Teaching for Life-Long Success ~ Introduction

I'm working on a book for parents next year clarifying how I teach and why. Although I began teaching out of instinct and my experience in the "real" or business and athletic worlds, it can now be backed up with brain-based research and the sciences of molecular and neurobiology and quantum physics.

Not everything I write here will be included in the book, but it's a way for me to clarify my thoughts and see where I end up.

But the facts have to be faced. Few people throughout history have succeeded in life at the highest levels they're truly capable of, just as few people have succeeded (and few continue to succeed) in school at the highest levels they're capable of.

I think it's less likely that some people are just destined and created differently than others, and more likely that few people learn how to create themselves and their own destinies differently than others.

Maybe it's because we aren't taught how to succeed in finding our greatest inner happiness in school that so few of us learn how to find it in life.

If history is going to be changed then, this means we have to change how we've historically educated ourselves. Socrates used inquiry and involvement to teach Plato, who in turn taught Aristotle, who in turn taught Alexander the Great.

Even with this type of documentation, this type of teaching has rarely been taught since then in either public or private schools. Today it is still met with great resistance, simply because "that's not the way it's always been done".

If this type of learning sounds vaguely familiar however, it's because that's how we all naturally learned BEFORE going to school. And this was the time of our greatest learning. After this, fewer and fewer meaningful connections were made as we filled more and more individual neurons with separate and disconnected bits of knowledge for tests.

The connections we did make between neurons, the way our brains put things together and made sense of the world, often occurred not from connecting facts and creating academic enlightenment, but from associating meaningless facts and meaningful failures to present-day opportunities. This limiting neural network caused us and continues to cause us to see and experience life in a very limiting way. The result is we live each new day as if it were yesterday, making it very difficult to fearlessly think big and boldly pursue our dreams.

I can't believe how many 10 year-olds come to me already believing how they are is ALL they are, and all they're ever going to be. If this is allowed to continue, it only reaffirms and rewires these false beliefs and neural networks for them. Twenty, thirty and forty years more of this and it is that much more difficult to unwire and unlearn.

No wonder we give up on our dreams and settle into lives of conformity and mediocrity, adopting belief systems that as long as we are relatively behaved (just like in school), we'll be taken care of in the afterlife as long as we get "good enough grades" to get in.

It is critical that while in school students do and accomplish things they've never done before. This provides the evidence and confidence for Dreaming Big to truly begin, and to begin unlearning and unwiring the old, limiting belief systems, making way for the wiring of new and more empowering networks. Ones they can fall back on and add to as adults.

But with the increased emphasis on high test scores and the money it brings a school, only much higher test scores coming from classes taught via inquiry and discovery will a return to natural and real learning occur in everyday education.

Much more important is that more students being taught how to create real happiness and success in school, and therefore able to repeat that success in life as adults.

It's a shame to hear parents and teachers refer to any child as just average or below average based on previous test scores. That's just where they are, not who they are and what they're capable of becoming.

Most tests, even IQ tests, often access only convergent thinking (the ability to give a correct answer to a standard question). Divergent thinking, the ability to be flexible and solve problems, is much more valuable in the real world to achieving real, inner success.

As the temptation to teach to the test increases and brain development in our students decreases, there has never been a more critical need to teach at higher levels of thinking and for the development of courage, creativity, boldness and the ability to overcome failure........But for this to happen, the changes have to be permanent, and made on a level that can't be seen with the naked eye.