I don't know what to do with this proliferation of venues to express myself! Now that I'm unemployed, I have way too much time to surf around...maybe I can use it constructively by doing an even better job of linking all my stuff into somewhere. There's always the fear of losing something awesome from the past, but maybe I just need to get over that. The stuff I wrote in the past wasn't really all that awesome. Yeah, that's it. :-)
So I'll be on Xanga a little more for awhile, dialoging with zerowing21 about the existence of God and stuff. It was a hard decision whether to do that from here or there...I dunno...whatever. But at least those posts will show up here in a slightly more navigable way than if it were all just linked to FB...but then, maybe the way FB does it is better after all...
I don't know! But I think it is possible to know... ;-)
Monday, March 22, 2010
Friday, October 16, 2009
Good Work Days
Feeling productive after two busy days in the office! Today I sent out the newsletter and wrote a new article for the Members' Library. Whew! All that on top of debating Loren and Jonathan about Joel Osteen (totally playing the Devil's Advocate)...yes, a busy day.
Now off to hang sheetrock in the kitchen...
Now off to hang sheetrock in the kitchen...
Friday, November 21, 2008
What we're Doing...Really
In my scanning the World Wide Web recently, I came across an article written by a small-town middle school principal - explaining the character education program currently operating in his school.
I was struck by the articulation of three major goals toward the end of his article: that students would "understand, care about, and act upon core ethical values." There is obviously a sequence here that this principal is highlighting, and I was struck by how it lines up with Character First!'s ideas of Emphasize, Require, and Recognize.
Like this principal, we need to see the necessity of helping people to think clearly about what character is before we can try to inspire them to it; and inspiring them before we make a big deal out of whether they're doing it or not.
What we're doing, really, at Character First!, is helping to get people talking and thinking about character. Once that is happening, the door is open for the right discussions to bear fruit.
I was struck by the articulation of three major goals toward the end of his article: that students would "understand, care about, and act upon core ethical values." There is obviously a sequence here that this principal is highlighting, and I was struck by how it lines up with Character First!'s ideas of Emphasize, Require, and Recognize.
Like this principal, we need to see the necessity of helping people to think clearly about what character is before we can try to inspire them to it; and inspiring them before we make a big deal out of whether they're doing it or not.
What we're doing, really, at Character First!, is helping to get people talking and thinking about character. Once that is happening, the door is open for the right discussions to bear fruit.
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
The Vocabulary of Character
Wow, the term "character" has been flying around in the media this fall like the flakes of an early November blizzard.
"This candidate has character."
"No, that candidate has character."
"Does not so have character!"
"Does too so have character!"
"When it comes to character, they definitely have the moral high ground."
My Google alerts lit up with references this election season. Unfortunately, from the lack of creativity in many of these statements, it could begin to appear that this blizzard only has one snowflake. And it may be starting to get brittle from being blown around too hard.
Whenever a word is overused, it's in danger of becoming a label - a term that loses it's original meaning as someone preempts it as a shortcut to proving their point. Recently, we at CTI linked to a story about a Hawaiian girl who was praised for returning $1,000 that she found in a thrift store videocassette. I was pleasantly surprised to see the term "honesty" actually used in the article. Working in character education in the elementary school setting over the past ten years, I witnessed the development of several character "labels" that seem to get slapped on whenever someone, particularly a young student, is praised for "being good." "Respect" is a huge one, and I would have half expected the girl to be praised for "respecting" the thrift store by turning in the money. In many varied circumstances, I have heard people encouraged to show "respect" to others when what the speaker really meant was to calm down, pay attention, play nice, follow the rules, give others a chance, wait for the team, etc. After hearing this repeatedly, I even found myself falling into the same trap, as the only word that came to mind tell the students to "be good" was - "Have some respect!" Verbal shortcuts are very contagious.
Last week, I had the opportunity, as a fairly new staff member, to attend the Basic and Advanced Implementation Seminars offered by CTI. I was initially somewhat sceptical of the amount of time that was spent coaching the attendees on the process of "Character Recognitions" in the workplace. OK, so it's important for employees to see that good character will be held up and praised, but isn't that a fairly simple activity? Well...it turns out not really. The corporate managers and directors taking the training didn't seem to think it was a waste of time. I slowly caught the picture that in many of these organizations, there were no concepts in employee's minds that could be consistently appealed to when asking for good character in the workplace. So Character Recognitions were the tool that would be used to build that "vocabulary of character" that could be used over and over to articulate precise, desirable behaviors and attitudes.
