GAETI Day 9

Today was a breakthrough in understanding what 21st Century Skills are! Having it explained as soft skills-those important behaviors we "should" learn at home such as etiquette, ethics, social skills, etc. and hard skills-the content related and technical skills is SO much easier to grasp! It is difficult to teach those soft skills because teaching the whole child has, unfortunately, fallen on the classroom teacher. We can no longer assume that children should know certain skills. The way we interact with our students IS a teaching tool. Another speaker today came from the Dept. of Highway Safety, De'Marco Fomby. He was instrumental in telling us how some of the teens think about drugs and alcohol. This is a subject that I touch on in my class, but I can build on this by helping the health teacher at my school by translating some of the posters and info into Spanish. That will be great practice and maybe making a video in the target language to help involve as many students as possible. Good communication is the key. If colleges see a disconnect, they need to talk to the high schools and then we can produce well rounded students!