Rebecca Farraway
Leadership Challenge
Final Paper
Instructor: Jose Gomez
December 13, 2007


Leadership
The
Challenge
Fostering Leadership Within Families


14 PART EIGHT
Fostering Leadership In The Next Generation:
Personal Reflections - Practical Solutions

My business is my family and my family is my business.
Joe Kennedy, Father of U.S. President John F. Kennedy

Can you imagine anything more energizing, more unifying, more filled with satisfaction than working with members of your family to accomplish something that really makes a difference in the world?
Steven R. Covey, Franklin Covey Institute - Author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families


Each autumn, my husband, two daughters and I celebrate the fall harvest by spending a Saturday morning picking vegetables at a local farm. No grocery store produce department can compare with the rows of vibrantly colored vegetables, the smell of chlorophyll in the air and the sense of connectedness that we feel to each other and to the earth while engaged in this rewarding tradition. This one day of hard work brings my family joy and satisfaction throughout the entire year. Every time we sprinkle locally grown and self-picked sun-dried tomatoes on a salad or reach into the freezer for a bag of yellow and red peppers to add to a spicy Cajun dish, we feel the sense of accomplishment and appreciation that comes from hard work.
The psychological benefits of hard work are proven and time-tested truths. Hard work brings a sense of accomplishment and pride to the participant; it fosters self-esteem yet, ironically, decreases the likelihood of an individual becoming too cocky or self-centered. Above all, hard work instills appreciation within the individual.
In a traditional agrarian society, families worked side by side to accomplish the tasks which were needed to survive. They experienced a direct, obvious and logical sequence to the type of work that was performed and the end results which they achieved. As a result, the value of work was clear; people worked to support the family. It became easy to connect the dots between effort and reward. Families planted, watered, weeded, picked, sold and ate their crops. Most families participated in building their own homes. From a young age, children were a part of the family business and this involvement was not limited to farm work - even doctors, lawyers and shopkeepers involved their offspring in the workings of the family business. In addition, the direct results of other’ labors were fairly obvious and easy to observe. There were few middlemen to dilute the connection between the processes involved in producing the end results of labor. In spite of its shortcomings, agrarian life provided a large number of natural opportunities for teamwork, leadership, problem solving and familial bonding.
Contrast the experience of the agrarian family with the plight of today’s families where children are often unaware of what their parents even do at “work.” From the child’s perspective, the parent simply disappears for the day and then, emerges in the evening, usually tired and often frazzled. Many children in 20th and 21st century homes lack an understanding of how money is earned and even why it is necessary. Today’s young people rarely witness the steps involved in earning a living - they only see the end result. Not surprisingly, this jump to the end brings a lack of understanding about how and even why productivity is important. Soon, feelings of entitlement begin to emerge and selfishness, instead of gratitude is learned.
It is important to provide children with opportunities to see their parents work. Just as importantly, it is absolutely crucial for parents to find ways for their children to work along side them. Working with your children fosters crucial bonding within the family unit and helps young people acquire the skills necessary to become happy, productive and contributing members of society.
Support Your Child’s Dreams
On its website, the non-profit company Idealist.org gives a list of organizations started by kids. Among those listed is A Place to Call Home, a program which was started by teenager Kirsten Thomas of Colorado. She started her company after a trip to Denver with her Dad. On the trip, she noticed the many homeless people in Denver’s downtown area and wondered how she could help. With the encouragement of her father, Kirsten enlisted the help of her friends and began colleting donations of necessities such as baby food and toiletries along with toys, bibles and other comforting items. Kirsten and her friends continue to compile the items and distribute them to the homeless in the Denver area on an ongoing basis.
In 1999, at the age of thirteen, Carolyn Rubenstein established Carolyn’s Compassionate Children, an organization, which creates pen pal relationships between volunteer teens and critically ill children. Since that time, Carolyn’s program has expanded to include organizing an annual school supply drive, holiday letter and gift drives and even offers scholarships to college students.
Another charitable company featured on the Idealist.org site is Melissa Poe’s Kids For A Clean Environment (F.A.C.E.). The organization which Melissa started in 1989, when she was only nine years old, focuses on finding ways for kids to help protect the environment and to talk about their concerns with other children. Currently, Kids F.A.C.E. has over 300,000 members throughout world. Through the program, they have planted over a million trees.
Kirsten, Carolyn and Melissa each chose a different focus for their organizations and yet, they all share one thing in common; they have parents who listened to their concerns, ideas, interests and dreams. In addition, their parents worked along side them and helped find the resources needed to support their children in becoming young leaders.
Foster Young Leaders
Almost every parent remembers the deep bond that they felt when they saw their newborn child for the first time. Nothing on earth compares with the bond between parent and child and yet, competing influences constantly bombard parents and children in an effort to pry apart their attachment. Everything from video games to the kid next door fights for a piece of your child’s time. Combine these competing factors with the average schedule of today busy parents and it is easy to see how a multitude of options can replace the bond of the family. According to psychologist Alan Loy McGinnis,
In every person there resides a basic need that in the technical books on this topic is called “the affiliative motive.” Each of us likes to belong to some group of tightly-knit people where we are known and accepted, where we are committed to each other, and where we know that the other members of the group will be loyal to us if we are in trouble. It is the old tribal instinct. Ideally, this will occur in our families, where people forgive anything. When such devotion is cultivated in families, people may stray away for a while, but they inevitably return (Bringing 138).

