DAY 1:
Music’s Impact on Life, Society, and Culture
Directions:
- 1. Watch the YouTube videos at: https://goo.gl/1LB4rg
- a. As you watch, consider music’s impact on today’s society and your daily life. Consider your typical school day and typical weekend day. Also consider how music impacts the lives of others. Think about how music may impact people of different nationalities and cultures. What are some of the similarities between music in your life and music in other people’s? What the the differences?
- 2. Find a YouTube video that inspires you or is important to you.
- a. Make a note of that video’s URL.
- b. Write a few sentences why you chose the video to share.
- 3. Use the Google Form to complete the questions above.
- a. https://goo.gl/7H5SQt
Standards/Objectives:
- 1. HSAB.RE.1 Listen to, analyze, and describe music.
- 2. HSAB.RE.2 Respond to music and music performances
- 3. HSAB.CN.1 Understand relationships between music, other arts, other disciplines, varied contexts, and daily life.
OTHER INSTRUCTIONS:
* Please let Dr. Laux know if you have questions.
DAY 2:
Reflective Essay
- Read the two articles below “What Straight-A Students Get Wrong” and “Recent Graduates Lack Soft Skills, New Study Reports”
- Write a reflective essay on your thoughts about the two articles.
- The essay is to be no more than two pages but at least one page.
- Double space, 12 point font.
- What points of the articles do you agree with? Why?
- What points of the articles do you disagree with? Why?
- Think about “soft skills” and how they will impact your career and future.
- Submit your essay to the submissions page. You will get an email receipt of your submission.
What Straight-A Students Get Wrong
If you always succeed in school, you’re not setting yourself up for success in life.
By Adam Grant
A decade ago, at the end of my first semester teaching at Wharton, a student stopped by for office hours. He sat down and burst into tears. My mind started cycling through a list of events that could make a college junior cry: His girlfriend had dumped him; he had been accused of plagiarism. “I just got my first A-minus,” he said, his voice shaking.
Year after year, I watch in dismay as students obsess over getting straight A’s. Some sacrifice their health; a few have even tried to sue their school after falling short. All have joined the cult of perfectionism out of a conviction that top marks are a ticket to elite graduate schools and lucrative job offers.
I was one of them. I started college with the goal of graduating with a 4.0. It would be a reflection of my brainpower and willpower, revealing that I had the right stuff to succeed. But I was wrong.
The evidence is clear: Academic excellence is not a strong predictor of career excellence. Across industries, research shows that the correlation between grades and job performance is modest in the first year after college and trivial within a handful of years. For example, at Google, once employees are two or three years out of college, their grades have no bearing on their performance. (Of course, it must be said that if you got D’s, you probably didn’t end up at Google.)
Academic grades rarely assess qualities like creativity, leadership and teamwork skills, or social, emotional and political intelligence. Yes, straight-A students master cramming information and regurgitating it on exams. But career success is rarely about finding the right solution to a problem — it’s more about finding the right problem to solve.
In a classic 1962 study, a team of psychologists tracked down America’s most creative architects and compared them with their technically skilled but less original peers. One of the factors that distinguished the creative architects was a record of spiky grades. “In college our creative architects earned about a B average,” Donald MacKinnon wrote. “In work and courses which caught their interest they could turn in an A performance, but in courses that failed to strike their imagination, they were quite willing to do no work at all.” They paid attention to their curiosity and prioritized activities that they found intrinsically motivating — which ultimately served them well in their careers.
Getting straight A’s requires conformity. Having an influential career demands originality. In a study of students who graduated at the top of their class, the education researcher Karen Arnold found that although they usually had successful careers, they rarely reached the upper echelons. “Valedictorians aren’t likely to be the future’s visionaries,” Dr. Arnold explained. “They typically settle into the system instead of shaking it up.”
This might explain why Steve Jobs finished high school with a 2.65 G.P.A., J.K. Rowling graduated from the University of Exeter with roughly a C average, and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. got only one A in his four years at Morehouse.
If your goal is to graduate without a blemish on your transcript, you end up taking easier classes and staying within your comfort zone. If you’re willing to tolerate the occasional B, you can learn to program in Python while struggling to decipher “Finnegans Wake.” You gain experience coping with failures and setbacks, which builds resilience.
Straight-A students also miss out socially. More time studying in the library means less time to start lifelong friendships, join new clubs or volunteer. I know from experience. I didn’t meet my 4.0 goal; I graduated with a 3.78. (This is the first time I’ve shared my G.P.A. since applying to graduate school 16 years ago. Really, no one cares.) Looking back, I don’t wish my grades had been higher. If I could do it over again, I’d study less. The hours I wasted memorizing the inner workings of the eye would have been better spent trying out improv comedy and having more midnight conversations about the meaning of life.
