By Mary-Justine Lanyon
Editor
For more than 25 years, members of the Mountain Sunrise Rotary Club have been impressing upon students in the Rim of the World Unified School District the importance of the choices they make as young people.
“This program,” Rotarian Geoff Hopper told Mountain High students, “is to give you the opportunity to explore options in the choices you face.”
Hopper was joined by fellow Rotarians Laura Dyberg, Corina Colan, Priscilla Williams, Davis Hopper, Rick Miller and Lisa Shaughnessy as they presented the program to students at both Mountain High School and Rim of the World High School recently.
They took the students through a number of interactive exercises over the course of two days.
Using a rotary phone as a prop, Hopper asked how many apps it has. With the answer of just one – to call people – he told the students it’s like high school. “You don’t have a lot of apps at first but you accumulate them. That’s the whole thing about the Choices program – we will demonstrate there are many opportunities available to you. You may choose them or you may not.”
Asking how many of the students feel as though they have been stuck in school forever, Dyberg reminded the students it is just a little part of their lives. Unrolling a timeline, three volunteers demonstrated just how much of their lives is before them. “Whatever you decide now,” Dyberg said, “affects the rest of your life, including retirement.”
Under the direction of Rotarian Laura Dyberg, three students rolled out a timeline showing how long their current choices will affect their lives.
Other activities included reviewing cards with 30 different factors on them – appearance, ethnicity, interests, religion. The question to the students: Which ones can you control? The answer was they have control over at least half of the factors listed.
One of those 30 will impact their lives the most: self-discipline. Mastering self-discipline, the students were told, will lead them to the right way to master the others.
In another activity, the students were led through an exercise where one was a high school dropout, one a high school graduate and one a person with education beyond high school. They were presented with a number of jobs – ranging from a video game designer to a food server. Of the nine jobs they were presented with, the dropout was eligible for two, the graduate for four and the person with additional education for all of them.
“It’s so easy to quit,” Hopper told the students. “I’ve done well because I refused to quit. The real world doesn’t care about your excuses.”
How much does it cost to be on your own out in the real world? One student, playing the part of a high school dropout who was working at a minimum-wage job, was taken through an exercise listing all the expenses she would face – housing, food, utilities, taxes. There was little left for transportation, clothing. And she couldn’t afford to go to the movies and had no chance of getting a car.
The Choices program also addresses time management. Using rocks, gravel and sand to fill up a container, the students learned about activities that are not optional, not flexible (rocks), those that have flexibility as to when you do them (gravel) and those that are totally optional (sand). By putting the rocks in the container first, they were able to add the gravel and finally the sand.
As the program drew to an end, the Rotarians shared S.M.A.R.T. goals with the students – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, Timely. They asked the students to complete the form with their goals for when they are 25 and how they will achieve them.
0 Comments