CHOICES Champion

CHOICES NEWS:

The May 18, 2009 issue of New Yorker Magazine included a fascinating article by Jonah Lehrer about self-control in children and teens. Based on initial experimentation by Stanford University Professor Walter Mischel in the late nineteen sixties, and further researched by others in the years since, this article suggests that children and teens who master the skill of self-control tend to do better in life as adults. Does this sound familiar to you as a CHOICES Presenter? If not, review the discussion on Self-Discipline in your Presenter Guide, and take a look at your CHOICES Key Ring! Then, hit the link below to read the full six-page article. We found the following excerpt from the bottom of page five particularly interesting in light of the CHOICES message:

Angela Lee Duckworth, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, is leading the program. She first grew interested in the subject after working as a high-school math teacher. “For the most part, it was an incredibly frustrating experience,” she says. "I gradually became convinced that trying to teach a teen-ager algebra when they don’t have self-control is a pretty futile exercise.” And so, at the age of thirty-two, Duckworth decided to become a psychologist. One of her main research projects looked at the relationship between self-control and grade-point average. She found that the ability to delay gratification—eighth graders were given a choice between a dollar right away or two dollars the following week—was a far better predictor of academic performance than I.Q. She said that her study shows that “intelligence is really important, but it’s still not as important as self-control."

Read the article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/18/090518fa_fact_lehrer

CHOICES MANAGEMENT TIP OF THE MONTH

Stay on Top of Entering Student and Staff Survey Forms

One way to stay ahead of year-end reporting activities to CHOICES and your community stakeholders is to enter your CHOICES Student and Staff Surveys for each school right after you serve that school. That way you won’t have too many surveys to enter at the end of the school year, and instead can analyze, share and celebrate the great results from your data…not to mention using it to help secure presenters, schools and funding for the following year. If you don’t have a set of the CHOICES Survey Compilation Template and instructions, contact your CHOICES representative today…and stay ahead of the survey data game!

CHOICES FIELD REPORT

Defense contractor Raytheon’s Terri Munson covers all the bases when she and her team take on the challenge of serving at-risk teens. Along with CHOICES Program Manager Vanessa Vera and members of the company’s Hispanic Organization for Leadership and Achievement (HOLA) and Raytheon Black Employees Network (RAYBEN), Raytheon is delivering CHOICES to about 500 teens this school year in Lawrence (MA) Public Schools. Of these teens, more than 125 who are considered severely at-risk then receive a third day during which Raytheon employees who come from similarly difficult backgrounds share their personal stories. The basic message they give is that education is the way out of poverty.

For example, one of the presenters shared that when he was in high school he was told by a teacher that he was “a dumb Mexican and would end up working in the agriculture fields”…but, he ended up graduating from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) with a degree in Aerospace and is a System Design Engineer at Raytheon.

In addition, Terri brings eight high school students to Raytheon each week for a special version of their company’s Stand and Deliver mentoring program, called Fast Start. Finally, a couple of Raytheon CHOICES presenters are in the process of putting together a program called SOAR High for 22 more of the at-risk kids. After meeting the kids through CHOICES, they dedicated themselves to ensuring those 22 students would achieve success through a new mentoring program.

Here is what several teens had to say about their experience:

• “They made me want to continue school and not drop out.”
• “I learned to stay focused,to work, and try hard to achieve my goals.”
• “I learned that I shouldn't give up.”