March 2018 Superintendent's Blog Guest Post: Áine Kern, Sage Creek High School

March 2018 Guest Post: Áine Kern, Sage Creek High School

Each month, a student from one of our high schools will write a guest post for the Superintendent Blog. The students will be asked to reflect on one of the characteristics described in our Graduate Profile. This month, Sage Creek High School student Áine Kern reflects on the characteristic of “Critical Thinker.”


Carlsbad Unified Graduate Profile: Critical Thinker

“Graduates are inquisitive. Graduates have the passion and vigor for learning that will fuel them through new opportunities and challenges. They notice; they wonder; they figure things out.”

Critical thinking is a sort of innovative problem-solving. It’s pushing your mind and even your body to find the maximum-benefit solution to any problem, whether it’s in a trigonometry class or a poetry club meeting. It’s striving to achieve more, to make it further in life, to leave your name behind on work you can be proud of.

Most importantly, especially for a student, critical thinking is recognizing that no one is exactly like you; no one is going to agree with all you think, do, and say. You’re a complex individual with a background no one else could exactly mirror; what’s beautiful about school― as well as often frustrating― is that a campus is a Petri dish of hundreds and hundreds of different perspectives, ideas, and insights. They clash sometimes; more often, they work together to create something new and creative.

Critical thinking is arguably the most important skill students must master before leaving their homes, their cities, and, ultimately, their comfort zones. If students are only trained to follow directions without question, then all we would have achieved is a motionless society, never expanding to help more people or better society. Humans are not meant to be at a standstill. We would have died off long ago if people had stopped thinking critically and seeking solutions.

Every day as a student, my peers and I are pushed in biomedical innovations class to find new remedies for medical ailments, inspired in literature class to find new interpretations and meanings for old stories, challenged in government class to justify and defend our ideas within the context of current American politics and society.

In the workforce and in higher education, graduates from Carlsbad are able to problem solve independently; we’ve learned to utilize any resource available and gain expertise through experience. The curriculum at Sage Creek, at least, is very hands-on with working on real-time issues like diabetes, healthcare system problems, analyzing prose and recognizing fallacies in current speeches. My time in high school has been a largely independent strain of learning: fewer lectures and more projects.

Admittedly, the projects can be burdensome. They’re time-consuming, focused on foreign subjects, and challenging. However, even as I struggle through the work, I can see how it’s all preparation for a college thesis, a company innovation, anything in the workforce or the college life that would have more damaging consequences than a bad grade if it went awry.

Even now, before any of my peers have graduated, I can easily envision them becoming successful speechwriters, engineers, architects, and doctors. My classmates never hesitate to ask questions whenever confronted with an intricate problem or confusing concept; they always step up to meet the challenge whenever it arises.

I’ve seen my peers build robots, construct lyres, invent germ-killing light mechanisms, write poetry, create clubs, and strive to be more than just run-of-the-mill students in Carlsbad. They work jobs outside class, they build foundries and melt metals, they direct plays, they write stories, and they intern in hospitals.

As a Carlsbad Unified student, I spend the majority of my time within a community of overachievers, a city of never-settlers, a school of critical thinkers. And I’m definitely the better for it.


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Áine Kern will graduate from Sage Creek High this coming June and plans to major in Classics and Literature in college. She currently edits opinion articles for The Sage.

March 2018 Message from the Superintendent

The Great Kindness Challenge

A few weeks ago I was pleased to join CUSD Board members, the Carlsbad mayor and council members, and hundreds of students, teachers, and parents in celebrating the 2018 Great Kindness Challenge. With the Excalibur Dancers and CHS Drumline rallying the crowd, we formed a giant human happy face on the Carlsbad High School football field.

Jefferson Elementary School launched the first “Great Kindness Challenge” seven years ago. The school community came together to show how a week of acts of caring and goodwill could improve the school’s relationships and culture. Since that modest inaugural event, the Great Kindness Challenge has exploded into an international movement. In 2018, over ten million students, attending nearly 20,000 schools in over 100 countries, performed 500 million acts of kindness as a part of the Challenge.


The Great Kindness Challenge, a program offered through the nonprofit Kids for Peace, aims to empower students to create a culture of kindness. Kids For Peace CEO and co-founder, Jill McManigal, is a former teacher and a Jefferson parent.


This year, the Great Kindness Challenge featured a “Bus Across America” tour, starting in New York City with an appearance on Good Morning America. The Kindness Bus journey highlighted Kind Coins for Hurricane Relief, a Kids For Peace program that is funding the construction of four new playgrounds in communities impacted by last year’s destructive hurricanes. Kids For Peace has also built schools in Kenya and Pakistan.

                                 

Chad Lund, principal of Jefferson Elementary, believes that the Great Kindness Challenge helps create a positive school climate. “We focus on being kind, and kids simply know it’s how we do things.” All Carlsbad Unified schools participated in Kindness Week with a variety of activities and events. At Calaveras Hills Elementary School, the Coyote Dads group and the PTA took on a school beautification project. They created a beautiful rock garden located on the main campus walkway. Also, each class read and discussed the book Only One You. They learned that we are all special and unique as individuals, but that when we come together we form something strong and beautiful.


Students at Valley Middle School sent “Smile Grams” to their friends. Other students made “Peace Packs” to be distributed to the less fortunate in our community. School clubs assisted with a “Got Kindness?” activity in which students used strips of construction paper to describe acts of kindness that they had observed, and then built a “Chain of Kindness” with them. And ASB students gave out “Kindness Packs” to kids who performed random acts of kindness around campus. 

During Kindness Week, our next generation of leaders is learning that every person can truly make a difference, and that even a small act of kindness here can have an amazing impact throughout the world.

Kindness Matters!