factors playing into her decisions about which schools to actually apply to. For example, she’ll want to think about how far from home she’s willing to study. If distance is not a factor, setting might be. Would she be comfortable in an urban environment? How about at a school that’s pretty far from any major population center? What kinds of students does she want to study alongside of? How important to Claire will the presence of a religious community be? What about racial diversity? Socio-economic diversity? Campus political climate? Opportunities for study abroad? What kinds of extracurricular interests might she be continuing with or starting for the first time at college? Does she want a school that has a fairly structured set of required courses in the first two years, or one with very few required courses? What about size? How big is too big? How small is too small? Does she want to go somewhere where the annual anthropology graduates number in the single digits? Or double? Does she think she might be going on to study anthropology at the graduate level? How big of a factor will financial aid be in her decision? These are all questions that she probably has no answers to now, but will gradually develop answers to as she moves through the search process. Each answer will help her winnow her list of schools down a bit more.

When the time comes, I recommend that students begin their searches with the hardest part, which is finding schools that the student can imagine happily attending (not “safeties” that they’d really rather not) where they are likely to be offered a space. Colleges hold Open Houses for the express purpose of giving students and families a chance to connect with admissions folks and faculty alike, and members of the anthropology department at any school she’s considering will probably be thrilled to go on and on about what they consider the special strengths of their department to be.

You can use the free College Board search engine to generate a list of schools that offer anthropology as a major. Claire’s mission, should she choose to accept it, is to spend some time surfing around these schools’ websites and getting a feel for what distinguishes one program from another. Let HER become an expert. I guarantee you that if she looks at 20 sites there will be some schools that drop right out of consideration… because of some factor that she’ll start to realize is important to her.