Making the transition of graduating high school to starting college can be overwhelming and scary and full of long to-dos. Where do you turn for help?!
Please keep in mind that this review is not sponsored or endorsed in any way, these are all my own thoughts and opinions.
Overall: This is a great parenting book! I feel like Suzy and I are old friends in another life, we are so similar! So that did sway my opinion in ways. However, I loved that she began the book with a preface that she didn’t really like parenting books, so she wrote one of her own! And did it beautifully by the way. The overall feel of her book is that parenting is hard and comes with a lot of challenges, but these challenges are manageable and she has tips to share to get us all through them.
Things that particularly stood out to me:
*The pictures she includes of her family and kids, which make the whole book feel more relatable. It’s not as much a “preachy” book full of “I-know-more-than-you” type of wording, it’s full of her real-life experiences and how she managed as a mom.
*She advertises it as an “activity” book as well because she includes 50+ activities to do with kids. I was worried this wouldn’t be applicable or helpful for me because I could just follow her Instagram account. Or I didn’t want to read one big list of activities and be overwhelmed by different things to do with my kids, making it not actually helpful.
However, this wasn’t the case! They are strategically placed throughout the book where they made sense and lined out exactly what you need, how to do it, and even a picture to show the setup! For example, after a whole chapter on taby’s (not quite a baby anymore, not quite a toddler yet), she finished the chapter with a section of taby activities.
They aren’t activities you will be doing right at that moment, obviously. But it does make it easier to flip through quickly and pull up an activity to do with your kids, and they are especially easy to find since there are pictures of where the activities are!
*There is a whole chapter on tantrums that completely changed the dynamic of our home. It was so good!
*A lot of her ideas were just little steps to get you through parenting. There wasn’t anything huge you needed to understand or accomplish, she just teaches simple ideas like, “teach your child to use a code word when they are struggling to avoid tantrums.”
As far as cons go, I honestly could not find any. It is organized well, the activities are doable as a parent, and the whole book feels very relatable. The only minuscule thing I might be able to think of is that it’s very directed at parenting young kids, and won’t help as in-depth with parenting pre-teens/teenagers. However, it does really niche down the book to make it very applicable instead of having a broader perspective.
Susie Allison wrote a great book, one I would recommend to any parent in the early stages of parenting. I have gifted this book to many friends that all agree, it is a great parenting book!
The election is *almost* over. I don’t think any of us were ready for election week instead of election day, but it’s 2020, what else can you expect?
Have you been talking to your students about the election? Explain electoral votes? Show them the red and blue maps across the country? Talk about what policies are and what each candidate is promising?
What better way to teach about a big, historical event with some picture books! Here are a few of my favorite.
Did you know that every year our company, Honors Graduation, gives away $50,000 in scholarship money to graduating high school seniors to use towards college tuition? They are able to fund this by cord sales each year.
Also, if you’re looking for some uplifting stories to read about, check out our past scholarship winners. You can see work from when this scholarship originally started up until this year’s 2020 winners. From providing masks to low income students, to a safe platform for special needs students to connect online, these high school seniors have set the bar high! It is an honor that we can help them in a way to continue their education into college and watch as they continue to do more for our communities by building a better future.
How have you personally designed a better future for your community? Is there a high school senior you can share this scholarship with?
This is part of a series using enneagram in education. For more information on why enneagram in education, refer to this post. To read about other enneagram types in education, you can see those here.
Enneagram type 6, the loyalist, or the questioning friend.
A few words to describe this type:
Controlling.
Doubtful.
Safety Conscious.
Perceptive.
Questioning.
Loyal.
Let’s pull this into a classroom setting. If you’re an enneagram type six, you may walk into a new classroom with a new teacher or professor and be skeptical of what they are teaching or what their qualifications are. You may feel the same about peers. Anxiety can fill your thoughts as you wonder if your ideas and questions will be accepted or dismissed in this environment, being open about these are important to you. The more structured and organized the classroom and classwork is, the better you do.
How to get the most out of your education as a type six.
Build relationships with your teachers and peers so you can excel in your studies. Relationships are important to you.
Ask questions! Speak your mind. Utilize office hours or study hall time if you feel your needs are not being met and your questions are not being answered.
Give yourself time to observe different situations.
Find safety in yourself and your environment so that you can be confident in your school work.
“[Sixes] Start investing their time and energy into whatever they believe will be safe and stable. Organizing and structuring, they look to alliances and authorities for security and continuity. Constantly vigilant, anticipating problems.
– Enneagram Institute
Type 6’s go to type 9 in growth and type 3 in stress.
Are you a type 6? What is important for you to have a successful learning environment?
