Jethro Jones: Welcome to transformative principle episode 240 today.
I'm just going to talk a little bit about my first few days of school.
Actually, I've only had two days of school, so I'm just going to talk about
those and then tell you what we're going to talk about on our third day of school.
So
Jethro Jones: if you go back and you remember episode 229 and 230 of this
podcast, transformative principle, you.
Remember Amy MacDonald talking about flight clubs and how is she builds webs of
support and connectedness with students.
And it is really cool.
Anyway, go back and listen to those if you have not
yet,
Jethro Jones: because it's really neat.
And we had her and her team come up here to Fairbanks and
do that with our students.
And let me tell you, it was amazing.
I enjoyed it so much because we got an opportunity to talk with the kids
about what they thought was important.
We spent the whole first day of building connections, teaching
them about webs of support.
And it was really, really great.
Our second day, we spent all focused on expectations, beating building
team spirit, school, spirit, and making sure kids knew what we
expected of them about school.
Um, our new assistant principal of Carla Marquand is fantastic and, uh,
brought a pep rally type energy to our school, which, um, I have learned
is definitely an area where I'm weak.
I definitely, I used to think that I was good at that stuff,
but now I realize that I'm not.
So it was really good to have her there and be able to bring that in as well.
So, um, Really great.
First couple of days, and the rest of this podcast, I'm going to share
with you a, uh, a video that I made for the students to, um, talk about
synergy, which is a new thing that we're doing this year, which is like our
personalized learning journey on steroids.
So I'm really excited about it.
I think that it's going to be great.
And I think our kids are just.
Love it.
So, um, some of them are going to hate it, but that's just, that's how it goes.
Right.
So we're doing it to give kids opportunities, to do cool things, to
not have the restraints of being in a content area, classroom over them.
So I'm really looking forward to it.
I think it's going to be fantastic and they're going to love it.
So, um, I'd love to hear your feedback and thoughts.
Um, you can reach out to me on Twitter at jets or Jones, or you can, uh, send me an
email jethro@paperlessprinciple.com or you can always give me a call 8 0 1 7 Jethro.
Love to chat with you.
If you have thoughts or ideas of how we can do this.
Or if you're listening and you want to do something with our synergy
group, that would be awesome too.
Even if you're far away, we'd love to have your voice in the conversation.
Thanks so much.
And here's my little recording for the students.
Well, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to day three at town on middle school.
I know it's already late in the day, but I am just.
Excited for what we're going to talk about.
But first I want to recap where we've been, first of all, on the first day
of school, we talked about connections and building webs of support.
This is so important for you as young adults to start learning who
you can rely on and how to build those webs of support to help you
become the person that you can be.
There's a man named Jim Rohn, who has a quote that says you are the average of the
five people you spend the most time on.
Now that is really important, especially in middle school, because I want
you to spend your time with people who are doing amazing things and
helping you be the best that you can.
On day two, we talked about expectations.
We did a lot of team building and we did a ton for our school spirit.
That was an awesome day.
I loved every minute with you guys, and I am super excited for what we're
going to do together this year, today.
So far, we've been talking about technology.
And you know what?
You still have not started meeting with your regular classroom teachers yet.
You've been meeting with teachers who have been here supporting you, and you're
likely going to have them as a teacher, but nobody's been to first period yet.
Why do you think we're doing that?
We're going to talk about synergy here in just a minute, but first, why are
we starting school so different from how you've always started before?
Go ahead, talk together and come up with some ideas of why you think that is.
Okay.
Come on back together.
I'll tell you why.
I think we did it so differently.
We do school differently because we are trying really hard to help
you know, that you are geniuses and you can change the world.
And in order to do that, you need a different kind of.
In order to do that, you need someone to give you permission
to do things differently from the very beginning of school.
And that's exactly what we're trying to do.
So let's talk about synergy.
What is synergy?
Synergy is your chance to change the world with support from your school?
Another way to phrase it is that as student driven projects, that
help you learn without limitations.
So everyday you come to school and you do a bunch of stuff.
You can learn in a silo, language arts here, math here, science over
here, what we want synergy to be as an opportunity for you to learn a whole
bunch of different things that may have nothing to do with each other, but
not be in a silo because you're going to learn them together as a group.
