In the past couple of weeks, we’ve announced a new course that I will teach next year for all members of the Colorado Academy junior class. Its called "Life, Leadership, and Legacy."

 

We have found that as juniors become immersed in the intensive college process, their thinking can become limited by the sometimes-narrowing confines of just "getting into college." Our job as educators at CA is to help and guide students through that process, but also to help these young adults begin to view the world more broadly.  Our goal is to help students tackle tough questions; to think differently about how they arrive at answers; to examine the kinds of daily dilemmas that require people to call upon ethical judgments, strong will and character, experiences of their own, and the expertise of others. In keeping with our efforts around school culture, we want our students to aspire to and live up to higher ideals.

 

None of this comes at the expense of our academic teaching. CA is, at its core, a liberal arts- and sciences-based, college preparatory institution. But we also know that we will have failed our mission as a school if we are not preparing students with other, critical skills. In a recent Thomas Friedman editorial in the New York Times titled, “How to Get a Job at Google,” (click here)  Friedman interviews Laszlo Bock, the Senior VP of People Operations for Google. Read the piece to the end – taking to heart Bock’s emphasis on the importance of leadership, humility, collaboration, adaptability and loving to learn and re-learn. It is no surprise that Bock’s list of five hiring attributes is akin to CA’s 6C’s.

 

I will be excited to share my thoughts, as well as those of our students, as we embark on this new seminar course; I am even more excited to continue to follow CA’s alumni to see just where in the world their skills and talent will take them. See below for the course description.