At an inner-city high school in Chicago, 130 freshmen show up for class every day. They come from different parts of the city, different education levels and different financial situations.
Some spend two minutes walking to school. Others spend seven hours commuting back and forth.
Some read at a fourth-grade level. Others read at a ninth-grade level.
Some come from wealthy families. The majority come from poor families.
But they all go to the same school.
Why?
They want to learn from technology leaders. They want to learn from teachers who care about them. They want to learn about stuff that really matters.
CAAT had over 97% attendance during our freshman year, far higher than the average Chicago Public School attendance. This despite the fact that most kids commute an average of 3 or 4 hours a day to get to school. These kids are motivated.
“We’re trying to help them think and develop an aptitude that is entrepreneurial, that embraces risk, that embraces the out-of-the box thinking, that is rich in analytical thinking, that is rich in communications,” Howerton said. “These are skills that are necessary to be successful technology entrepreneurs, to be people who can literally change the industry, not skills or aptitudes that are necessary to just go be workers in some industry.”
During a visit from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer on June 10, student Christopher Hayes gives a multimedia presentation about the projects he’s done at the Chicago Academy for Advanced Technology this year.
When I was in the second grade, I found that it took our school a week or more to replenish the pencil vending machine by the principal’s office. You could buy pencils, two for $0.25, that had baseball or football teams, or your favorite TV show, as decoration along the outside of the pencil. But when you dropped in your quarter, it was completely random what pencils the machine would vend.
So I scraped together all the quarters I could find, and bought out the vending machine, cornering the market on pencils in our elementary school. The pencils that I bought, two for $0.25, could easily be resold for $0.25 each, doubling my money. And I could charge a premium on the pencils with the popular sports teams or TV shows, creating market demand. For weeks I carried a huge bundle of pencils in a rubber band, and became the street dealer for lead.
The school principal could have easily challenged my little business just by restocking the vending machine more quickly, but the value-add of being able to buy specific pencils would have remained. Thirty years later, I can still remember the principal calling my Mom into the office and complaining about my little enterprise… I’m grateful to this day that my Mom celebrated my entrepreneurial zeal as a seven year old.
I can relate to nearly every part of Cameron Herold’s TedX speech… I’ve spent my entire life unemployable, and probably diagnosable with most of the same disorders (ADHD, a little bipolar, etc) as most other would-be-entrepreneurs who are being dosed with Ritalin today.
Entrepreneurship isn’t just about making money, it’s about creating the solutions to solve problems and meet a need, and being unafraid of risk and failure.
The greatness of America is its entrepreneurial spirit, which has been a unique part of this country’s history since before it was founded. Taking risks, striking out on a rarely traveled path, creating value to change the the world, pursuit of a better life… these are the things to celebrate and nurture in kids, no matter how small those ambitions may seem at the time.
Students from the freshman class, who will enjoy mentoring relationships with tech leaders throughout Chicago during their four years of high school at CAAT, got a chance for some mentorship from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer visits the students of CAAT as they celebrate the completion of our first freshman class. This is an inner city high school we started to educate and inspire kids to futures of innovation, and mentorship from tech community leaders around Chicago is a key facet of the school. Having Steve visit as one of those mentors was great!
Now I can share: we’re hosting Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer at our new high school today, visiting the students of Chicago Academy of Advanced Technology, talking about their futures and technology, and announcing Microsoft donations and support of the school.
Even more than an education gap, these kids had an inspiration gap.
It’s great to have the support of Microsoft, CompTIA and so many other local companies and organizations… when we started this inner city school I was most struck by how the kids responded to new stakeholders taking an interest in their lives, to inspire them to greater challenge, to learn to wield technology and people skills in a way that transforms their lives and their world.
A nice mention of our new high school by Sandra Guy in the Chicago Sun Times over the weekend… it’s really exciting to interact with many of these kids… a huge THANK YOU to all of the companies and individuals that have helped fund and support this new school. Much work to be done, but the second freshmen class is now being recruited!
<strong><a href=”http://www.suntimes.com/technology/guy/2221622,CST-NWS-ECOL01.article” target=”_blank”>Tech-driven curriculum powers new high school :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Sandra Guy</a></strong>
I had never been interested in being “in business”. I’ve been interested in creating things.
Business is not about formality, or winning, or the bottom line, or profit, or trade, or commerce, or any of the things the business books tell you it’s about. Business is what concerns us. If you care about something enough to do something about it, you’re in business.
Would I have been happy without my successes in business? I’d like to think so. But again, it depends on what you mean by business. Would I have been happy had I not found concerns to absorb me and fascinate me and engage me every minute of my life? No, absolutely not, I’d be as miserable as sin.
If you’re an entrepreneur, you need to find a manager. Then you should move on, enjoy yourself and then set up your next enterprise.
The first law of entrepreneurial business: there is no reverse gear. No one in business can unmake anything, any more than a band can unmake a song.
Inspire your people to think like entrepreneurs, and whatever you do, treat them like adults. The hardest taskmaster of all is a person’s own conscience, so the more responsibility you give people, the better they will work for you.
Engage your emotions at work. Your instincts and emotions are there to help you. They are there to make things easier. For me, business is a ‘gut feeling’, and if it ever ceased to be so, I think I would give it up tomorrow. By ‘gut feeling’, I mean that I believe I’ve developed a natural aptitude, tempered by huge amounts of experience, that tends to point me in the right direction.
Innovation is what you get when you capitalise on luck, when you get up from behind your desk and go and see where ideas and people lead you.
Entrepreneurs take risks and break convention. Everyone wants a creative kid, right? Jonah Lehrer shares thoughts on an interesting study…
… which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn’t. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a variety of personality measures – the list included everything from “individualistic” to “risk-seeking” to “accepting of authority” – the traits mostly closely aligned with creative thinking were also closely associated with their “least favorite” students. As the researchers note, “Judgments for the favorite student were negatively correlated with creativity; judgments for the least favorite student were positively correlated with creativity.”
This shouldn’t be too surprising: Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem?
I’ve never been very good a coloring within the lines, myself.
Four years ago Fred Hoch and I sat in an airport lounge talking about how many innovative, talented students are educated in Illinois but slip away to other regions after graduation. We created an initiative to identify and recognize the fifty brightest students graduating from area colleges and universities that would eventually become leaders of the local technology community. From that first year scouring the state for the best talent we could identify, the program has now matured and tonight we celebrated the 2010 recipients of the Fifty for the Future program, an initiative of our Illinois Technology Foundation.
