Excerpt from Wired 'Grasshopper project'

Born in 1971 in South Africa, Elon Musk is an American entrepreneur who is most notable for founding the company X.Com (which is now known as PayPal). He also founded: SpaceX, which manufactures space launch vehicles which are replacing NASA's space shuttle program; Tesla Motors, which developed the Tesla Roadster, the first electric car to go to production; and Solar City, which is the largest supplier of solar energy systems in the USA. He has a net worth of 2.4 billion dollars. The following is an excerpt from an interview with him in the November 2011 issue of Wired:


Chris Anderson: So how do you do it? What's your process?

Elon Musk: Now I have to tell you something, and I mean this in the best and most inoffensive way possible: I don't believe in process. In fact, when I interview a potential employee and he or she says that "it's all about the process," I see that as a bad sign.

Chris Anderson: Oh no. I'm fired.

Elon Musk: The problem is that at a lot of big companies, process becomes a substitute for thinking. You're encouraged to behave like a little gear in a complex machine. Frankly it allows you to keep people who aren't that smart, who aren't that creative.

I was interested in this interview partly because I feel that we have many students in the program for which process and proper procedure are an anathema   I don't confuse rejecting procedure with intelligence, and I
DO believe that many of my students need to learn strategies for working with systems, but I wonder if we should be careful to recognize that challenging accepted practice is sometimes a necessity.

Discussion on delayed gratification

This TED talk "Don't eat the marshmallow" explores the theory that the ability to delay gratification is one of the most essential ingredients for success in life. How does this concept apply to school?

Some students question de Posada's definition of "success", and wonder if it is the same as theirs, but most of them found this 6 minute TED Talk interesting and provocative.

Adolescent Brain TED talk

We recently watched this TED talk about adolescent brain development.

Some take-away points

1. Adolescence is an important period in one's brain development
2. Grey matter is pruned by activities that are typically engaged with, so the greater the variety of engagement the better.
3. It is very difficult for adolescents to gain perspective.

Some points made by GOLD students

1. While point #2 may be valid, this should not be used as a reason to limit our time on games/computres, because tasks in games are similar to tasks we will have later in real life.
2. The speaker argues that her evidence leads to the conclusion that more of the world's adolescents should be in school, but perhaps they should be out of school, and engaged in more active, creative and real-world endeavours.

Review of discussion on Self-Advocacy

Some self-advocacy hints

• Do your self-advocacy before/after class, it is much easier and less stressful then doing it in front of 29 students.
• Self advocacy is linked to knowledge about our own learning profile, not personal preferences
• "because of my written output issues, these problems will take me about 2 hours" NOT "I hate long problem sets"
• Teachers assign work to help students learn, so try to find a way to learn what the teacher is trying to get you to learn: "would it be possible for you to point out the 5 most challenging questions from the set?"

Farewell to our grads of 2012

Congratulations to GOLD graduates of 2012:

• Natalie
• Rama
• Nick
• Dagan
• Wyn
• Stuart
• Daniel H
• Jack

GOLDs who moved to other schools

• Meaghan
• Cameron

Also congratulations to Jazz, former GOLD and PW's 2012 Merit Award Scholar.

GOLD Info Nights - 1st Date Set:

Thursday, November 21st, 2013 @ Prince of Wales Library (7 pm).

The GOLD Information Nights are an opportunity for grade students and their parents to find out more about the programs at David Thompson and Prince of Wales.

Prospective students SHOULD be present--this is quite important--they will have an opportunity to meet some of the current GOLD students from each program and hear for themselves what "actually" happens in the GOLD rooms and in each school.

Staff from each program (Chris Bromige from PW & Jennifer Jack from DT) will be present for both evenings.

General format for these meetings is a short presentation from the teachers regarding the broad outlines of the programs, special attributes of each school, and the referral process. Then there will be a question and answer session with current Goldies fielding the questions.

Thanks

Firstly, thanks to Dana Kohn, who spearheaded a thrust of donations to assist the program's operations this year. A total of $340 was donated, and there should be tax receipts coming from head office sometime in the next few months(!).

Our first move was to subscribe to Wired and the Utne Reader. This leaves about $240 left to spend. We can, apparently, get Popular Science through PW's Library at no cost.

For the remainder of the money? I'm open to ideas--we thought we could spend a bit of it on room decoration--update some of the posters, print and frame pictures of students past and present... Thought we could use some of it to purchase exciting things like tissues and hand sanitizer.