Parents of teens, this is for you. Parents of younger kids, they will turn into teens before you know it. And if you’re just a big kid yourself, you might want to stay with me here.
Rare is the parent who has never wondered what their child will grow up to be. Rare I am not although I did postpone my wondering until my children were well into puberty. I might have postponed the wondering about Bryce longer – he was progressing nicely and I had faith in the process – but for a middle school teacher who volunteered the opinion that she could “see our friend Bryce doing well in a cubicle doing clearly delineated tasks exactly as he is told.” There’s nothing wrong with cubicle jobs, and they are just right for some people (see below). But Bryce was already interested in filmmaking, an outside-the-cubicle profession if ever there was one. The cubicle prophecy was only one of many factors that led us to Thomas Edison High School, the only high school in our state devoted exclusively on students with learning differences.
One of the cornerstones of Thomas Edison High School is their Transitions program, which kicks into high gear during the senior year. Transitions focuses on each student developing a plan for life after high school. All options are explored through field trips (colleges and employers), guest speakers, class instruction and hands-on experiences (all seniors enroll in community college and take an elective class and a “college survival” class). For some students, Transitions will take them down the SAT/college application path. Others will pursue community college and yet others will seek employment. (Edison’s graduate-to-college rate is 90%, far higher than the state or national average. In the hands of the right teachers and staff, learning differences are not “disabilities.”)
For Bryce, now entering his senior year, the Transitions process has begun. One of the first steps was his completion of the O*NET™ Interest Profiler.
What will your child grow up to be? The O*NET™ Interest Profiler is not a crystal ball, but rather an eerily accurate indicator of interest areas, and how those interests fall into six categories that suggest real-life jobs to which those interest can be gainfully applied. The profile consists of 180 activities to which you respond with “like” or “dislike” (not “can” or “can’t”). Your score will reflect your most cogent occupational interests. The six areas of interest are Realistic (practical, hands-on work, often outdoors), Investigative (thinking through problems, searching out facts), Artistic (jobs involving self-expression, forms, designs, patterns, often without a clear set of rules), Social (helping others with learning and personal development), Enterprising (project-oriented, especially business), and Conventional (jobs that follow set procedures, rules and standards, working with concrete data rather than concepts).
Now, many of us are sick to death of phony quizzes that attempt to sort a general population into half a dozen herds of general thinking. The Transition teachers at Edison knew some parents would be skeptical, so they encouraged us to complete the profile ourselves and see how accurately it gauged our own work interests.
Wow….
Read the full article here.