So universities: Make it easier for students to take some intellectual risks. Graduate schools can be clear that they don’t care about the difference between a 3.7 and a 3.9. Colleges could just report letter grades without pluses and minuses, so that any G.P.A. above a 3.7 appears on transcripts as an A. It might also help to stop the madness of grade inflation, which creates an academic arms race that encourages too many students to strive for meaningless perfection. And why not let students wait until the end of the semester to declare a class pass-fail, instead of forcing them to decide in the first month?
Employers: Make it clear you value skills over straight A’s. Some recruiters are already on board: In a 2006 study of over 500 job postings, nearly 15 percent of recruiters actively selected against students with high G.P.A.s (perhaps questioning their priorities and life skills), while more than 40 percent put no weight on grades in initial screening.
Straight-A students: Recognize that underachieving in school can prepare you to overachieve in life. So maybe it’s time to apply your grit to a new goal — getting at least one B before you graduate.
From: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/08/opinion/college-gpa-career-success.html#commentsContainer
Recent Graduates Lack Soft Skills, New Study Reports
A recent study revealed that four in 10 corporations and almost half of academic institutions believe that recent graduates lack certain so-called “soft skills” needed in the workforce to be successful, including emotional intelligence, complex reasoning and negotiation and persuasion.
While hard skills are “easily measured,” soft skills “are more of the intangibles that are hard to access and measure,” according to Dr. Marcheta Evans, provost and vice president for academic affairs at Our Lady of the Lake University.
The just-released 2018 Bloomberg Next study sponsored by Workday – “Building Tomorrow’s Talent: Collaboration Can Close Emerging Skills Gap” – included responses from 200 senior-level individuals from both academia and business.
Employers are now more focused on interpersonal skills rather than GPA, according to the study. In response, some universities are releasing extracurricular transcripts that demonstrate a student’s individual skills in addition to grades.
Such activities can provide a window into soft skills that employers increasingly are demanding in the workplace, from teamwork and self-regulation to multicultural competency and perseverance.
“Businesses are learning that [GPA] was an artificial measure of how successful the student could be on the job,” said Dr. Cheryl Talley, an associate professor of neuroscience at Virginia State University. “It is an easy measure to have, to assess and to look at on the resume. But if this wasn’t correlating with how successful you’d be on the job, then it’s an artificial measure.”
In recent years, technology has changed the workforce and how people communicate with one another.
Due to the evolution of the workforce, Evans said, adaptability is important.
“A lot of times I think young people get a bad rep in regards to their communication skills,” said Evans. “They have the technology and sometimes they communicate in short form on their phones. It’s just a different form of communication that they are used to, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t know how to communicate.”
In addition to the belief that recent graduates lack soft skills, nearly eight in 10 American adults agree that if there is not a development of a more talented workforce, the United States will fall behind other countries, according to a Gallup-Lumina Foundation survey.
Within the Bloomberg study, both corporations and academia found teamwork, analytical reasoning, complex problem-solving, agility and adaptability to be the most important soft skills.
Talley said is not surprised by the study’s findings because she believes that K-12 education mostly focuses on standardized testing, which doesn’t assess soft skills.
Such testing “has been the focus of 12 years of [students’] education,” said Talley. “Why are we surprised that they lack other skills?”
However, though learning soft skills are often not part of a classroom’s curriculum, the Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll revealed that more than three in four adults “strongly agreed” that K-12 schools should teach critical thinking and communication to children.
“It is hard to work against habits that have been formed all the way through K-12,” said Talley. “Students would have to be highly motivated to change the way that they act and interact. And I don’t know what we could provide in higher education that would motivate them to make such changes.”
Within the ongoing changes in the workforce, many employers are training on the job. According to Gallup’s 21st Century Skills and the Workplace Survey in 2013, a majority of respondents (59 percent) agreed that they developed most of the skills they’ve used in their current job outside of school.
“Things are changing so fast right now, an employee may have come out with a set of skills as far as your degree is concerned, but those may be obsolete in the next two to three years,” said Evans.
Soft skills, by contrast, do not become obsolete. Though they aren’t directly taught in most schools, some institutions are taking initiative.
For example, Stanford University has created a course titled Organizational Behavior 374: Interpersonal Dynamics. The class is focused on building effective relationships through communication and self-awareness.
“While student success may depend on mastery of content in core subject areas such as math and reading, it also depends on more than knowledge of core content,” authors of a 2016 Gallup-Lumina Foundation poll wrote.
“Critical thinking, creativity, communication and other soft skills, as well as student physical and social well-being, are also necessary for future success in higher education and in the workplace.”