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Mawi Asgedom has written six books that are used in thousands of classrooms across North America and spoken to over 750,000 students and educators in more than forty states. A nationally recognized educator, Mawi has trained leaders at The Harvard School of Education, The Midwest Principals Center, and numerous international conferences. Mawi has been featured by many prominent media including The Oprah Winfrey Show, Chicago Tribune, and ESSENCE magazine.
Plywood People: Mawi, you have a very interesting story. Would you tell us how you got to Chicago?
Mawi Asgedon: I was born in Ethiopia in the midst of a thirty-year civil war. The war intensified in my area in the late 70’s, when the ruthless dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam authorized his armies to attack and destroy the rebels in my birth-land of Tigray. Mengistu was later convicted of genocide by the Ethiopian High Court.
My mother saved my life and the lives of my siblings by leading us across a wilderness to a Sudanese refugee camp. After three years in the refugee camp, when I was seven, I was resettled to Illinois by World Relief – one of ten organizations that have a contract with the State Department to resettle refugees in the United States.
Though I grew up in low-income housing and on food stamps here in the States, I can honestly say I never felt poor. Maybe that’s because for three years in the refugee camp I lived in a straw-and-mud hut, hauled my own water from a well, and then watched my mom boil the water to kill the bacteria every time we wanted to drink.
Growing up in the U.S., I dreamed of helping my family and I saw education as the way to do that. There were many ups and downs along the way, including the death of my beloved older brother, but to make a long story short, when I was 18, I earned a scholarship to Harvard. Since graduating from Harvard about eleven years ago, I’ve dedicated myself to inspiring the next generation of teenagers.
I’ve spoken at over 1,000 schools and written six books that are used in thousands of classrooms across North America. Today, I’m the president of Mental Karate, an organization that equips educators to inspire students.
Plywood People: What can you tell us about what it takes to inspire today’s youth.
Mawi: Let’s take a step back and consider three things that make it difficult to inspire youth.
First Challenge: Seeing the Invisible
Our young people live in a highly visual, media-rich environment. Cars, houses, girlfriends/boyfriends, computers – these are all things that our youth can easily see with their eyes. In contrast, things such as discipline, initiative, courage, and self-awareness exist largely on an internal plane that is not easily visible. That’s the first challenge: those who sell the external world have made it more visible and alluring than it’s ever been, and those of us trying to sell the internal world (educators, character education instructors, parents, religious institutions) have not kept up. Generally, we are using the same posters and motivational speakers we used 20 years ago. Yet the external world is now sizzling with Facebook, Twitter, the Internet, and 1000 ways for a young person to not pay attention to or care about the internal world.
Second Challenge: Lack of Clear Assessment
There’s been a lot of focus lately on standardized testing in schools. In theory, testing is used because it allows the powers that be to hold administrators, teachers, and students accountable for achieving in key areas such as math and reading. The focus on testing raises an interesting point that relates to inspiration. For starters, let’s consider the old management adage: “We measure what matters.” We measure math and reading because they matter. We measure attendance because it matters. Our schools generally don’t measure or try to assess initiative, discipline, contribution, courage or any other attributes that most people consider critical to success. Yet if our students have learned to read and write, but have not developed qualities such as compassion, initiative, and discipline, can we really say we have educated them? Part of the assessment challenge is that a Scantron machine can spit out 40/50 on a math test and conclusively give a student an 80% grade. But it’s much harder to measure inner concepts such as initiative in a simple and quick manner.
Third Challenge: Inaction
When I first started speaking, I used to think it was a compliment when a principal would say to me something like, “Wow! I’ve never seen the students sit so still.” But after a few years, I asked myself: How is just sitting and doing nothing a compliment? If a math teacher taught students the quadratic formula and the students just sat still and never did the quadratic formula on their own, we would hardly consider that a desirable outcome. Yet that is what often happens. We bring guest speakers, read books that are meant to inspire, hold Citizenship Days, and are generally content if students just pay attention. I believe that the single greatest opportunity in the arena of youth inspiration today is bridging the action gap. Anyone who wants to inspire youth should focus on helping youth take meaningful action.
Plywood People: How have you addressed these challenges through Mental Karate?
Mawi: In creating Mental Karate, I focused on three things:
1) Action: Creating a system that resulted in action.
2) Assessments: Finding a way to measure action.
3) Educator Focused: Creating a system where the educators themselves inspired the students, rather than a special speaker.
Students of Mental Karate go on a year-long journey with their classmates, teachers and administrators to learn about, discuss, and take action in key areas of character. Each of the five colored belts in Mental Karate are associated with a proven principle: Initiative, Discipline, Contribution, Courage, and Awareness. Students progress only by taking action – so if you do nothing, you get nothing.
Plywood People: Could you share some stories with us?
Mawi: Some of my favorite actions by student include
- A 7th-grader taught himself basic French during Yellow Belt (Discipline). How did this happen? His Mental Karate instructor asked him to describe his biggest challenge. The student said that he didn’t like that his aunts talked French behind his back. In Mental Karate, we train students to view themselves as active agents in solving their own problems – and in this case the kid solved the problem by teaching himself three French words a day until he knew over 100 words. He was featured in the local paper for his achievement.
- A student who was living in a group home, with his father unknown and his mother in jail for 12 years, took the initiative to write letters to his mother. She wrote him back from jail. They now have a growing relationship.
- Kids at a KIPP School in Houston raised over $220 to contribute to Haiti.
Plywood People: What do you dream for the students you work with?
Mawi: Here’s the million-dollar question: What’s better for these kids? To hear about another person’s journey? To see an inspiring poster on the wall? Or to know French, have a relationship with a mother, and brighten the lives of those suffering deeply? My dream is to equip thousands of Mental Karate instructors across the country who can inspire millions of positive actions by our youth each year. In doing so, I hope to help our students see that the invisible forces within – courage, discipline, initiative – allow them to create exciting, often shocking possibilities in their external world.