Now here's, what's amazing is you have a chance to change the world.
Let's talk about somebody who did just that just a few short months
ago, five students from Downey high school in Downey, California,
decided that they were going to be called the Downing space innovators.
They participated in an event called the Conrad channel.
Or their goal was to change the world with something relating
to space and space travel.
So what they did is they said, you know, when astronauts go up
into space, their muscles get weak because there's no gravity.
So they designed a suit that the astronaut will wear that has bungee cords on it.
That can be adjusted.
And those bungee cords make it so that the astronaut, every time they
move their bodies, they have an opportunity to have tension on their
muscles, which makes it so that they, their muscles don't atrophy as much.
How crazy is that?
Five teenagers came up with that.
Where was NASA?
Where was space X?
They came up with that themselves.
They created the product, they made it.
I think that's amazing, but you know what?
Maybe you don't care about space.
That's okay.
Maybe you care about widows.
Maybe you care about old women who can't get out and shovel their driveway and
you want to change their world and you want to start a group that goes around
and shovel snow for those old ladies.
Every Tuesday and Thursday, when you're at school and you take your friends
and you go out and you shovel their driveways and you make sure that all
of them have a clear path for them to get in and out of their home.
Maybe that's what you care about.
Maybe you care about something totally different.
What you're going to have an opportunity to do is you're going
to have an opportunity to do that thing that changes the world that
makes our community, our world.
You're going to spend two hours, twice a week doing that here at our school.
Now I know a lot of your parents and a lot of teachers are going to be wondering
what is happening during this time?
What are kids actually learning?
How are they meeting the standards?
How are they learning?
What the state says?
We need to learn all that stuff is important.
And we definitely want to continue learning that.
But we also know that you learn differently when you're focused
on doing something to improve the world for someone else.
And so you're going to learn all those things.
As you're learning about different ways of doing things,
you're going to be researching.
You're going to be writing down your ideas.
You're going to be brainstorming.
You're going to be trying to persuade others.
Why your idea matters.
And this is what's important.
You can learn a lot through that process.
Some of you are going to do really amazing things and it's going to
be awesome and others, well, you're going to try something really amazing,
and it's just not going to work.
I do want to share a success story with you from our very own school
last year, because it was amazing.
So we had a bunch of girls get together and say they wanted to
create a town and our step team.
It was their idea.
They got our former assistant principal doctor or to work with
them and they went on to be on the news to be presenters at our board
meeting, to present at our perform at, uh, pep rallies and, uh, assemblies
and sporting events at halftime.
They did all kinds of great things because they had this idea that they wanted.
To make people feel excited about something.
They did an amazing job.
Are they perfect?
No, they weren't.
They had a lot of struggles, but you know what they did, they worked hard to
be their very best and to do something, to make a lasting impact on our school.
And they certainly did that.
They changed their own lives.
And made themselves better in the process.
They learned way more through that opportunity than we could have ever gotten
them to learn through our textbooks.
And so textbook learning has a place, but it's not everything.
And so we want to expand your horizons and help you learn new and
different things that you're just not going to get from a textbook.
So by August 30th, you have three things that you need to do.
Number one, You can decide what it is that you're going to do.
Number two, you need to decide who you're doing that work with.
Number three, you need to identify the adult that is sponsoring you and get their
permission and their support in your idea.
You've only got a few days, so between now and then you need to be talking about this
as much as you can coming up with an idea of what are you going to do to change the.
Your teachers have a list that we brainstormed together to give
you an idea, a starting point.
We don't want this to be the end point.
We want this to be the beginning of your ideas of how you
can make the world better.
It's just the beginning.
It's not the be-all and end-all, and we want you to work hard to
come up with something amazing.
We're giving you this opportunity because we trust you and we
respect that you can do it.
That's the honest truth.
Your ready to make an impact on the world.
That's why you're here at Tana this year.
And this year we are going to soar together.
So in summary, you have three things to do, figure out what you're going to do to
change the world who you're going to do it with and identify an adult sponsor at our
school to help you through that process.
It's not going to be easy, but it is going to be awesome.
And I'm so excited to see what you create.