Helping students follow in Dr. Bird's footsteps

What will our Forrest Bird Charter students look like five years from now when they walk through those doors?

What about 10 years or 20 years from now?

What will education look like 10 or 20 years from now?

Will this room be full of robots wearing khaki pants and Forrest Bird Charter T-shirts?

As educators we need to ask ourselves these questions, because these students are our path into that future, taking with them the knowledge, hopes and dreams we try to give them here.

So what do we know about their future? We know it will be very different and that the rate of change they will encounter increases over time.

We know that they will have more tech gadgets and that they better know how to use them. The use of technology in learning is exploding. As we speak, students from the third world are using cell phones to access free, world class university instruction from professors at Harvard or MIT. And they are using that knowledge to get jobs that pull their families into the first world.

We know that they will have to adapt to change in their careers: that they will have to process more information, change jobs and be retrained more often.

We know that they need to be able to engage in critical thinking, work in teams to solve problems and be creative. When businesses are asked what they are looking for in the 21st century workforce they don’t tell us that they are looking for high scores on a standardized test.

Those businesses tell us they want thinkers and problem solvers and dreamers and innovators, people who think outside the box. They want someone who tries to make things better, to come up with a better design or a better idea. This does not mean that these students don’t need to learn the math and engineering skills, the communication and writing skills or the ability to present what they know. They need to be able to persist in the face of difficulty and develop the habits that will make them successful.

Ultimately, our students and the world they will live in need more people like Dr. Forrest Bird, a truly great innovator, aviator, patriot and inventor. That is why we are so proud to be part of a school that bears his name and will carry his story into the future.

We have rebuilt the entry to our school and added landscaping to create an “Invention Garden”. Over time we hope to add elements and artifacts that celebrate the spirit of innovation.

I have worked with teenagers most of my life. Sometimes the hardest thing for them is to know what they want. They all know what they don’t want but sometimes it is hard to connect the future out there with what they have to do now.

My hope for that teenager as they walk through the door in 5 or 10 or 20 years and as they pass the inventors garden that they might think, hey that could be me. It is kind of corny but maybe they could be inspired to persist a little longer on a math problem, sweat out one more edit on a paper or turn in that last assignment in Chemistry.

Our dream is that Dr. Bird’s story will go into the future with our students. Thank you.

ALAN MILLAR

Sandpoint

Administrator

Forrest M. Bird Charter Schools