Check out the cover art of a new book by Gibsons educator Michael Maser. It is based on street art found under Vancouver's Granville Bridge and features a normal looking dude in T-shirt and jeans - at least he's normal from the neck down. His head has become some weird gizmo reminiscent of a motorcycle. This is how young people are seeing themselves? Help is needed.
Maser is truly excited at the debut of his self-published book Learn Your Way: Self Designing the Life You Really Want, Starting Now because this book can really help ages 15 to 25 thrive within an ever more complex society. He draws on 24 years as an innovative educator, and he offers readers many strategies and tips for optimizing self-responsible learning and creating a rich, meaningful life.
"I believe my book gives young people tools and opportunities to flourish in coming years, as well as meet the significant challenges they will face," Maser said.
Although this book is aimed at youth, there's lots of fodder for those a few decades older than 25. Maser talks about the intelligences that are no longer determined by IQ tests that measure reading, writing and math -so important to previous generations.
Now, other intelligences are given credibility, especially since contemporary innovators such as Bill Gates and Steve Jobs dropped out of school, not to loaf, but to learn in their own way, in a fashion that their schools did not appreciate. These include spatial intelligence, the potential to recognize and use the patterns of wide space, and intrapersonal intelligence, the ability to understand oneself.
Maser gives a website where the reader can work an exercise to help determine their own abilities.
Other exercises teach how to relax, how to develop your life plan, how to retrain the dragon that follows most of us and keeps us from getting what we really want. Appendices help the reader to deconstruct advertising and to invoke mythological power to help us in our lives.
Maser's aversion to standard schooling is evident in the book but he does not waste time attacking it with arguments. Rather he supplants the concept with other choices, using practices that he has been working with for years now. He is currently a director of SelfDesign Learning, an independent K-12 on-line learning program, now enrolling close to 2,000 learners in B.C. and beyond. For his pioneering work, he shared a Prime Minister's Award for Teaching Excellence and a Special Merit Award from the B.C. Ministry of Education.
In a section about the importance of mentors, Maser lists his own wife and daughter as important influences in his life, and he dedicates the book to his daughter, Robin, who was home schooled. Clearly, learning is a life-long activity for the family.
Maser will launch his book at Davis Bay Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 4 from 7 to 8:30 p.m. Students (15 to 25 years), parents, educators and youth counsellors are invited to meet the author, and enjoy refreshments, a presentation and book signings. For those who miss this launch, there is another one scheduled at Gibsons United Church on Tuesday, Oct. 18 from 7 to 8:30 p.m.
For anyone unable to attend these events, books will be for sale locally and more information can be found at www.learnyourway.ca.
