These are all outstanding. Speaking from personal experience, the Benjamin Zander video is one of my absolute favorite TED talks.Here are three videos from the list:
- Benjamin Zander on music and passion: If you want your kids to fall in love with music, Ben Zander is your best friend. In this video, the very funny and energetic speaker and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic discusses classical music and why everyone should love it as much as he does.
- Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize wish: Teach every child about food: In this clip, “the naked chef” exhorts for change to the standard American diet and speaks about his fight against obesity. Don’t worry, he’s clothed the entire time.
- Arthur Benjamin does “Mathemagic”: Arthur Benjamin is a human computing machine. In this talk, Benjamin displays his amazing ability to calculate figures in his head, then he tells you how he does it. This is about as entertaining as math gets.
The prime function of the children’s book writer is to write a book that is so absorbing, exciting, funny, fast and beautiful that the child will fall in love with it. And that first love affair between the young child and the young book will lead hopefully to other loves for other books and when that happens the battle is probably won. The child will have found a crock of gold. He will also have gained something that will help to carry him most marvelously through the tangles of his later years.
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| — | Roald Dahl (via truetocharacter) |
Introducing…. Here is my first classroom! Check out them doors.
Click for the best DoctorWho tumblr ever.
IEP at a glance… would be fabulous to leave for sub… nothing confidential, but the sub would know what accommodations to make.
tetw:
by Po Bronson
A growing body of research suggests that labeling kids “smart” does not prevent them from underperforming. Instead, it might actually be holding them back.
Very interesting.
I can relate to some of this, actually.
- Dweck wrote in her study summary, “we tell them that this is the name of the game: Look smart, don’t risk making mistakes.”
I feel like my whole life has just been explained right there. With that sentence.
HELLO SOURCE OF ALL OF MY INSECURITIES! THANKS FOR SHOWING UP A DECADE OR SO LATE.
“I am smart, the kids’ reasoning goes; I don’t need to put out effort. Expending effort becomes stigmatized—it’s public proof that you can’t cut it on your natural gifts.”
I should probably write a post about why this clicks so hard with the issues I have with “inborn talent”, and the idea of good art being “effortless” but I’ve got too much work to do today. :|this is pretty much my life
Interestingly, they’ve shown that the best thing to do is praise children for working hard and thinking creatively. In the mind of a child, being smart is something you’re born with. Working hard is something you do, no matter how “smart” you are. Children who are praised for working hard generally perform well in anything they do because they are intrinsically motivated by the rewards of practice. Unfortunately, I was a “smart” kid growing up… I wonder how adult subjects would perform under a similar experiment…
Great Idea: Make your own Guess Who! Can do with photos of celebrities, historical figures, friends, politicians, etc.
OMFG
THE HISTORICAL FIGURES ONE
OH
MY
FUCKING
GOD
