Lethargic Basketball and Hands-on Experience

-14 days to departure

On Sunday mornings, I play basketball with friends. Playing hoops with friends once or twice a week is something we've done for some twenty years. It's a great game. I enjoy the spirit of competition, the exercise, the camaraderie. 

Me, blue shirt, basketball!

This morning, after three or four games of pretty sluggish play on my part, I sat on the sidelines and typed into my phone "yellow fever vaccine side-effects". And up popped this: 

Less serious side effects (may occur for 5 to 10 days after you receive the vaccine) include: 

• low fever, mild headache, general ill feeling;
• mild rash, muscle pain, joint pain, body aches; or
• pain, tenderness, swelling, or a lump where the shot was given.

I have been a touch draggy of late. Guess I shouldn't be surprised. I've been injected with a weak strain of the yellow fever pathogen so my body's immune system can create the antibodies needed to fight it. (By the way, I think the third side effect listed is pretty silly. If you need to be told that jabbing a needle in your arm will cause side effects in your arm, you just aren't paying attention.)  

Today I will introduce you to the third and final member of our team. He is a very good friend of mine, I've known him since 2000. Soon he'll be a very good friend of Tim's. His name is Xane. He is my sixteen-year-old son.

Xane attends a boarding school in Oregon called Delphian School. You can see their site here. Better, you should watch this six-minute video featuring Delphian students. They do a better job describing the school than the site.  

Why Delphian School for my son? To answer that question, I'll tell you briefly about a trip he just completed with twenty-seven of his classmates: the West Coast Business Trip. This is an annual school event, they alternate between the West and East Coasts. West focuses on the high-tech and entertainment industries (Silicon Valley, Southern California). East focuses on commodities, high finance, and Wall Street. (Chicago, NYC, Boston).

Launch Festival 2016, Xane is on the left

These trips are not tourist stops, gift shops, and leisure. They're all business, literally and figuratively. The students dress, act and speak like professionals and with professionals. They get behind the scenes tours; they meet CEOs, senior executives and venture capitalists. 

Instagram

Google

Jet Propulsion Laboratories

Delphian's focus is on a 50/50 balance between academics and hands-on, real-life experience. The business trip exemplifies this approach in every respect. On this trip, the students visited and met leaders at such enterprises as Instagram, Google, CBS Interactive, Stanford University, Cisco, Survey Monkey, Maker Studios, Dreamworks and many more.

Xane has just completed this life-changing business trip, which has no doubt fired up his entrepreneurial ambitions to white-hot levels. He will now unpack, do his laundry, spend a few days in class then pack again and on Friday head home for spring break. (Can't wait!) His spring break will be spent doing an internship at a local business for a week then heading to Liberia for two weeks, a project that is just as integral to the Delphian program. 

At Delphian, at the upper end of the program, students are expected to discover, create and participate in outreach projects that have significant social and humanitarian impact. They could be close to home such as establishing tutoring programs at the local Native American Indian reservation or on the other side of the world like our Liberia project.     

As an educator and father, I see that there is great power in students getting first-hand knowledge of both ends of the social spectrum, from Silicon Valley to Liberia. I want my students and children to understand the connectedness of the world and their responsibility for it. I want my students and children to embody the four logo points named on the Delphi logo: knowledge, integrity, leadership, ethics.