Building Resilience in our Youth

Have you seen this last month how you or your youth could either use more resilience or how you developed more resilience?  

Remember, we focused on modeling good coping skills? (see article)  It's funny how our subconscious can work on a problem that we put in front of it because--looking back--I can see how much of my personal development centered around modeling good coping skills!  Wow! 

I found connections with what we were studying this month in our Vanguard group (patterns to keep and discard as part of our education) and really spent a lot of time evaluating how I respond to things.  This actually led to a deeper, cleansing look at years' old default pathways that have been behind some of my negative coping "displays."  It is ongoing, but has had a good beginning.

I would love to hear your own insights and experiences when thinking about and applying our challenge to model good coping skills for our youth!

Next challenge!
So here is the challenge for this month...

2. Praise effort, not just success. Children should understand that success is a product of hard work and sacrifice. But even when they try hard, sometimes they’ll fail. Commend your children for trying, then encourage them to figure out what’s going wrong and to try another approach or practice more. Celebrate small steps in the right direction.

To start off, please include in the comment section below or on the Facebook Vanguard page advice you may have for us going into this month: articles, personal experiences, books, talks, etc.

Let's synergize as we focus on this for the month! 

Avoiding the "Cobra Effect" in Parenting and Mentoring

Resilience.

Who doesn't want that for their child? In fact "the lack of resilience" may be recognized as one of the leading problems with today's youth as they leave the home.  

I would like to use the article, "Resilience—Spiritual Armor for Today’s Youth"
by Lynn G. Robbins, as the jumping place for a discussion to take place monthly over the course of the next year to help us apply this to our Vanguard Group methods and our home.  Although it is from literature published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, I feel the principles are universal and look forward to respectful feedback and discussion referencing sources and experiences from many different world views.  To have capable and empowered youth for the future is everyone's concern.

The starts with this analogy:

The story is told that during British rule of colonial India, an unacceptable number of venomous cobras lived in and around Delhi. To solve the problem, local authorities began paying a bounty for dead cobras. The ill-advised bounty backfired when enterprising locals began breeding cobras for profit. When the bounty ended, the breeders set the cobras free, further compounding the problem.
The phenomenon of unintended consequences sometimes causing more harm than intended benefits is known as the “cobra effect.”

 The article is meaningful and had a profound effect on my parenting paradigm already when I went running this morning with my 6 year old biking along.

I had a different approach to how I interacted with him.  I carefully explained why I was riding on the road in certain places, how it was safe for me to be on the road at times because I could recognize the patterns of traffic and how I  could be seen because I was bigger.  I gave him the opportunity to travel behind me or to stay on the sidewalk, giving him choices that he could act on according to his comfort after being mindful of the dangers of the different options.  Both options were safe, but it gave him the chance to face them on his own terms.  I explained more to him the principles behind my choices rather than just demanding obedience and compliance as is so easily my default.  
It was a good experience!


I would like to invite you to read the article (pretty quick read) and then we will use the following article with it's 8 points as a center for our discussion this year.  I would like to invite you to comment below or ask for author permission and I will have you post an article on this blog. You can also do it on our FB group.

The first tip for helping our youth develop resilience is:

1. Model good coping skills. Teach by example. When your own emotions are high, say things like, “I can tell I’m getting frustrated. So, I’m going to take a deep breath (or pray, or take a little walk, etc.) before I try again.” Or, “I’m sorry I got angry. I need to try again.”

Just starting with this question on my mind as I studied my core book this morning, I found 13 different principles to help me personally avoid "the cobra effect":
1.Take upon us responsibility for our areas of stewardship and actions
2. Act with soberness (and not just the non-alcoholic kind :D)
3. Come into the temple (or place of personal highest worship or communion with God)
4. Be diligent
5. Recognize personal weaknesses
6. Seek help of Creator to recognize struggles in others
7. Have courage to recognize virtue 
8. Know which tools that are at our disposal to use
9. Just because we have great resources or "riches"-- don't be prideful!
10. Don't make excuses
11. Honor male/female roles
12. Be mindful of your example
13. We are responsible to seek and know truth so we can help those in our stewardship

I look forward to reading your thoughts this month as you think about how we can better model good coping skills!

