FOR CHARACTER
creating schools and communities of character
                                                                                            September/October, 2005
An electronic newsletter to help make sure character counts!
                                                                                                                    Gary Smit
 

CHARACTER COUNTS! and the Six Pillars of Character are service marks of the CHARACTER COUNTS! Coalition, a project of the Josephson Institute of Ethics.  For more information about training opportunities and resources available to assist schools and communities in the integration of a character education initiative, check out their web site at: www.charactercounts.org or call them at 1-800-711-2670.

IN THIS ISSUE…

TAKE A MINUTE FOR CHARACTER

By the time you receive this, school should be back in session. No matter what position you hold, there is a time of preparation needed to get ready for a new year. Preparing for back-to-school means we have to deal with people and paper.  Aren't there times you would like to be able to clone yourself as a way of trying to get everything done? And then again, you may wish for a place to just hide from the people and the piles of paper that seem never ending. 

I too had to get ready for a new school year as August was a very busy month for me with numerous out-of-state trainings for teachers and administrators.  A few weeks ago I was in California working with an administrative team on how to build and strengthen an ethical culture for their school district. We focused on not only how to deal with people within the school system and the myriad of administrative tasks that need to be accomplished, but also addressed the increasing demands of performance expectations.

In our profession, I have found that we tend to color our daily pictures of school life with the premise, “If something will go wrong, it will.”  We get students in grades where we already have full classes and seldom in the grades where we’d love to have more. Of course, our largest classes always have the greatest number of students with special needs. The overprotective parent will be the one whose child gets injured on the playground.  Regardless of how much planning we do, there will always be situations over which we seem to have no control. Dozens of meetings and piles of Xeroxed memos will not eliminate problems like these from occurring. The longer we are in this business, we realize this to be fact.

What it really comes down to is our attitude toward life and our response to the challenges we face on a daily basis. According to the Webster dictionary, the word "attitude" means "an internal position or feeling with regard to something else." Other words often used as synonyms are: "disposition, feeling, mood, opinion, sentiment, temper, tone, perspective, frame of mind, outlook, view, or morale."  Airplane pilots often use "attitude" to describe their horizontal relationship with the runway when they land. If their attitude isn’t aligned properly, the plane will make contact with the ground at the wrong angle and it will cause them to crash. In essence, our attitude is the inward disposition toward other things, such as people or circumstances. As with an airplane, attitude is applied whenever you must deal with something other than ourselves. Too often our attitude is such is that we tend to blame our circumstances rather than our choice we have to make.. If you dwell on the negative, your attitude will reflect the same. It was Charles Swindoll who said, “I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% how I react to it.

At the California training, we spent time dealing with issues around people, paper and performance. In a brainstorming exercise, the administrators came up with what we called the “Top Ten Laws For Dealing with People While Encouraging Improved Performance.”  Let me share with you the list:

1.    Treat others the way you want to be treated.
2.    Remember that change is a door that only can be opened from the inside.
3.    Carefully manage your time – it’s your scarcest and least renewable resource.
4.    Don’t ask someone to do something you wouldn’t do yourself.
5.    Use “we” rather than “I” when talking about your school or department.
6.    Keep all promises – don’t promise more than you can deliver.
7.    Recognize the reality that perception is everything.
8.    Practice what you preach and preach what it is that you practice.
9.    Don’t burn bridges you may have to cross again.
10.   If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten…even a dead fish can swim downstream.

Maybe there is a pearl of wisdom here that will spark your interest this year in how you approach the people, piles of paper and performance expectations.

Gary Smit
gsmit@forcharacter.com

Backpackin4kids

In this issue I would like to share with you information about a service project that could be a way for a school or a youth service organization to demonstrate the pillar of caring.  Our son, Jason, is a middle school teacher who has started an organization called backpackin4kids.  Their goal is simple.  Backpackin4kids is an organization accepting donated backpacks and school supplies to be delivered to kids living in many different poor countries and cities around the world. These backpacks are used for a student’s schooling or to carry objects for daily chores. With the devastation in New Orleans and along the coast of Mississippi, the project is also committed to collecting backpacks and school supplies for distribution to the children who are victims of the devastation from Katrina. If you are interested in learning more about this organization, you can check out the web site at www.backpackin4kids.com.