Successful businessman and motivational speaker Gary Palmer asserts that parents should devote at least as much time to the raising of their children as they do to their chosen professions. In his company, My Kid’s CEO, he frequently asks parents the question, “If you aren’t your kid’s CEO, who is? Is it another kid at school, is it the media?” Palmer’s company helps families find ways to spend more time together whether it be through service projects, starting a family business or simply creating a home business plan and mission statement which includes roles, responsibilities, expectations and positive and negative outcomes. According to Palmer, “Working together creates a strong eternal bond within families that no outside influences will ever break. Paradoxically, children who are tightly bonded to a sense of family also develop a strong sense of purpose and vision…a primary characteristic within leaders.” Essentially, if we want our children to become leaders, we should show how this is done. By listening our children’s ideas and dreams, by helping them to establish goals and by teaching and modeling the purpose and value of work, we create ever lasting bonds that foster leadership in the next generation.
According to parenting advocates, Linda and Richard Eyre,
The interesting thing about being a parent is that what we’re really trying to do is work our way out of the job. We’re aiming to get our children to a point where they can govern themselves, where they are law-abiding citizens who can handle their own money, live by good values, and become parents capable of passing the same abilities, mortality, and basic happiness on to their own children (our grandchildren) (Three 21).

Hello Leadership Friends!

Thank you for helping to create a wonderful semester experience. I enjoyed hearing all of your great ideas and helpful suggestions on leadership.

Hope you all have a healthy, safe and fun winter break!

Sincerely,

Rebecca

P.S. Thanks Jose and Anna - Well done!!!

Steps and Actions I Can Take to Become a Better Leader in My Life

Steps and Actions I Can Take to Become A Better Leader In My Life

1. Say “no” to the least important tasks and activities in my life.
2. Make and keep a detailed record of my goals and the steps required to achieve them.
3. Make quality supplemental reading a part of my everyday routine.
4. Study the history and lives of leaders I respect and admire.
5. Ignore negative thoughts
6. Recognize and appreciate the kindness of others.
7. Support and celebrate the goals, dreams and achievements of friends and acquaintances.
8. Remember to distance myself from those who are prone to becoming jealous of or competitive with the people they know.
9. Look for and recognize opportunity.
10. Look for ways to offer compassion instead of judgment.

Is It Worth It? Challenge # 13

Questions:

Question: Is this worth it?

Response: Yes, if Weber State is willing to spend time and money on community education, they should consider offering math skills courses before offering reading skills reinforcement. Reading skills offerings are plentiful. It is not a matter of which skill is more important but rather, which skills are being neglected.

Question: Am I willing to think (and take action) about this everyday?

Response: Probably not everyday. ☺ Still, I am willing to call and write a letter to Weber State’s Continuing Education Department stating my opinion.

Question: How big of an issue is this?

Response: Declining math skills are a huge issue in the United States. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, U.S. students rank consistantly lower in their math scores than students from other industrialized countries.

Question: What don’t I know about this?

Response: Plenty. Still, as a person who previously struggled with math I found that my issues with the subject stemmed more from a lack of exposure and general fear than an inability to grasp the concepts. I want to see my children as well as all children succeed in math.

In watching elementary school teachers give instruction in math, I have been surprised how often the teachers themselves, lack understanding of mathematical concepts. This does not bode well for students. The only way to solve this issue is to offer more math support courses for students and to do so early in their educational lives.

Question: Who can give me more information about this?

Answer: The Community Education and Math Departments at Weber State.

Question: What are the action items that need to be taken.

Answer:

1. Contact the Community Education Department at Weber State about offering children’s math courses for fifth grade – adult. (We can all repeat the same concepts). Perhaps even parent/child math review courses.
2. Talk to the principal at my children’s school about offering after school and summer courses in math, which are available to all interested children.
3. Follow up and offer to volunteer with the program offerings.

"WSU Would Be Better If...- Challenge # 12

Weber State's community education program offers reading skills classes for children and adults. While it is wonderful that Weber offers such a program, reading programs are plentiful in community education classes, after (elementary) school programs and at colleges. Remedial Math, however, is one area of education that is not being adequately reinforced at the elementary, Jr. High or High School level. As I spoke with my peers about this issue, they agreed that reinforcing math in the primary grades would help many students avoid the hassle and embarrassment of repeating fifth thru ninth grade math (in college classes) as adults.

Unfortunately, it is difficult for parents to find cost effective resources which will help their children succeed with math. In addition, more parents lack math skills than reading skills, making it especially difficult to help their children acquire the quantative literacy skills needed to understand complex reasoning.

For this reason, I believe that colleges who offer community education for children have a duty to include math courses in their selection. By offering community education-math reinforcement to young students, Weber ultimately helps itself and future college students save time and money.

