When I was a little girl, Earth Day was a big event.  My mom would always bake a cake and decorate the top with little plastic circus animals and lots of food coloring-rich frosting.  We would often plant a tree at school or flowers in our front yard and sometimes would take a walk in the nearby "forest," which was really a creek with a smattering of trees, to reflect on the beauties of nature.  When I was a teacher, I carried on the tradition (albeit without the plastic animal-topped cake--I was teaching my students about nutrition, gosh darn it!).  We read books about Earth and did science projects.  One year we planted bean seeds and incorporated their germination process into a longer unit on life cycles, recording scientific observations, data collection, and graphing.  I also taught my fourth graders about global warming (and really didn't mean to scare Pearl--she had a soft heart). 

Reflecting on past Earth Days reminded me of how fun, and even mystical, learning can be.  Earth Day is the perfect excuse to wonder.  When kids are given the space to explore and ponder topics that seem incomprehensible, it often sparks a healthy curiosity that encourages them to seek learning on their own.  After I taught about global warming, Joshua and Luis would share books on the topic during silent reading.  It was probably the sense of danger and the unknown that intrigued them.  As a teacher, it was a thrilling moment when I overheard them discussing what they thought the world would look like when they were grown.  Little did they know that they were having a "book talk!"  Their primary motivation was to explore a topic that was beyond what they could comprehend and they were loving the exercise. 

Wishing you time to wonder today. 

Editor's Note: By giving donors complete creative control over gifts geared towards high-need K-12 students, The Generation Project hopes to facilitate personal connection between donors and the kids they are helping.  As part of that effort, we are letting some of the students that we hope to affect to use this blog to write about their lives, their schools, and anything else they find interesting. Our hope is that, by posting kids' own words, we can give you, the donor, some insight into the interests and passions of the students you would be affecting with your gifts. To highlight the kids' own words, their posts are uncensored and unedited and represent the views of the kids and adolescents that authored them, NOT The Generation Project. 

This post was written by Ivan Guzman, a 15-year-old from the Bronx.  Read more about Ivan here:

Nick Kristof has written a fantastic column about some recent studies suggesting that I.Q.--long thought to be at largely a byproduct of genetics--is, in fact, quite malleable.  Some of the research Kristof highlights is already being reflected in public policy.  For example, Kristof cites research showing that childrens' IQ scores rise dramatically if they are exposed to aggresive educational interventions in early childhood.  That research largely validates a centerpiece of President Obama's educational agenda: increased funding and a renewed emphasis on early childhood education. 

More interesting is Kristof's suggestion that intelligence is malleable even through adolescence.  He notes that junior-high kids who are told that "I.Q. is expandable, and their intelligence is something they can shape" tend to work harder and get better grades than those who are allowed to believe that their intelligence is preordained by genetics.  In other words, students who believe that that hard work will make them smarter, get smarter.  Students who think that their intellectual destiny is pre-ordained, on the other hand, are more likely to wind up on the low end of the IQ scale.  Kristof thus proposes an "intellectual stimulus" program that would both bolster early childhood education and teach students of all ages that their intelligence is in their own hands. 

I would only add one thing to Kristof's proposed "intellectual stimulus": in order to get kids to believe that they control their intellectual destiny, we need to give them ample opportunities to experience intellectual success.  As the Times reports today, kids need more than positive reinforcement--they need confidence. Adults can preach malleable intelligence until we're blue in the face, but there is nothing more powerful for kids than actually seeing that their hard work is paying off.  And to give students the best chance at experiencing academic success, we're going to need to give them a wide array of academic experiences. Let's face it: some kids are going to grasp math more easily than others, while others are going to have an easier go at reading.  Still other kids are just going to be more interested in science, social studies, art, or theatre, and are going to thus be more motivated to put in the hard work in those subjects.  A diverse curriculum that appeals to diverse interests and inclinations gives students many more chances to quickly experience success. 

By way of example: when I was teaching 8th grade social studies in the Bronx, I had a student named Ricardo (not his real name) who had struggled academically throughout middle school.  Ricardo's reading scores were low, his math scores were low, and his grades were low.  In most of his classes, he'd always make a good-faith effort to work hard, but he would get frustrated and give up fairly easily.   For whatever reason, though, Ricardo loved analyzing historical documents--and he was pretty good at it.  As Ricardo realized he was able to succeed at historical analysis, he started working harder at it.  Whenever he got a B+ on a paper in my class, he'd beg to do it over again so he could get the A.  And over the course of the year, Ricardo's other teachers reported that his overall work ethic had changed.  Rather than giving up when things got tough, Ricardo was buckling down and trying his best, because he'd seen the effects of success first-hand in social studies class.

I'm not trying to fetishize social studies here, because that was just Ricardo's experience.  I also noticed a change in my other students' work habits after they saw their hard work pay off on one of Ms. Rae's science projects, or one of Ms. Batchelor's literacy essays.  The point is that our message "hard work pays off" is so much easier to convey when hard work has, in the past, actually paid off for a child.  And you never know what transformative subject or project or paper is going to give a child that first taste of success.  As an organization, that's part of what The Generation Project brings to the table: we encourage our donors to think about what co or extra-curricular experiences led to success, and design a gift that could recreate that experience for kids that might not otherwise have those opportunities.

The more opportunities we can give kids to work hard and succeed at something, the greater the chance is that they'll internalize that all-important message that intelligence is malleable.  Conveying that message may indeed be our ultimate goal, but we need to give kids as many different pathways to realizing that message as we can.  And hence, the inspiration for this blog title, courtesy of J-Live: 
"Ask yourself, even if you got one target, Ain't you better off with two darts?"¹

This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but it is the coolest news story I've read in awhile, so I thought it warranted a blog post:

According to Chinese Radio International, some Somali pirates were gearing up to attack a convoy of Chinese merchant and navy ships in the Gulf of Aden.  But suddenly, out of nowhere, thousands of dolphins  swam between the pirate ship and the merchant vessel, foiling the pirates' attack.  According to the Chinese radio report (via the New York Times):