In Last Thursday's Math Education Class, we watched Sir Ken Robinson's 2006 TED Talk, which I have included above if anyone is interested in viewing the clip. Ken Robinson makes several great points in this short twenty minute talk regarding education. He does the talk in a humorous way by which the joking manner he uses helps bring his points across to people in an extremely effective way.
He said several things throughout the clip that stuck with me or that was interesting. The first point he made that I had never thought about before was the fact that we are educating students now in the present for a future that we do not even know about or in his words, "a future we have no clue about". Therefore, he thinks that we should treat creativity as important as a component of education as literacy since we have no idea while the future will hold.
A statement he says that resonated with me was "if you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original". He goes on to say that in today's education system, the worst thing someone can do is make a mistake. He believes that all children are born artists, but going through the school system where everyone does not want to be wrong, we grow out of our creative minds. He says that no matter where you go to in the world, the same hierarchy of subjects are seen with math and language arts at the top, and the arts on the bottom. Then within the arts are another order of subjects with more attention given to art and music compared to dance. This hierarchy is used due to the Industrial Revolution where you needed the higher subjects to work or as a way to gain entrance into different universities, since they valued subjects like math but not the arts.
Another thing that I found to be surprising but true is that no longer does it mean you have a job if you have a degree. Having a degree in today's world is extremely common and no longer guarantees that a job will be there for you. This is extremely relative to our lives as future teachers, where the amount of jobs for teachers in the province are at an all time low. I have met several people throughout my schooling that are driving taxis, working at fast food restaurants, or other places with a degree. Now in today's world, you have to go on to get a Phd in order to be employable.
As future educators, we should try to promote creativity in our classrooms through different activities and different methods of helping students learn. We should not be caught up in right or wrong answers but let the students justify their answers which will lead to students having a greater sense of thinking and having a creative mind.
No comments:
Post a Comment