Commitment + Motivation = Success

"DON'T BE A MENACE TO SOCIETY" I teach Family and Consumer Science, formerly known as Home Economics. The students are in grades 10-12. The school is in a community with a high rate of unemployment,high property taxes,high dropout rate, high illiteracy and high rate of unwed mothers and low on prospects for industries or business with tax bases equal to or greater than the industries and/or business that have closed down in the past ten years. The school is in the 2nd year of the "schools within a school" conversion. Citizens within the county feel that their hard earned money paid for taxes (a high percentage is for the school system) is not generating a high return, due to the high illiteracy in the county and the low test scores of the students.

The majority of the students in the school are from single family homes and when I mentioned to them the contents of The Bond, they all started saying, "I want to read that book", and I told them that they could. It is extremely difficult to share one book with three classes of students, with twenty in each class. I mentioned this to a facilitator on today and she told me about your program, and I thought, hey, they could really help us out by hooking us up with the books. The students were amazed at the friendships formed, the motivation and determination to be successful, and how the author's lives mirrored theirs regard of the ethnicity of the authors. Also when talking about "The Bond", it hit home with most of the males as to how they are emulating their absent fathers and they just don't know it. The females thought is was cool because the book discusses how the treatment of a male by his father greatly influences his treatment of his wife/friend, and/or their children or future children.

The resources needed are the books, Beat the Streets, Pact and The Bond. While just briefly discussing these books, the students showed great enthusiasm and asked if they could read them. I think that these books will be both an eye opener and tug at their heart strings simultaneously and should also exert some influence in the choices they make in all their environments. They should also reinforce the fact that decisions made today whether positive or negative, can affect you today and years from now. These books can change the thinking, behaviors, and attitudes of teens, from being negative to positive and this positive energy can be used to help them to become productive contributors to society, not takers and users.

Given the needs of the community,the changing of these students lives can result in one less dropout, one less unwed mother, one less domestic abuse situation, one less illiterate citizen. The changing of these students can lead to more doctors, lawyers, educators,chemists, researchers,musicians,artists, etc. The cure for cancer, heart disease, Parkinson's Disease, MS, birth defects and deformities, reversal global warming, discovery and production of other fuel alternatives and DNA discoveries can be found by these students because they realized that "THEY DO AND CAN MAKE A DIFFERENCE IN THE LIVES OF OTHERS AND ULTIMATELY IN THE WORLD"