Archive for July 5th, 2007
Soft Skills/My First Generation Gap
July 5th, 2007
I’ve been reading a lot about soft skills lately and must admit this is a relatively new term for me. I’m not sure if I’m just suddenly getting old, but I find myself responding to the idea of “soft skills” with thoughts of “well, in my day. . . or when I went to school. . .” and thinking about the role of our schools today.
Soft skills are defined in the June 12, 2007 edition of Education Week, pg. 8, as “professionalism and work ethic. . .demonstrating personal accountability and effective work habits, such as punctuality, working productively with others, time and workload management.”
I have to say that these are skills that are extremely important in my administrative position and they’re probably the skills that I’m most proficient at in my work. I also have to say that these are not skills that I learned in school. I learned them at home. Now I promise not to go down that road of “it’s the parent’s job”, I get that it’s our responsibility when parenting is lacking. But honestly, these are largely skills to which every person in my family held true.
I grew up in a blue collar town, a coal mining town, and every person I knew and looked up to worked in an office, the coal mine, the steel mills. My grandfather worked as a postman and later became postmaster and I thought that was akin to being the president of the United States.
Here’s the thing about growing up in that atmosphere, everyone worked. That’s what defined them, that’s what was expected of me when I turned 15 years old and that’s what defines me today.
Punctuality? Cripe, it never would have entered the mind of either of my parents to go to work late. And if someone was coming to pick me up, my mother had me standing at the door 15 minutes early so they wouldn’t have to wait for me. I don’t think my father ever missed work, except when he was hospitalized after a cave in at the coal mine. Time and workload management? Again, they did the job required, no matter what it took. My point is that I grew up knowing that everyone worked, they gave everything they had to the job, and that’s just the way it was. I simply didn’t question it.
I realize that there’s a balance in life. But soft skills are something I’ve just taken for granted my entire life. I’ll have to do some serious thinking about how to build those into our instruction. If I can only get students to show up to school on time. Even with our positive incentives and negative consequences, that remains a challenge. Now in my day, my parents never would have tolerated my tardiness. . .maybe I am getting old.