A vocabulary of character. Suddenly, things started to take shape in my mind. Our fourty-nine character qualities are not an attempt to create an impossibly complex and un-achievable standard of living. We're not simply trying to make it more difficult than Character Counts with their Six Pillars, or Character Education Network with their 11 consolidated traits. Rather, we realize that people need a way to talk clearly about issues of character. For many, the concepts are simply not there in order to think and speak about this part of their life. They don't need the shortest possible list of words to use in every possible situation - they already have that. They need articulate words and concepts to shape their thinking and conversation as they pursue a culture of character.
So each of our resources are not so much a point to be memorized and mastered, but simply material designed to further refine and define the mental image that we have of good character - and of specific ways that it can be acted out in different situations. Each resource should enable people to think more clearly, speak more motivationally, and act more decisively as we make character a part of everyday life.
Whether we use CTI resources or not, though, let's start putting some more substance - more substantive words and thoughts - out there amidst the blizzard of vocabulary being used to articulate good character.
"This candidate has character."
"No, that candidate has character."
"Does not so have character!"
"Does too so have character!"
"When it comes to character, they definitely have the moral high ground."
My Google alerts lit up with references this election season. Unfortunately, from the lack of creativity in many of these statements, it could begin to appear that this blizzard only has one snowflake. And it may be starting to get brittle from being blown around too hard.
Whenever a word is overused, it's in danger of becoming a label - a term that loses it's original meaning as someone preempts it as a shortcut to proving their point. Recently, we at CTI linked to a story about a Hawaiian girl who was praised for returning $1,000 that she found in a thrift store videocassette. I was pleasantly surprised to see the term "honesty" actually used in the article. Working in character education in the elementary school setting over the past ten years, I witnessed the development of several character "labels" that seem to get slapped on whenever someone, particularly a young student, is praised for "being good." "Respect" is a huge one, and I would have half expected the girl to be praised for "respecting" the thrift store by turning in the money. In many varied circumstances, I have heard people encouraged to show "respect" to others when what the speaker really meant was to calm down, pay attention, play nice, follow the rules, give others a chance, wait for the team, etc. After hearing this repeatedly, I even found myself falling into the same trap, as the only word that came to mind tell the students to "be good" was - "Have some respect!" Verbal shortcuts are very contagious.
Last week, I had the opportunity, as a fairly new staff member, to attend the Basic and Advanced Implementation Seminars offered by CTI. I was initially somewhat sceptical of the amount of time that was spent coaching the attendees on the process of "Character Recognitions" in the workplace. OK, so it's important for employees to see that good character will be held up and praised, but isn't that a fairly simple activity? Well...it turns out not really. The corporate managers and directors taking the training didn't seem to think it was a waste of time. I slowly caught the picture that in many of these organizations, there were no concepts in employee's minds that could be consistently appealed to when asking for good character in the workplace. So Character Recognitions were the tool that would be used to build that "vocabulary of character" that could be used over and over to articulate precise, desirable behaviors and attitudes.
A vocabulary of character. Suddenly, things started to take shape in my mind. Our fourty-nine character qualities are not an attempt to create an impossibly complex and un-achievable standard of living. We're not simply trying to make it more difficult than Character Counts with their Six Pillars, or Character Education Network with their 11 consolidated traits. Rather, we realize that people need a way to talk clearly about issues of character. For many, the concepts are simply not there in order to think and speak about this part of their life. They don't need the shortest possible list of words to use in every possible situation - they already have that. They need articulate words and concepts to shape their thinking and conversation as they pursue a culture of character.
So each of our resources are not so much a point to be memorized and mastered, but simply material designed to further refine and define the mental image that we have of good character - and of specific ways that it can be acted out in different situations. Each resource should enable people to think more clearly, speak more motivationally, and act more decisively as we make character a part of everyday life.
Whether we use CTI resources or not, though, let's start putting some more substance - more substantive words and thoughts - out there amidst the blizzard of vocabulary being used to articulate good character.
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