Lesson One: The ABCs of Life: The Skills We All Need but Were Never Taught - Softcover

Oliver, Jon

 
9780743237925: Lesson One: The ABCs of Life: The Skills We All Need but Were Never Taught
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743237927 ISBN 13: 9780743237925
Verlag: Atria, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

A Guide for Adults and Children by the Founder of the Award-Winning Lesson One Program
This indispensable book gives adults a proven plan to help children develop the life skills and internal discipline necessary to learn and thrive in today's society.
Following the logical progression of a child's development, the book uses upbeat activities and games that adults and children can share to ground themselves in Lesson One skills for use in everyday life. Offering much-needed answers to major problems gripping our culture, here is the book that anyone living and working with children has been waiting for -- a lesson plan that works for life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jon Oliver is a certified teacher who has spent thirty years developing Lesson One. He has frequently appeared in the national media and made presentations at conferences and workshops around the country. His school-reform efforts have earned him commendations from the White House. He lives in Ventura, California.

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Chapter One: Discovering Lesson One

"With the world spinning out of control, how does your life become your own?"

Jon Oliver asked me that question one day some years ago; it has resonated in my mind ever since. We live as members of a society and a culture, but we are individuals, with lives of our own making. Every day we face the challenges and the joys and the difficulties of living, working, studying, and playing with others. How do you deal with people filled with rage? How do you stop beating yourself up for failure when you know you've done your best? How do you handle the everyday pressures of work and home? How do you learn to believe in yourself and work out your problems with thinking, instead of turbulent raw emotion? How do you handle life's challenges and help children handle them as well?

Where do you find the answers to these questions? Schools teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but what about reality? What about life? If you don't learn about life's demands at home or at school, then how can your life become your own?

There's an answer to these questions: Lesson One. This unique program presents children and adults with a sequence of skills that change their lives and, someday, will change the world. These are skills, among them self-control, self-confidence, responsibility, thinking and problem solving, and cooperation, that we all need to be productive and happy. Most of us understand intuitively that we need these skills, but not all of us learn how to acquire and apply these skills.

In this book is the solution. Lesson One: The ABCs of Life is a practical, understandable, sequential guide for adults and kids that provides a time-tested program that has already changed the lives of thousands of children, teachers, and parents around the country.

I first discovered Jon's work at a time when the country was in turmoil over youth violence, shortly after the attacks at Columbine High School. The topic of conversation at watercoolers and coffee machines around the country was the same: What can we do about our kids? Most people thought there was no solution, that our nation's students were spiraling helplessly out of control. The prominent attorney Ty Cobb -- best known for his involvement in high-profile Washington cases -- wrote a poignant essay in the wake of the Columbine shootings, which asked, "How did we get so distracted and divided? Why are there so many guns and so few good public schools?" This book tries to address these issues and change our society for the better. As you read on, you will see that the lack of some basic skills can create enormous problems for individuals and for society. Without the ABCs of Life, our society's problems will only continue to grow.

One night, while listening to National Public Radio, I heard about Lesson One. I've heard a lot of explanations and prescriptions, but Lesson One seemed to be a unique voice, advocating a novel approach to address the underlying causes of the crisis in our culture. In his interview, Jon spoke about the need to begin teaching children about self-control early in life. Curious, I called him, and learned that there was far more to his program than even a thoughtful radio piece could cover. I decided to write a story about it.

In my research, I soon discovered that Lesson One was beginning to spread throughout our society. Dateline NBC and ABC's World News Tonight did major pieces about it. Jon Oliver presented Lesson One at the White House. Parents and teachers around the country were excited by the program as soon as they heard about it.

I've spent years visiting and writing about schools as a consultant for the U.S. Department of Education and as a research assistant at the Harvard School of Education, but I have rarely seen a program that made an immediate impact on the socialization and attitudes of kids -- and never one as powerful as this.

At the Welch Elementary School in Peabody, Massachusetts, I first saw Lesson One in action. There was something magical about the classes that Jon taught. Children were happy and eager to participate, using their self-control and cooperating with each other. Principal Helen Apostolides later wrote me, "As a result of the program, teachers who once spent 80% of their time on classroom management and 20% on teaching, now spend 80% on teaching and 20% on classroom management. Before, we used to spend a lot of time on discipline; now we spend less time on that and more time on educating."

School by school, Lesson One changed the culture of every classroom it visited, creating climates based on mutual respect and cooperation.

I followed Jon and his staff around the country. Almost every time, school principals prepared Lesson One's staff for the worst, telling stories of bullying, playground violence, classroom disruption, and lack of cooperation. When Lesson One's staff went into the classroom, they connected with the students.

I saw its effect at schools, but I wanted to know more. I saw a satellite broadcast featuring Lesson One that was co-produced by the United States Department of Education, the Harvard School of Public Health, and the United States Department of Justice. Of the program, parent Elaine Metropolis says, "It has been very comforting for me personally as a parent to know that my daughter has those tools, these skills, her self-control and responsibility, and self-confidence. These aren't just terms that she learned that she's going to forget; they're tools that she's internalized. She can now can bring them with her. She'll have them when she goes off to college. They'll stay with her forever, just like the alphabet. You don't learn them one day and just forget them the next. You learn them and apply them to new situations." Lesson One's entertaining and sequential presentation of skills struck a chord with children and adults alike.

In the months that followed my visits, violence in our schools became an even more prominent national plague. Every time I picked up a newspaper, there seemed to be a new school shooting or a violent incident involving parents and kids at Little League or hockey games. After Parade magazine published an article about Lesson One, six thousand people, from every state in the country, called or wrote to learn more about what Lesson One does. The program had obviously touched a nerve. There were untold thousands of Americans out there who were eager to make a change in our society. They just needed to learn how to do it.

A basic premise of Jon's program is that most people are well-intentioned and they love and care for their children. If they treat children inconsiderately or cruelly, adults are usually just repeating behavior they learned when they were young. Because of what they grew up with, this is the perspective from which they deal with children and other adults.

It is simply human nature for us to see everything from our own perspective. However, if we limit ourselves to the perspective of our own upbringing and experiences, we risk repeating patterns because that is all we know. When we look at a very large and complex work of art, we must step back, away from our limited perspective, to see the broader picture. Once we see the big picture, we are able to move beyond the limits of our own experience. The skills help us do just that. With the skills, our viewpoints are broadened, so that we can examine each situation individually and respond in alternative ways, ways that move beyond some of the dysfunctional patterns that we are accustomed to. By using the skills, we can have the choice to stop harmful patterns and choose ones that are helpful to make our lives our own.

I've learned, through years of writing about education and family issues, that parents and other adults often think that they are preparing...

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Verlag
Atria
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743237927
ISBN 13 
9780743237925
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
328
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Simon and Schuster Netherlands BV
info@simonandschuster.nl

Herculesplein 96
Utrecht
3584 AA
Niederlande