HOW TO BUILD A SUCCESSFUL MENTORING PROGRAM

MENTOR has just released a comprehensive tool kit that offers step-by-step instructions that programs can follow to implement key four components of effective mentoring practice: Program Design and Planning; Program Management; Program Operations; and Program Evaluation. It also contains a CD with more than 160 tools and templates that mentoring programs can customize to suit their individual program needs. Programs can use these checklists to see how well they are progressing in implementing the components. Organizations can download the tool kit for free at: http://www.mentoring.org/program_staff/eeptoolkit/index.php

INFORMATION YOU CAN USE

IMPLEMENTATION IDEAS
IDEAS FOR ENCOURAGING DIALOGUE AMONG CHILDREN
3rd grade - 5th grade
·    Divide the children into pairs
·    Give to each child a small toy or object. Have them set it in the circle (of tape) and as they do have them state one benefit of being truthful.
·    Blindfold one partner and direct the other partner to verbally guide his friend through the toys in the circle without stepping on them.

DIALOGUE
·    What did your guide do to help you?
·    Why was it easy/hard to trust your partner?
·    Did you want to peek and why?
·    What are some things we can do to become trusted by others?
·    How do you feel when people come to believe and depend on you?
·    Describe how you think people feel when they know they can trust you.
By Mary Jo Williams, 4H Specialist, University of Missouri
 
MAKE CHARACTER COUNT IN THE CLASSROOM
High School ACTIVITIES USING QUOTATIONS
At a number of inservice presentations, I will begin with an activity using quotations.  You can take a dozen quotes, put them on a sheet and ask participants to circle the quote that has the most meaning for them. The participants then take time to meet two other people and share their quote while responding to questions like these:

This activity can also be adapted for use with students. 
Another activity using quotations is as follows. Grade level: 2nd and up
In the "telephone" game, students sit or stand in a circle and one whispers a quote in the ear of the person on the right. That person repeats it to the next person, and so on until the wisdom goes around the circle. After the final student recites the message as he or she heard it, show the group the original quote. Did the quote remain accurate or did it get garbled? If it is an exact match, award the group one point.


CHARACTER COUNTS! has developed sets of mini-posters containing quotations that can be used for these activities or for just posting in classrooms. You can find the posters at the CC! web site.
For other activity ideas, go to: www.charactercounts.org/ideas/ideatoc.htm

Lessons on Constitution Day and Citizenship Day

You may be interested to know that free, ready-to-use lessons designed to help educators fulfill a new federal mandate are now posted at the Center's website: http://www.civiced.org/byrd/ . This federal mandate requires that every school-from elementary and secondary schools to colleges and universities-provide instruction on the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, September 17, the anniversary of the document's signing.  The mandate extends also to federal agencies. September 17 falls on a Saturday this year: Constitution Day may be observed the day before or at any time around that date.

The lessons, which were developed in collaboration with the American Association of School Administrators (AASA), are available for kindergarten through twelfth grade. They contain multiple ideas for discussion topics, exercises, questions, and activities, as well as short background readings and were adapted from the Center's We the People: The Citizen and the Constitution text and Foundations of Democracy curriculum. 

CHARACTER COUNTS! WEEK, OCTOBER 16-22

October 16-22, 2005 is the 12th annual CHARACTER COUNTS! Week, when schools, youth groups and entire communities across the U.S. will celebrate good character. The CC! National Office wants to help you plan meaningful and fun activities for the Week -- and throughout the year. To that end, they have developed many free CC! Week resources you can use.

Go to www.charactercounts.org/ccweek and register to receive a 10-percent discount off CC! Week posters and vinyl banners, and to gain access to the free downloadable resources, including:

COMMENTARY BY MICHAEL JOSEPHSON
Getting Started

Chris’s parents were proud of him when he graduated from college.  But it’s been six months and Chris hasn’t gotten a job yet. In fact, he hasn’t looked seriously. He has no idea what he wants to do and he’s thinking of grad school. He’s living at home with his parents and things are getting tense, especially with his father, who accuses Chris of being lazy and afraid to enter the real world.

Chris thinks his dad is being totally unreasonable. After all, he’s only young once and he needs some "space." During a recent argument Chris said, "I’m not you, Dad. I have my own way of doing things. I want a job I enjoy."

His dad replied, "That’s a nice idea, but in the end they call it `work` because it’s about making a productive living -- not having fun."

There are many youngsters like Chris who are having trouble getting started with a serious job and becoming self-reliant. Some, like Peter Pan, just don’t want to grow up. Some are afraid of making a wrong decision or of being rejected. Others are victims of what psychologists call "magical thinking." They believe that when the time is right everything will fall into place. So they wait for opportunity to come knocking or until they feel inspired or excited about their next step.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. What’s crucial is to begin. Things happen and opportunities appear most often when we are moving, not when we’re standing still.  Momentum is vital. Basic physics: It’s easier to alter the course of a moving object than to start movement initially. In the end, it’s not really about "finding yourself." It’s a matter of "making yourself."