While we are in the middle of the Michael Hinojosa job application for superintendent in Las Vegas, one thing is certain, most students in both Dallas and Las Vegas are not watching. What are students worried about? Their interests go to the millions of issues created by social networks and advertising media that occupy the evenings and weekends of our children: video games, movies, purchases, passing time with friends and family, and occasionally some study.
Our goal as teachers is to tilt those millions of interests so that school work and study gain in popularity. Without a more realistic vision of their futures by our students, that will never happen.
It is not a gamble to spend more energy and time focusing our students onto their own lives 10 years into the future. Until that future vision is more real, until students can easily and credibly talk about it by the time they are finishing middle school, cities like Dallas and Las Vegas will both continue to have only about half of their students graduating high school within 4 years.
Hopefully somewhere, someday, a superintendent will cut these dropout rates in half within 6 years. It will only be done using some of the methods from the School Archive Project.
