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Often I have written here about St. Gregory’s long-standing commitment to leadership education, and that this year, we have taken that commitment to the next level with the formation of our new leadership institute.  A week ago we hosted our first annual Providence Corporation Youth Leadership Summit, a 12 hour leadership development program for nearly 70 attending seventh graders, representing 2o different Tucson-area schools, each of which nominated their outstanding 7th grade leaders as representatives.   The video tells the rest of the story.

Last week our seniors took the College Work Readiness Assessment for the first time; most of them very much enjoyed it, to their surprise.  Two days afterwards, I had them speak to on video about the test: please know these are their own words, entirely unscripted.

My favorite quotes:

We all found it extremely intriguing and enriching, and personally what I like about is so much is that sometimes when you are in class you think “when am I ever going to use this information” and “I cannot think of a single life experience when I would need to use this equation or this random fact from history.” But with this test, I found myself sitting in a room with a computer and have a pool of information to dive into,  which is a really great feeling and you understand and realize that what you are learning is relevant and important.  I think that this realization made it exciting and fun and has given me an almost newfound respect for the information I learn on a day to day basis.

It was nice to be able to couple together some of the common sense and life wisdom that you don’t always get to incorporate in testing and in class;   this test allowed you to couple that [wisdom] with the strictly information knowledge and that which was strictly in the documents and work it all together into a very, very nice piece.

What I found really interesting what that on this test, it was not only just “hey we are going to find out what you know” it was more “we are going to give you information and you are going to have come up with your own opinions based on this information.” (more…)