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Showing posts from June, 2014

Bottom-Up #Innovation Needed to Strengthen #Motherhood & #Family

updated 2/7/16 I  consider how incredibly fortunate I am to have had the opportunities that I have been given. I stand on the shoulders of others.  My own family life was not perfect, but I had both parents home, and the strong support of extended family. This post is about what 'mother' means to me, and it is also a social commentary in how I see the role of the 'mother' under constant bombardment in America today.  My mother has been a selfless, sacrificing woman who has gone beyond the point of exhaustion, wit, and strength to see that my three sisters and I succeed. Everyone who knows my mother know about  her connection to her children. We constantly seek to talk with her on an almost daily basis and she counsels us. She does not call us with counsel to give, but we seek her out. ..It is also because her internet phone system automatically answers her  calls putting the caller on loud speaker by error.   Her children seek her out because of...

Sparking an #ExecutiveFunctionSkills Fire: The #Entrepreneur Mindset

With the advent of common, across the board student performance standards aimed at competitively meeting international standards, the need for parents to shore up and instill an entrepreneurial mindset in their kids becomes a great priority. Not doing so is a disservice to them, your family, and our country. This action-oriented mindset parallels in striking ways with the development of executive function skills, and it is part of my educational policy to lead a transition from using one's EF skills effectively across different settings and ages.  That said, if executive function skills development is a foundation then the entrepreneurial action-mindset and framework is the context in which we see a performance of the skills. For your use, I have included a working list of almost three dozen executive function skills. This word bank of skills is a fast way to come up to speed with a growing knack for coming up with activities that include a great number of these skills, or activiti...

Trojan Horse method of Engaging Disenchanted Students

The use of a back-door approach to 'jimmy' your child's mindset can be used to circumvent a lack of motivation and engagement. Children and young adults with attentional deficits or executive function skill deficits find it troublesome to focus on that which they find cumbersome, and with the manifestation of the learning environment in U.S. Public schools, the top-down instructional format is exactly like trying to fit everyone into a square hole.  Hence, many students hit grade performance obstacles, and experience feelings of frustration, anxiety, and even anger. Their parents look to help and remedy the situation: they sit down to do home work with their children, they help them stay on the study path, and hopefully, look to advocate for their child in the school. If you are looking for another pathway, then here is one. I argue that pre-teens and adolescents are grossly under-challenged by their public schools, aside from being treated mostly like cattle. The public sc...