CHOICES
We love to expose the Metro students to people who aspire to excellence and exhibit true leadership.
When Sen. Barack Obama recently spoke at the Columbus Convention Center, our students were in the audience. No matter your political views, it’s easy to recognize the value of providing high school students with an opportunity to see a presidential candidate in person.
The trouble comes when they have to choose between two valuable opportunities (not a bad problem to have!). One day in November, the students had to choose between spending time with two award-winning individuals, both with the ability to enlighten students in significant ways.
Battelle brought board member Russell Hulse to Metro to spend time with physics students in a small, informal setting that allowed for questions and discussion. Dr. Hulse won the Nobel Prize in Physics with the discovery of the first binary pulsar (a twin star system) in 1974. To prepare, students read Dr. Hulse’s Nobel lecture and visited OSU’s planetarium where they learned more about pulsars from astronomy professors.
On the same day, OSU hosted award-winning author and composer James McBride at the Fawcett Center and invited local tenth-graders to hear him play and discuss his books. In language arts class, many of our students read his bestseller The Color of Water, a tribute to his mother, a white Jewish woman from Poland who married a black man and raised 12 children, seeing them all through college.
Two exceptional, exciting opportunities… how does a student decide which is more valuable? The decision is as individual as our students.
One important lesson they learn here is to make good choices for their own learning experience. “Responsible Decision Maker” is one of the Six Metro Habits of Mind, that encourages the students to be in charge of their learning experiences and to know what would be most valuable for them.
- - Posted December 6, 2007 - -
Diana Wolterman is on a two-year special assignment to Metro High School, where she will play a key role in furthering the collaboration between the private sector and education, including special projects to connect Battelle staff with the activities in the school, assisting with tours and visits, developing and implementing new experience-based curriculum support, and helping to document the process of creating a new STEM-focused learning experience. Diana also will document Battelle’s successes and missteps at Metro to help the organization learn from the experience and make good decisions going forward at Metro and in other educational activities.