Up and Going Again!

After a few years of deep healing and readjusting to homeschooling in a bubble, I am excited to move forward with making this blog a better resource for mentors! I will be posting videos and links that people put on our facebook group as well as videos that I and other mentors produce.

Also, don't hesitate to revisit old discussions! I guarantee that the topics will still be relevant and helpful.  For instance, I chanced across this old blog created to help with a 2014 training in Utah.  The articles had great insights and resources to revitalize how I look at our methods!

Please email me or FB message me with particular questions, videos or articles you would like to see published or produced to help with your group.

I am also starting an online Vanguard group that people can join if they want to reply below or FB message me.  Your family can start at any time; I will just ask that you do the preliminary exercises to get your family mentally ready to join us :D. 
Online Vanguard Group link

For now, I am going to start an ongoing discussion for the new year, so check out the next article on this blog.

For those who feel short on time here is a kick-off video that includes:
-a Core and Crust of Leadership/Vanguard Sun activity suggestion for students and mentors (link)
-a few thoughts on the "Cobra Effect" (see next article)
-desire to start off a discussion group for parents/mentors

(I just listened to it and it goes way too fast, so I will slow down when I video in the future...I was just so excited to get these ideas out there!)

Project Learning: Master's Level

I thought it would be insightful to share something my daughter came across in her college class:

I'm reading Randy Pausch's Last Lecture, and in it he talks about a Master's Degree program that he supervised:

Describing the ETC is really hard, and I finally found a metaphor. Telling people about the ETC is like describing Cirque du Soleil if they’ve never seen it. Sooner or later you’re going to make the mistake. You’re going to say, well it’s like a circus. And then you’re dragged into this conversation about oh, how many tigers, how many lions, how many trapeze acts? And that misses the whole point. So when we say we’re a master’s degree, we’re really not like any master’s degree you’ve ever seen. Here’s the curriculum [Shows slide of ETC curriculum, listing “Project Course” as the only course each semester; audience laughs] The curriculum ended up looking like this. [shows slightly more detailed slide]. All I want to do is visually communicate to you that you do five projects in Building Virtual Worlds, then you do three more. All of your time is spent in small teams making stuff. None of that book learning thing. Don and I had no patience for the book learning thing. It’s a master’s degree. They already spent four years doing book learning. By now they should have read all the books. 

The keys to success were that Carnegie Mellon gave us the reins. Completely gave us the reins. We had no deans to report to. We reported directly to the provost, which is great because the provost is way too busy to watch you carefully. [laughter] We were given explicit license to break the mold. It was all project based. It was intense, it was fun, and we took field trips! Every spring semester in January, we took all 50 students in the first year class and we’d take them out to Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic, and of course when you’ve got guys like Tommy there acting as host, right, it’s pretty easy to get entrée to these places. So we did things very, very differently. The kind of projects students would do, we did a lot of what we’d call edutainment. 

Never underestimate the value of project based learning! 

The Main Purpose of Education

"Hardly anyone gets a great education anymore.  Strangely, it is not even the goal in most public, private or home schools around the world.  Instead, literacy, credentials, or college prep now mark the high point of most educational ambitions."

What is your focus for your group? Your kids?

"In fact, marketable test scores and good grades are frequently (and falsely) equated with quality education.  The world has largely forgotten the ideal of a Thomas Jefferson level of education, of really understanding the great ideas, of becoming truly wise through exploring, reasoning, pondering and internalizing the best that humanity and God have offered.  We've strayed from the knowledge that the main purpose of education is to prepare us to truly serve."

These are some thoughts from the opening lines of Oliver DeMille's new book, "Hero Education" and a perfect kick-off to those of us on our way to "service-oriented leadership" in the month or months ahead.

Those great ideas, our seven areas of impact, are essential to be discussed in the context of the classics we expose our kids to!  Please share any spin-off thoughts or connections you have :D.

Enjoy serving!

How we can use Vanguard to counter the harmful mindset of public education

All global ambitions are based on a definition of productivity and the good life so alientated from common human reality I am convinced it is wrong.

This statement caught my eye as I read "Dumbing Us Down" this morning.

So what is society's definition of "productivity," of "the good life"?

