MAKE A PLAN, SAM! (part I)
Many high school students graduate without a plan for “next steps.” Some go to college just because it seems like something they “should” do, and some don’t go to college because they’ve gotten the idea they’re done with education. But guess what! It’s up to you. And that’s the scary part.
Yep, adult life is yours. And that’s a terrific thought! You get to decide what’s good and bad, right and wrong for yourself entirely by yourself. WOW! Total freedom at once! Pretty cool, eh?
But the trouble is that it’s scary too. It’s scary because you don’t have a lot of practice with total freedom. Sometimes it feels like other people make decisions for you for so long that you don’t know how. Or maybe it feels like graduating from high school is the big accomplishment you’ve been working for. The day after graduation comes with a huge “now what?” and no answers. But that time is coming, believe me.
Graduating from high school won’t do you much good if you don’t have any answer to the “now what?” question. You’ll drift along...maybe go to college for no good reason...maybe work for no good reason...and drifting won’t get you anywhere you decided to go in your own best interests.
But there are a million careers out there! How on earth can you possibly choose? How can you know what you’re going to want to be doing when you’re 50 years old? You’re right; there are no perfect guesses. There are a million roads out there! And you can’t possibly know what you’re going to want to be doing when you’re older. But you CAN narrow it down to a road that looks right for you. You might change roads once you’re down a ways, but you can’t change roads until you’re on one!
So let’s get started!
(1/8 credit in English)
The first step to find the road of your choice is to do some self-assessment, knowing your own personality and attitudes. That sounds easy enough, doesn’t it? Who else could possibly know you better? The honest answer is no one does know you better! But do you know yourself as well as you can? Do you spend much honest time thinking about how you are the same as other people, different from other people? Can you honestly define your own personality? Can you honestly define how your personality affects you?
Job one: Click the site below to get to it:
Take at least five different “quizzes” of your choice. Keep track of the names of the quizzes you take and pay attention to the results. When you finish, type a one-page summary of your experience. Tell me 1)what you learned that you’ve never thought of, 2)whether they described you as you see yourself or differently and why, 3)what did all of the quizzes agree on about you? and 4)how would you now define your personality? Who are you deep inside? (Don’t forget to include the names of the quizzes you took!)
~and don’t forget to run both a spell check and a grammar check!
JOB TWO: Now go to www.angelfire.com/nm/barbalee (click the green again!) ~ go to content areas ~ go to guidance. Once there, start on the “huge compendium of personality tests.” Take at least ten more “quizzes.” Some of them will be easy quizzes, and some will be hard. Some will give you easy results; some will be very hard to understand. You choose the ten that you like best.
Now write and turn in a summary just like you did from the emode site.
JOB THREE: Another very important job in defining who you are is to honestly think about your skills and achievements. This time, you have to do all the “figuring out” by yourself. There is no one who can help you. Hey! More practice at making your own decisions! Answer the following questions by copying what’s below and filling in the blanks.
1. I am proud of myself because I succeeded well when I .... (try hard to include at least four things)
2. I remember getting a compliment from someone when I was told .... (try hard to include at least four things that aren’t comments about things you can’t control, like your looks or something you own.)
3. I work best when I am working with .... (people? numbers? information? things or objects?)
FINAL PROJECT AND QUIZ
It’s time to SHOW me you know who you are. You are to create a collage of yourself. It can include both pictures and words in any format you want. If you find an image on the Internet, for example, you can right-click on it and save that image. You can cut words out of newspapers and magazines; you can do that with pictures or images, too. You can use photographs or your own artwork. Your choices! This is the beginning of you make your own choices path in your curriculum. The collage must be a minimum size of typing paper, 8 1/2 by11 inches, but it can be bigger than that if you chose.
After you turn in your collage, I will ask you a minimum of ten questions in the format “What does such-and-such say about your personality?” You must respond with one or two written sentences for each question which show your understanding of yourself.
BENCHMARKS INCLUDED:13, 16, 43, 69, 74, 76, 78, 79, 82, 83, 86, 87, 90, 93, 109, 111, 114, 119, 134, 138, 139, 140, 141, 142, 143, 145, 146, 147, 148, 152, 153, 154, 157, 158, 159, 161, 163, 164, 165, 166, 174, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 258.
