What Does It Mean To Be Successful In The Future?

Listening in on my Dad's phone meetings did help me give some understanding that I need good communication and critical thinking skills if i want to be a good candidate for a job. The article "Rigor Redifined" by Tony Wagner explains how having these types of skills can get you highly recongnized in the world of business. Wagner interviewed business leaders and kept recieving the same response over and over. What most business owners are looking for in an employee is their critical thinking and problem solving, collaboration and leadership, agility and adaptability, initiative and enterpreneuralism, effective oral and written communication, accesing and analyizing information, and curiosity and imagination. All these skills are not regularly teached in a classroom. In one classroom Wagner sat in on a teacher asks his students, "Give three reasons why the Iron Triangle may be criticized as undemocratic." And no one replies to that question. But when the teacher asks, "OK, who can give me a definition of the Iron Triangle?" Then a student answers, "The military-industrial-congressional complex."

Students these days are hardly ever looking outside the box. They don't stretch their thinking enough and only want to pass classes and never want to work hard for acheivements. One thing that I had to learn when coming into highschool is, critical thinking. I had never been taught to think for myself or elaborate on simple things further then what was needed. Now i think using this skill in my english class is positive thing that will help me in many ways through life. It has assited me in History with annotations and forced me to know what is going on in the book. My other classes don't teach this skill. They teach what they have to through notes and take the easy way out. Notes do help me, but I think combing that with leadership and teamwork it might benefit me in the long run. Teachers should think more often about the reality of the world and what skills you need to master to get a good job. Isn't that why they teach? So they can see us succeed in life?