Not Learning the Right Things

The Article "Rigor Redefined" by Tony Wagner was about what the people who run businesses are looking for when they higher on new workers. The article then showed how well teachers are preparing students to get 21st century jobs. From reading this article I can tell that Wagner thinks that students are not being thought the right skills to get a 21st century job.

The skills that business leaders are looking for are:
Critical Thinking and Problem Solving
Collaboration and Leadership
Agility and Adaptivity
Initiative and Entrepreneurialism
Effective Oral and Written Communication
Accessing and Analyzing Information
Curiosity and Imagination

All of these things to me are basic skills that we are just not taught to use for ourselves. We are taught what all of them are but not how to use them. In the article a lot of the leaders said that it is easy for them to give the new workers the technical information, but the workers have to know what to do with the information. I agree with this, because they can teach them the technical information, but it is up to the worker to know what to do with it and be able to make it into something bigger. There was a quote in this article that really got me "Yesterday's answers won't solve today's problems." This is so very true in my opinion, and it really goes along with the new 21st century workplace. The quote goes with the 21st century workplace because information today is always changing and old answers don't cut it. So workers need to be able to come up with their own solution to the new problems. The whole workplace has changed, and there is more competition for jobs then ever before. So if students can learn some basic critical-thinking,writing and reasoning skills, they will be much more likely to get a well paying job.

I liked reading this article, because it seems that at least a few of the teachers at my school have taken articles like this to heart. They have changed their ways of teaching to help the students better succeed. Especially my English class where our teacher is really focusing on helping us to think for ourselves. Thinking for yourself seems like the base of all the things business heads are looking for. If more teachers would realize what its going to be like when we students do get in the real world, they would change their teaching styles to help us make it.

In the end its not really all up to the teachers to change their ways of teaching. We students should change our ways of learning too. By reading articles like this we can see what we need to know how to do. Then change our learning, so that no matter how the teacher teaches, we can take what we need to from the lesson.