A Better Weber State #11

I love Weber State! The faculty members are sincere, intelligent, caring and hardworking individuals who hold high expectations for the students they serve. No other service or aesthetic offering means as much to me as the gift of having high quality instructors and support staff at this college. For this reason, it is difficult for me to finish the statement, "Weber State would be better if..."

Still, difficult does not mean impossible so, "Weber State would be better if all bathrooms had paper toilet covers." Wait...no that's not my real suggestion; let me try again.

"Weber State would be better if it offered a summer extension program to help children improve their understanding of Math." Weber offers programs to help children with their reading skills but math is neglected, not just in our community but across the country and it is beginning to show.

U.S. News & World Report Article - Challenge #10

The Civil Right to Radical Math
By Diane Cole
Posted 10/22/06

Harlem-born, Harvard-educated Robert Moses is a radical in the most traditional definition of the word: He goes to the root of the problem.

First as a civil rights leader and now as an advocate for the poor and founder of the math literacy program the Algebra Project, Moses has looked at the ideal of equal opportunity and compared it with the reality-then set about balancing the equation.

In the 1960s, that meant leading voter registration drives in Mississippi, even if it led to pistol-whipping by white supremacists and the murders of colleagues who had marched alongside him. Staying with the work was the only way he could make sense of the injustice-and he has continued to stay, just in another mode.

In 1966, he left for Canada when, at the age of 31, he received a draft notice. After a stint teaching math in Tanzania, he returned to the United States when President Jimmy Carter granted amnesty to draft resisters. Soon after, he started working on a different formula for breaking down racial and economic barriers: teaching inner-city kids math-algebra, to be precise.

As Moses explains it, the connection between civil rights and the right to math literacy is logical. The civil rights movement ensured that minorities had a voice; now they needed economic access-and that started with education, specifically the math and science skills essential to succeeding in a tech-dependent society.

Connecting. The Algebra Project, at its peak, has provided help for some 40,000 minority students annually, in the form of kindergarten-through-high-school curricula guides, teacher training, and peer coaching. "I've been in the classroom and watched these students ... soar and grow," says actor Danny Glover, an Algebra Project board member.

These days, Moses divides his time between Jackson, Miss., and Miami, where he teaches high school math. His son Omo, who runs an Algebra Project offshoot, says Moses "has always been able to connect with young people. He's never embarrassed or uncomfortable; he'll try a math rap song, share his lunch, or sit on a bus with 50 students on a spring break trip," he says. "He has a genuine interest in them as people."

Despite a packed travel schedule, Moses gives no visible sign of fatigue. A vegetarian of long standing, he practices yoga regularly and tries to swim at least 1/4 mile daily. He portrays an aura of stillness that suggests that he'd rather listen than speak.

Introducing Moses at a recent conference, Shirley Ann Jackson, the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, commended Moses for "getting to the heart of the issue," which, as a physicist, she knows well: "You can't do calculus, physics, or engineering if you can't do algebra," she points out-which is exactly the point and why Moses originally founded the Algebra Project.

It was 1982-the year that Moses won a MacArthur Foundation genius grant-and Moses was completing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard. His oldest daughter, Maisha, entered eighth grade, ready for algebra-only to discover that the local public school did not offer it. Moses, who had taught math decades earlier at New York's Horace Mann High School, was determined that Maisha would take algebra-even if he had to teach it at the school himself. Which he did.

Algebra, Moses perceived, was a "gatekeeper" subject: Without it, middle school students couldn't advance in math, technology, and science. And without those courses, they wouldn't be able to meet the requirements for college.

So far, research has judged the Algebra Project a success. At Lanier High School in Jackson, 55 percent of the students following the project's curriculum passed the state exam the first time, compared with 40 percent of students in the regular curriculum. At junior high school sites, Algebra Project students scored better on standardized tests and went on to more advanced math classes at significantly higher levels than other schoolmates.

In part, the success is due to innovative curricula (developed by Moses) that translate the abstract language of algebraic equations into understandable, concrete activities. Moses also employs his leadership lessons from the civil rights movement. "You can't make change on a large issue just by advocating from the top," he says. "It has to be a demand from the bottom. That means building grass-roots networks pushing that demand forward." It means working within the community, he says, with families and students and schools.

A listener. Another way to put it is that Moses is always listening to the community. "I got into the habit of listening as a youngster," Moses says, explaining that he would tag around with his father and "hear him talk about events of the day from the point of view of the little guy."

Later, in Mississippi, civil rights leader Ella Baker set another example. "I don't know how many meetings I sat through with her not saying anything, not contravening," he says. She taught him the importance of "creating a space where someone else can step in and lead," he says. "There had to be a real laying down of the groundwork," a sense of participation that allowed people to direct the movement themselves.

And then, after Moses has listened long and hard and intently, he speaks, in a gently modulated voice that hits its target all the more powerfully for being so understated. In that regard, "Bob is like an alligator," says Timothy Jenkins, past president of the University of the District of Columbia and a longtime civil rights activist. "He might seem passive, but he's incisive. What he says is considered-and people listen."

Just the way they have been listening for 40 years and counting-and perhaps years beyond counting, as his algebra lessons grow exponentially from student to student, generation to generation, and from equations to equality.

This story appears in the October 30, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.