Homecoming week: 100 years.....a Hundred Memories!

What a fantastic Homecoming week we just finished. In my 20 years at PHS I have never seen student and faculty school spirit so widely displayed! Thank you to everyone who made it possible! Thanks to the PHS 100 Year Anniversary Committee for all of your work! Thank you to the student council and sponsors Roger Thomas and Sarah Hill! Spirit week was awesome. Powder puff was a lot a fun and very sportsmanlike. The parade was fantastic! The dance was well attended and very well done! The class games were incredible! The lunch provided by the Paris Ministerial Association was enjoyed by both faculty and staff. Congratulations to the football team and head coach Mike Brouwer on their 42-21 victory over Newton! Congratulations to the senior class on your spirit week victory! Way to go teachers for winning the tug of war! Great job to the teachers in the Homecoming Shuffle skit....you gals were so funny! To see so many of our students and staff decked out in orange and black last friday was unbelievable! The spirit club was loud and boisterous at the game and made a huge difference in the outcome.....way to go Mrs. Bradfield! Class sponsors did a great job of guiding their classes through the week from float building to powderpuff to all the other extra duties you fulfilled during the week! The PHS Band did a great job at the game and during the parade! Hats off to Mr. Tripp and the PHS Band Parents. Thank you to the faculty for all that you do everyday to make our students' experience at PHS the best it can be! And finally, thank you to the City of Paris for supporting your students and your school!

Curriculum Committee--September 22, 2008

One Year......100 posts

September 17th marks the one year anniversary of the phsprincipalblog. Big whoop most of you would say! Well, anyway, this blog has allowed me to "think aloud" if you will. I have managed to rekindle my passion in education....(bet you can't figure it out!) Although my blog has concentrated on changing high school and integrating technology, being part of the blogging world in education has also made me aware of the other issues that need attention in our profession of student preparation. Writing here has introduced me to a lot of great educators who also blog their ideas about education. My personal learning network (the people I read on the net) has made my positions on, and thinking about education evolve so much in the past year. Here is to another year of blogging, learning and self discovery!

Employer Expectations IV

Hard Skills most desired by today's employers:

SEVENTH GRADE Reading Level
Basic ARITHMETIC Skills (+ - * /)
Decimals, Fractions, and Percents
Executive Writing / Report Writing Skills
Proofreading / Error-Checking
Oral Presentation and Briefing Skills

Employer Expectations III

The following are what American Business and Industry have called the universal failures of employee preparation programs both at the public secondary level and at the post secondary level: We have failed to produce workers that have formal/PROPER SPEECH AND VOCABULARY; today's candidates for jobs fail to have proper HYGIENE and seem not to care about their APPEARANCE.; today's new workers do not have a positive COMPORTMENT and do not realize that BEHAVIOR matters; our young workers fail to be PUNCTUAL and lack AMBITION; workers coming through the doors looking for employment do not have LEADERSHIP SKILLS and do not have the ability to WORK IN TEAMS.

Before we get defensive, we must analyze our product. Not only do we need to look at the hard skills our students need to have to compete for a job in today's economy, we must look at the attitudes and etiquette that are necessary to compete for gainful employment. Are there things we need to do to restructure in public education so our students learn and see the importance of above mentioned "failures" of today's employee training programs? If our product is not selling, we better make changes or we will be out of business! We know our students are very capable of demonstrating what employers say they lack. They do need to see it modeled everyday by those that are influential in their lives. They need to know that everyday these things matter! We need to do more to get them ready for the work environment they will have to survive in after they finish school. The habits they build here will either serve them well or will be hard to break in the future. What do you think?

Employer expectations part II (revision I)

Business managers from Fortune 500 companies suggest that today's high school and college students need to have different experiences to prepare them for work. I am going to add comments to these suggestions over the next couple of days. I would like readers to chime in with their thoughts about what our students need to be required to do to get ready for life after high school. Below are some of the suggestions business managers have for schools and their students: (additional comments will be in red) FEEL FREE TO COMMENT WITH YOUR THOUGHTS! Ok, here I go having a discussion with myself again.........

• Use Teams to Complete Complex Projects Use multitask, differentiated projects for groups where students have to learn to depend on one another! Simply creating a Powerpoint for presentation is not a multitask project!


• Enforce Real-World Rules What do Real-World Rules mean to you? To me, real competition produces winners and losers and motivation to do your best. Educators need to give students the opportunities to work in these conditions. We need to quit training our students to do high school.....We need to train them for what comes after it!


• Require Precise Communication


• No “Typos” Allowed OK this might be hypocritical (right proofreader?), but we need to require our students get spelling and punctuation correct! How many times do we stop paying attention to what someone has written or is saying because of improper grammar or spelling mistakes?


• Regular Team Member Reports


• Do Complex Projects for Other Teachers


• Build Business Relationships
  

A new series.....Employer Expectations

I am going to start another of my wildly popular series today. (I have had at least one comment on one of my earlier series....that makes them popular right?) Every business idea that was ever worth anything started with the concept for an end product. Then a plan was formulated to create and market said product and then reap the rewards.....well, maybe it is not quite that simple, but for my argument it will suffice. Public schools are no different. We produce a product. The biggest problem, in my humble opinion, is that we do not do a good job of doing market research to improve or change our product. The market forces that affect us really has not forced us to do so.....but that is a whole other story. Our schools were designed to produce students with a general all around information/knowledge and skill bases. Today's world is remarkably different than the one in which our school systems were designed! Information changes and grows geometrically before we can adjust our curriculum. Skills that only the highly professional careers needed years ago are now expected in almost every field. I now must ask an important question....what is our product? Does what we produce need to change? Are we training the workers and college students of tomorrow or are we just teaching our students how to do high school? I think we must analyze what the market expects then look at what we are producing and see if it matches. Tomorrow, I will blog about some of the expectations today's business world looks for from prospective employees.

For some background reading on the topic follow this link