Blog Post #10

I very much liked the video, "Bring on the Learning Revolution," by Sir Ken Robinson. Before I get into the more serious parts of this lecture I would like to say that I found his joke about the British trying to supress American history very funny. I know, some of you thought it was corny, but I'm a Secondary History Education major so I found it amusing.

The first thing that I think we can really learn from him is that education does not need to be evolved, it needs to be revolutionized. People keep trying to make the same educational system work, but clearly it does not. A change needs to be made that will foster students' dreams and keep them interested in what is happening.

The second thing that I feel we can really learn from him is that you have to do something you love. When talking about his wife, he said she would be gone for hours writing something, but to her it only felt like a few minutes. I know this is true. My senior year of high school I absolutely loved three of my classes: Art Studio, British Literature, and Government. The class that brought me down completely was Pre-Calculus. I hated math, and I knew what my major was going to be, and I knew I would not need it. That class dragged my GPA down and made me hate coming to school. What was the point in this class? Why would I ever need this? Education should not work this way. I feel like this idea also ties into his idea about a needed revolution in the educational system.

The third thing that he said that I found interesting is that every person needs to know what their talents are. He said that he knows many people who simply go from day to day not using, or not even realizing their talent. Knowing what your talent is will help you discover what kind of person you want to be and what kind of career you should have.

Although everything he said was useful in this video, I found that the last thing he said to be one of the most important. He said that students hold adults responsible for helping foster and nurture their dreams. This is especially important for educators because every student is different, and they have different dreams. It was like when he said that someone he knew always wanted to be a fire fighter. When this man was in high school he had a teacher publically humiliate him in front of his class mates saying that if he became a fire fighter he would be wasting his talent and his life. A few years later this student saved his teacher and his teacher's wife from an overturned car. It kind of puts it in perspective, right? We do not know what the future holds for every person, so to say that one person's dream is a waste would be wrong on our part.