Daily dose of wisdom has positive effect

"Daily dose of wisdom has positive effect on kids"

Every morning at 8:00 am, just minutes after the bell has rung to mark the beginning of a new school day, students at Steele Middle School hear the hum of the school intercom and then these words: "Good morning, Steele School. This is Mr. Doctor with a few words of wisdom."

What follows are, indeed, words of wisdom from some of the world's great minds: Confucius, Sophocles, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Cesar Chavez, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey and others. All are great thinkers, movers and shakers in their own right, and all have contributed to humanity in some constructive way.

The morning reading at Steele Middle School is from Project Wisdom, a collection of daily readings... that prompts students to consider their behavior, their thinking and their choices. In it's manual, Project Wisdom says that its daily messages can help students by building their "character muscles" and by reminding them "to be responsible, courteous and caring human beings."

All the readings in Project Wisdom deal with themes that are relevant to the lives of adolescents and teens: positive thinking, tolerance, believing in yourself, taking responsibility for your choices, completing projects, courtesy and kindness. There are special readings that correlate with special days like Veteran's Day, National Black History Month, the first day of school and the start of a new marking period. And every now and then, mixed in among the important words of national heroes and the world's greatest philosophers, there's even a sprinkling of quotations from fun-loving fictional characters like Jiminy Cricket and Peter Pan.

So at the beginning of every school day, Assistant Principal Ken Doctor dishes out a little wisdom to the 815 students at Steele Middle School. His morning message, though it lasts only 60 seconds, has had an impact. "This project has had an effect on students," said Doctor, who believes that the early morning readings change the focus of the day by giving students something positive to think about and to strive for."

"Though it's hard to say just how much the students are influenced by the reading," continued Doctor, "I can tell you that it's had a noticeable effect. On several occasions, for example, students who have been in my office for disciplinary reasons have told me that they know they didn't make the right choice. In other words, they've listed to the morning reading and they've applied its message to their own lives."

Dennis Bray, an English teacher at Steele Middle School, agrees that Project Wisdom has made a difference in the school's environment. Like other teachers at Steele, Bray arranges her morning agenda so that her first hour students can give their wholehearted attention to the morning reading. Then she goes one step farther by using the morning message as a stepping stone for her students' daily journal writing.

"It's worth the time it takes," Bray emphasized. "The journal writing is something I require students to do every day anyway, and I thought why should I make up a topic when this one touches them so deeply and is so full of meaning."

Marcus Townsend, an eighth grader at Steele, said he looks forward to the morning reading because it gives him a moment for reflection and inspiration. "It's a good thing because it makes me think," said Marcus, "and it's something to keep my mind set on the future."

Reprinted with permission

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