When I think back to my own schooling, I realize that nobody taught me note taking. I was just told to “take notes.” Nobody taught me how to annotate a text. I was just provided a highlighter. Nobody taught me how to prioritize tasks, create a smart homework schedule, manage all my obligations and so on.

As a result, I stumbled through high school and college inefficiently… or at least certainly less effectively than I could/should have. Often, I procrastinated until I had to “crash” study for tests… or pull an all-nighter to deliver the goods I owed. (I am a night owl anyway, but staying up until 5:00 am was so common in my life for so, so, so many years that to this day, I can still burn the midnight oil in a way that is almost unnatural. Or so my wife swears.)

All of that changed when I became an AVID teacher. And read Covey. And then recognized that my inability to be efficient and work intelligently was preventing me from achieving so many of the personal and professional goals I longed to attain.

Before AVID, Covey and all the others who have contributed to my conscientious re-framing (let’s be honest, I have gulped down a ton of books on this subject area), I was an inefficient wreck. I guess this is why I use the term re-framing. I needed to re-frame the way I worked top to bottom, keeping what did work well and tossing what didn’t.

Nowadays, of course, I am a lot of unspeakable things but being “an inefficient wreck” is not one of them. I write, speak, blog, teach, and so on. Is it a lot? For sure. However, my life is not characterized by chaos, which is totally ironic because before I recognized I needed to re-frame the manner in which I worked, chaos was the operative word.

It’s almost as if I did not know how to operate

from any other perspective than under the gun, late for a deadline and so on.
Of course, I loved to lie to myself as well and tell myself that, “Hey, you
work better at the last minute anyway,” and things like that.

It calls to mind a line Mark Twain once said: “Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

But what I really wish, when I look back, is that

someone would have taught me some of the core principles of smart work habits
and efficiency back when I was still a minor. I mean, somewhere, between 4rth
grade and 12th grade, it really would have been nice to learn things
like Cornell note taking, time management, prioritization, and the law of
procrastination. (i.e. it’s stressful, quality often gets sacrificed and the
sense of joy in doing the work is torn asunder by the need to meet a deadline,
come hell or high water.)

It’s like catching an airline flight, in a way. These

days, I always try to be an extra ½ hour early. Why? Because I used to be the
type of person that would try to cut it razor thin and make it to the gate, “just
on time”.

Of course, every moment of the journey to the airport,
going through security, and getting to the gate was a hellish and stressful “race
against the clock” event which made the entire experience tremendously “tense”.
With the extra half hour these days, I am relaxed, I have a buffer and, if there’s
a hiccup in my arrangements, things don’t go nuclear.

And if I am there a half hour early, I can read,

write, make a relaxed phone call and so on. Really, I don’t ever find that I
have wasted any half-hours. And the gray hairs on my head that I did not cause
to sprout, well… it makes it all worth it.

I just wish I wouldn’t have had to go to the school
of hard knocks to learn this stuff… and if school would have taught me these
things, I would have been much better off.

Then again, who wouldn’t?

I am not sure if sexual molestation by school personnel against students is on the rise or if the explosion of web-based media has simply drawn more attention and awareness to the problem. Either way, it’s absolutely tragic when this stuff happens.

And it devastates lives.

As this story in the L.A. Times shows, the victims, the kids, suffer in ways that color their existence and worldview for the rest of their life… and what scares me is how numb I think we in our society have become to the crime because of the frequency with which it is being reported these days.

Having had students confess to me their victimhood over and over (it’s so much more common than I ever realized — like SO MUCH MORE!) is what drove me to want to do more. And the fact is, an incident right out of my own classroom (the tale a female student told me about her uncle) was the original spark for my latest book of fiction, The Secret Story of Sonia Rodriguez.

In some ways, I am just amazed how SONIA has hit a nerve with so many kids. Especially girls. And even more especially, with Latina girls. This novel hasn’t become breakout big like TWILIGHT or anything like that but it does have a very strong group of kids and teachers that really support it extremely well and it’s being brought into classrooms all around the country. (And oh the emails they send to me.) For that I am honored.

But still, I want to do more.

I guess the question is, how can we better protect our kids? And what more can we do to help them when this stuff happens?

BTW, was it always so prevalent and yet under-reported, or is society so much more sexualized that seeing more and more of this type of abhorrent behavior is simply inevitable?

Yet, this still brings me back to the bigger point: what can be done?

I do know that banning books like Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK is not the answer. Books open conversations in a way that few other forms of media can do. Read Laurie’s answer as to how she feels about banning books right here… you go Laurie!

The tragedy of sexual molestation is a plague on teens today and yet so many folks are sweeping it under the rug pretending it’s not happening in their school, their community, their world.

As Mark Twain once quipped, “Denial ain’t a river in Egypt.”