In our current neighborhood where we reside, I’ve been wrestling with a situation concerning my daughter’s school she will be attending for kindergarten in 2-3 years (more on wrestling thoughts of starting kinder at different ages coming later). Here is my dilemma. The school we are zoned for and supposed to attend (let’s call this School A) is in a lower-income neighborhood, and statistics show that lower-income neighborhoods are a product of lower college attendance, lower test scores, and lower graduation rates.
There is a school a half-mile (still walking distance!) from our home (let’s call this School B) that is in a higher-income area. Higher-income school= higher graduation rates, test scores, and college attendance. While each experience differs for each child, these are still the facts when it comes to placing your child in a school in low vs high-income neighborhoods.
HOWEVER, I feel it is important to point out that low-income schools are still a product of good education when it comes to diversity, inclusion, and tolerance. Given the diversity of these neighborhoods, the children are provided a good education of being a socially aware and contributing member of society, something higher-income schools can lack.
So that leaves me with a decision of sending my child to our neighborhood elementary school in a low-income area, two blocks from our home. Or driving or walking her a half-mile to the school across the highway in a higher-income area. I feel like I am choosing between:
Academics and Social Diversity
And looking at the small picture, my worries seem so insignificant. I am anxious about a small decision with my one child going into kindergarten. If it doesn’t seem like a good fit at the end of the year, switch schools. Even mid-year! Switch schools! (all of these decisions are supported by our local school district by the way, which may not be the case everywhere.) So why am I so concerned?
Because this isn’t just about my daughter going to kindergarten. It’s about the school system as a whole. Why are parents forced to choose between teaching their children academics or teaching them social justice? Why aren’t the academics in a low-income school the same as a high-income school? Why is the diversity in a high-income school non-existent while it’s inevitable in a low-income school?
The purpose of school is to learn academics, become educated, and use this knowledge in the real world as a professional in your field of choice someday, correct? If that’s the case, School B should be my choice.
But does getting this far in life have any impact if you don’t have the empathy, tolerance, and inclusion of everyone you come in contact with? In a perfect world, it shouldn’t get you far at all. School A should be my choice.
If I send my kids to School B, am I just enabling the broken school system that already exists by not giving my time and resources to School A when they need it more?
If I send my kids to School A, am I compromising their academic career because I want them to know, love, and understand social justice?
There is absolutely no right answer because our school system is broken. It should be “equal education for all” but it’s not. It has decades and decades of work before it can even get to this point, my children will not even witness the day equal education exists.
I love this quote from Lincoln Quillian on his academic research on poor neighborhoods and the impact they have on overall life. The whole study is a great read if you want more insight into this subject.
“Improvements in school quality, including no excuses charter schools, can close achievement gaps for academic outcomes. However, outcomes that are more determined by peer interactions are harder to solve with policy changes. We need to decide what we are trying to accomplish with schools. If the primary job of schools is academics, that it may be acceptable to focus on improving academic outcomes and closing achievement gaps, to the exclusion of improving other outcomes. However, if schools are framed as social institutions that build civic participation, tolerance, diversity, and teach students how to be contributing members of society as adults, then it is necessary to think more broadly about the implications of segregation.”
I just want to finish with these two last YouTube videos:
Educational Redlining- Sonja Santelises
How America’s Public School System Keeps Kids In Poverty- Kandice Sumner
And when it comes to my children’s education, what choice am I going to make on where they will attend school? We can chat again in 2-3 years when I’m forced to make a decision and I may have an answer for you. But until then, I will forever wrestle with the educational inequality of our nation.
Today’s Feature Friday post is a little different. We will be interviewing our past scholarship winner, Austin Fitzgerald. Austin won our scholarship in 2018 when she put together the Mindstrings Violin tutoring program. You can see her original video she submitted here.
Austin has been at the University of Chicago for two years now. She has kept in contact with MindStrings and has been working on a way to become qualified for the program to accept donations.
Since then, she has also become involved with a program on her campus called South Side Free Music Program. Her role is a violin teacher offering free lessons to the youth on the south side of Chicago. She is using this resource to hopefully have MindStrings expand to Chicago where she is located, however, COVID-19 threw off her plan. While Zoom and other online video call platforms may be an option, the majority of the students she would teach do not have this accessibility in their homes. This is something she is still working on.
Another way Austin has found to serve with her music ability while at school is by playing the violin to cancer patients at UChicago’s hospital. This is part of her MindStrings outreach program and she is working on recruiting others to do this with her.
Austin is double majoring in Pre-Medical and Anthropology with a biology minor, she has been busy in her studying! She is the current Co-President of the African and Caribbean Student Association at the University of Chicago. On top of this, she has been exploring her interests in childhood development and social mobility through her job as a research assistant at the Thirty Million Words Center for Early Learning + Public Health. Way to go Austin!
We are extremely proud of Austin and all of her accomplishments at college, especially during this difficult time where the pandemic has halted some of her plans.
If you would like to learn more about our scholarship and see how you can apply, check out our scholarship webpage.
