A new beginning is always dawning. It seems that I have been repeating that statement for the past twenty years. I have had the luck and creativity to constantly perform new and crazy feats, beautiful tricks. Soon I will be a professor on sabbatical, counseling youth in Oakland. I will be traveling to New York, and I will be reading and writing all the time—two new books, one which is an educational autobiography, tentatively titled, Bone Mountain, and the other will be an entertaining and profound novel. I also plan to spend much more time loving and caring for my children. Physical fitness and nutrition, especially after the two leg surgeries, is important to me as well.

One of my most pressing plans is to build a curriculum for our struggling students so that they embrace their genius within. As an educator for the past fifteen years, I have not felt student progress en masse. Certainly, I have seen many students develop to become great leaders and successful people. If I listened to cliché advice that says I should be content as long as I help one student, then I should now rest and be satisfied with myself. I have already helped more than one. Perhaps because of my ego and/or my own understanding of how complex ideas are valued in academia, I know I am responsible for so much more.

Of course students are bright, but they usually scratch only the surface of things, and who can blame them when our society promotes so much fakeness that is normalized everywhere. To be genius is to be strange, yet strangeness is exactly what our students need to evolve. I know there are many programs out there, such as college success classes, but those types of time management classes are not enough. Time, as a concrete and abstract concept, is much more complex than time management. Profound universal concepts can help our students become better university level thinkers, better universally human thinkers. I have outlined a curriculum that is going to present students the opportunity of embracing an intellectual identity. With this type of identity, they will become better writers and thinkers, true leaders for their communities.

Below is a sample of the ten week program I intend to develop. These students will be introduced to genius concepts and with that knowledge they will embrace higher abstract ideals. Normalizing an appreciation for genius is the ultimate goal.

DEVELOPING AN INTELLECTUAL, EMPOWERING, ACTIONING IDENTITY

BY BENJAMIN BAC SIERRA

This program is a ten-week multi-cultural curriculum designed to instill in students an intellectual empowering actioning identity so that they become successful leaders in their classrooms, careers, personal lives, and communities.

The ten-week program will consist of ten two-hour lectures/discussions on the following topics:

1. Introduction to Intellectual History and Transformative Leadership
2. Motivation
3. Time: the concrete and abstract components
4. Philosophy
5. Literature/Mythology
6. Physical Fitness and Nutrition
7. Law
8. Art/Invention
9. Entrepreneurship
10. Leadership

Students need this program so that they can gain an urgency and confidence for their academic studies and lives. The big challenge today is not that students cannot engage in intellectual activities; the problem is that they have lost faith in academics relating to their lives. They are alienated from their own minds. “Developing an Intellectual, Empowering, Actioning Identity” will teach them multi-cultural history, theory, and real life genius ideas in action so that students will truly reflect, desire to further develop their own ideas, and become active participants in transformative education both inside and outside of the classroom. With successful participants as leaders, they will offer social proof that intellectual discourse can be powerful and fulfilling, thus normalizing empowering dialogue and conversations in their communities.