As taught to me in public school these definitions included the following:
--a well-paying job
--public recognition
--order/lack of conflict or challenges
--conformity
--social acceptance
--approval by the experts
--getting whatever is newer and better, whether in material or intellectual areas
--getting ranked "higher" than those around us

Now I know that there is both great good and amazing teachers found within "the system."  However, as Gatto himself is a public school teacher it is important to see how these "lessons" or "definitions" not only exist, but how they are destructive and can be re-defined.

My mind made automatic counter-connections with two monthly areas of impact: "pursuit of happiness" and "work" and the lessons I have learned over the years in our study of those areas.  The lessons I learned through the classics in those areas took on more of the meaning that Gatto himself shares:

[We need to] locate meaning where meaning is genuinely to be found--in families, in friends, in the passage of seasons, in nature, in simple ceremonies and rituals, in curiosity, generosity, compassion, and service to others, in a decent independence and privacy, in all the free and inexpensive things out of which real families, real friends, and real communities are built.--pg. 16-17, "Dumbing Us Down"

I have learned these lessons:
--happiness can be found regardless of income
--self-guided missions lead to most satisfacting productivity
--to be different is beautiful
--peace and productivity can be found not only in spite of but through challenges and difficulty
--it is through our uniqueness that we bless the world and find ourselves
--people may not understand or approve of us, but that is not a healthy basis of self-worth
--God and myself are the experts on my life
--to find satisfaction and use in the resources around us leads to greater happiness than the next best thing
--we are all on different paths and to celebrate the uniqueness of those paths without feeling the need to compete or tear others down brings joy and greater productivity.  To spend our time comparing is counter-productive.

I have shared the following analogy before in association with our "7 monthly areas of impact" visual.  Each component of the visual can be "colored" or "fleshed-out" through our study of the classics.  As we interact with classics that illustrate positive or negative influences in those themes, our students start to feel what are right or wrong, healthy or unhealthy philosophies or activities in those areas.  To have some negative exposure provides contrast to the beautiful, but the majority should be exposure to healthy classics.

For example, for the question of what makes a good society, it is beneficial to read books like "The Giver," Ann Rand's "Anthem," or "Animal Farm."  However, to just dwell on negative examples is not enough.  We need to give them immersion in healthy societies or interactions like "Princess Academy," "Laddie," "Wonder," or even "The Secret Garden."   As a student resonates and interacts with the positive, meaningful and good in each of these areas, they will be stronger in their ability to recognize the superficial, the destructive, the meaningless in the messages so strongly sold through our current education system.

If nothing else, they will initially feel that something is wrong with a particular world view and then their faculties will arise to meet the challenge of addressing what exactly is wrong and try to fix it.  It is that initial trigger of "something is wrong" "warning! warning!" that we need to instill in the rising generation to tackle the mass mind-numbing effect of social conformity to world views that are both unhealthy and inherently destructive to those very goals they are trying to meet: "productivity and happiness."

If you have any spin-off thoughts, arguments against, additional resources, please share or bring them up in the comments below!

I recommend reading the first 14 pages of Gatto's book if you have never read it or even if you have...quick read.  Good refresher about why we do what we do.  Try to answer his "lessons" with "counter-lessons" you want to teach in your home and how you can do it. I would love to hear your thoughts!

Path to Discovering Genius!

I recently read “Understood Betsy” for the Mentoring in the Classics course and realized that the book centers around Betsy's discovery that she has a genius. Since this is an integral part of what we strive for in Vanguard, this is a good checklist of pondering to review both as parents and mentors.

Betsy goes through quite the process to get there:

-discovery that she can learn (driving the wagon*)

-discovery that she can be needed (the cat)

-discovery that she can be a part of something bigger and that she is a contributor (prepping meals with Cousin Ann)

-discovery that she need not be limited by externally imposed labels (grade-levels in schools)

-discovery of the joy and heart of genuine service ('Lias)

-discovery that she, too, can lead and deal with problems (the Fair)

-discovery that she doesn't need Aunt Francis's validation to succeed (end)

*references within book

I would highly recommend this short, readable classic for the parent mentors of any group. The reading and discussion of it could even be extended over the whole year, with a chapter or two per month.

Enjoy!