COUNT ON IT - SCHOOL COUNTS

Ever watch puppies and kittens? The puppies wrestle each other and fetch balls; kittens stalk, chase and pounce upon anything that moves. This is of course, not just ‘playtime’ for these animals, but an opportunity for them to learn the skills and establish the social framework they will use as grown-up animals.

Babies are no different. Every day, babies learn enormous amounts of material. How to walk, how to make sounds, how to use whatever language their brains ‘hear.’ As they grow, they learn to socialize with their family members and eventually with their friends in pre-school or kindergarten.

As they learn language, they experiment with the muscles that make sound, then they practice different sounds, link the sounds together to make words, and eventually implement the rules of grammar their brains have mapped out. Young children in English-speaking environments, for example, quickly learn that the general rule for past tense is ‘add ‘ed’ to a word.’ So they correctly take the concept ‘play today’ and create the concept ‘played yesterday’ in their heads. Sometimes, they apply these rules to words that have different past tense forms like ‘eat today’ and ‘eated yesterday.’ It’s fun to hear them make mistakes like that.

Numbers are the same. Very young children can count. But they start by simply reciting the words that are the numbers, and often recite them out of sequence, like one, two, four, eight, three. They also don’t really know exactly how many of something four is.

But as they grow, children are presented with opportunities to learn exactly how to speak well and that four means all but one finger on one hand. Even though you are much older - close to being an adult - you and your brain are presented with opportunities to learn what you will need to know and what you will need to be able to do as a young adult attending college or going to the workplace every day.

Every day in school you have the opportunity to learn and practice the academic content matter that you will need to use as an adult. Learning this content matter trains your brain to think. You have the opportunity to demonstrate what you have learned through the quizzes, tests and assignments your teachers give you.

There are many other things that you can learn, practice and demonstrate in school that are just as important as academic content matter. Employers often refer to these skills as ‘soft skills.’ Soft skills include traits, habits and activities that help define your character.

You can learn about the traits and habits you need to develop by viewing the School Counts modules. You can demonstrate your acquisition of some of those traits and habits by earning the School Counts Credential. And if you earn the School Counts Credential, you can take it with you to a job interview and show it to a potential employer. You might be in competition with other job candidates who might not have the School Counts Credential - and having documentation like that means you may have a better chance of getting the job!