One of the principle aims of the Academy for Creating Enterprise is to help students overcome what they refer to as the "Culture of Poverty." The basic premise is that most of the people are poor not because they want to be, but because they were raised in (and live in) a culture where the societal norms go against the practices and beliefs that allow success and financial prosperity. Overcoming those cultural beliefs is the first challenge that the Academy faces, and the first week is spent mostly teaching the students to believe in a culture of success.
In order to keep this post relatively short, I'll just say that the students had some great (very emotional) breakthroughs yesterday that were very cool to be able to see. One thing that Nate, Ben and I did that hadn't been done previously at the Academy was to have a movie night last night. To go along with the rather emotional day, we decided to show Pursuit of Happyness.
This is one of my favorite movies, and having passed through a lot of similar circumstances to Chris Gardner myself, and listening to some of the challenges some of the students are currently going through, it was a great way to end a really great day.
1 comments:
I LOVE that you showed this movie. You probably already know but it is one of my favorites too. Did the students like it?
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