What does the “Marketplace” mean in our school name Marketplace Mission Learning Center?

 uesday, July 29, 2014 at 2:31PM

What does the “Marketplace” mean in our school name Marketplace Mission Learning Center?

The following list from a July 22, 2014 article titled 15 Signs You’re an Entrepreneur presents the skill set needed to move forward in our fast changing world as an entrepreneur.

French economist Jean-Baptiste Say coined the word entrepreneur, and the work entrepreneur appeared in a French dictionary in 1723 defined as a person who makes decisions about obtaining and using resources while admitting the risk of enterprise. Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, in his 1776 The Wealth of Nations defined an entrepreneur as the person who puts together land, labor and capital to create an enterprise. Political economist Robert Reich considers leadership, management ability and team-building essential qualities of an entrepreneur. Entrepreneurs engage in the gale of creative destruction to replace in whole or part inferior offerings across markets and industries by creating new products and business models. According to Frank H. Knight and Peter Drucker entrepreneurs willingly risk their careers and financial and social security to pursue a new idea.  Entrepreneurs don’t just take measurable risks.  Entrepreneurs take ambiguous risks - only partially measurable, and they take true uncertainty impossible to estimate or predict risks. Entrepreneurs experience what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow.  Flow occurs when the individual forgets about the outside world and becomes emerged in a powerful insight.  Maria Montessori called this flow state normalization and described it as the child’s capacity for joyful and lengthy periods of intense concentration. Maria Montessori use prepared environments that offered children opportunities to achieve flow.

Aren’t we all entrepreneurs in our own lives with our own life being the enterprise we strive to create?  Each one of us must launch ourselves into the marketplace.  Each one of us must decide where to live and work, decide what labor to perform, and decide how to use our own capital.  We are the entrepreneur of our own enterprise, our own lives. Days, weeks, months and years go by.  Our limited resource of time determines so much of our future.  How can we take charge of our own time and use it to further the enterprise of our own life?

Self-paced online learning in a teacher/tutor/coach classroom at Marketplace Mission Learning Center is where you, the student, learn to control and direct your day-to-day behavior which makes you an entrepreneur using your own resources to further your own enterprise, namely your life.

1. You take action.  

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you take over your own learning both the how to learn and the what to learn.

2. You’re insecure.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you face your fear of failing in a real way because you have taken over your own learning which means you can’t blame a teacher or other students or the school.  You must face yourself and take ownership of your own performance.

3. You’re crafty.  

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you must become crafty like the television character  MacGyver and apply your own creativity, optimism and street smarts to collect and use the  resources you have to solve the problems you face.

4. You’re obsessed with cash flow.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center time and efficiency become your obsession. Your creation of your own enterprise begins to take shape before your eyes. Your own creation of yourself becomes your obsession.

5. You get into hot water.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you try new things, forge ahead to seize opportunities and tackle issues all to explore uncharted worlds.

6. You’re fearless.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you don’t see problems; you see opportunities in work clothes.  Your optimism carries you forward.

7. You can’t sit still.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you don’t have to sit still.  Try something new. We did in starting our school, and together we will continue to innovate and build it anew.

8. You’re malleable.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you can change direction right now. You build yourself, your enterprise, day-by-day. Where do you want to go?

9. You enjoy navel gazing.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you evaluate your own performance. Lessons have quizzes and tests and projects, but you need to gather feedback from other sources, process the feedback, develop a plan to improve and implement the improvement plan.

10. You’re motivated by challenges.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center challenges feed your drive. Adversity makes the game fun.

11. You consider yourself an outsider.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you learn that all the students consider themselves  outsiders who have begun to recognize the reality of no inside and no insiders and no outside and no outsiders. Each student learns to take command of their own boat at sea charting their own course. This realization makes for a stimulating exciting environment.

12. You recover quickly.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you learn that what many call failure our students call experience. An experience called failure simple didn’t work that way at that time. Students learn not to wallow or mope or feel sorry for themselves; students learn to move on to the next big thing.

13. You fulfill needs.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center you learn to look for the problems and the holes and to think of ways to fix them. Students learn to apply this problem solving to themselves, to their fellow students, to their school, to their families, to their community and to their society.

14. You surround yourself with advisors.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center students learn that their advisors are their lessons, their teachers, their students, their parents, and the wealth of information on the internet. Students learn to strive to make informed decisions.

15. You work and play hard.

At Marketplace Mission Learning Center students learn that when they fall down, they must keep picking themselves up until they get it right. Students learn to stay focused on their enterprise building, namely themselves. This means learning the basics.