Austin Scholar #8: Work Harder, Not Longer
Hey, y'all!
Welcome to the Austin Scholar newsletter! To all of my new subscribers, I'm so excited and grateful that y'all are here! To all of my returning subscribers, welcome back, and thank you for the continued support.
Also– every newsletter that I sent out during the month before my birthday has been published on Substack, so you should check those out if you haven’t already!
Please forward this newsletter to other parents who want to learn ways to help make twelve years of school less painful and more fulfilling for their children.
This week from Austin Scholar...
An anecdote about a restriction that teenagers appreciate
Teenagers Should Learn How To Work Harder, Not Longer
Three sources that outline important mindsets needed to build a great work ethic
This week is about hard work, but next week I’ll write about balance :)
Austin’s Anecdote
Alpha doesn't have a "bell" that rings, telling us when class is out. There's no one telling us when it's time to switch from Science to Math. All we know is that we have ambitious goals to meet every week and we have to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B.
I’m not going to lie, though: sometimes it can be really hard to focus during the day and meet my goals. When I’m working at a table with my friends and I get stuck on a math problem, it is really easy for me to choose to talk to my friends over struggling through calculus.
One of the things that Alpha students have to learn is how to balance our freedom and agency over our education and creating enough structure so that we meet our academic goals.
In order to encourage this balance, the Alpha students and guides worked together to create the Pomodoro Room. (The Pomodoro technique is a time management technique that alternates between focused work sessions and frequent short breaks in order to maximize concentration and minimize fatigue.)
Essentially, the main room of the building was transformed into a quiet workspace, complete with a Pomodoro timer (25 minutes of deep work, 5 minutes of break) throughout the work blocks. This completely transformed the energy and overall focus of the school day.
Before, a lot of kids would be daunted by the hours without instruction and would get bored after only a couple of minutes, consequently resorting to staring at their computer screen for the rest of the day (To all of my friends, sorry for calling y’all out, but you know it’s the truth :) ).
Now, because of the Pomodoro Room, instead of being overwhelmed with the time, we only have to plan for 25 minutes. These smaller chunks of time allow us to be extremely productive during the work time because we know that it’s not much longer until a break.
To further illustrate the impact of the Pomodoro Room, I would like to mention that it is 100% optional to work in this room. And yet, around 75% of Alpha high schoolers choose to work in the Pomodoro Room every day. (See Austin Scholar #6: Teenagers Need To Take Control of Their Education for a deeper dive into choice)
Productivity across the board has increased dramatically and all of my friends have learned how to work diligently and check goals off of their To-Do lists.
Teenagers Should Learn How To Work Harder, Not Longer
The creation of the Pomodoro Room has forced me to evaluate how to best aid high schoolers in building a concrete work ethic. Well, to start, what even is “work ethic?” In my life, I see work ethic as having a strong mindset, drive, and plan to work intensely and consistently to meet goals.