Yong Zhao "Every Child is a Rudolph"

Yong Zhao made a connection that we are all a Rudolph in some way.  By this he means that we are all unique and have different interests and talents.  He said how schools don't tend to like Rudolphs because they don't fit into one mold.  They try to fix people's deficit rather than highlighting the things we are good at.  They don't realize that people have a different type of intelligences and can't have all of them.  Schools can crush creativity and aren't helping students reach their full potential.  Someone can be great at acting but they may not have enough room in their schedule to take theatre and then they don't end up pursuing it.  His main point was that we need to invent the future rather than trying to change the past, in school curriculum and just in general.

Teacher's Conference

One of the sessions I went to was about different learning styles.  During this session I learned that I am a kinesthetic learner.  This means that I like to learn things by doing.  I like to write stuff down or make something like a poster.  I also work better in shorter spurts rather than concentrated blocks of time.  I can get restless and fidgety and have a hard time sitting for long periods of time.  People may see me as disorganized but to me it makes sense.  Aside from learning more about my learning style I also learned how I can have different options for the same assignment to incorporate all of my students with different learning styles.

Sir Ken Robinson TED Talk

One point that Sir Ken Robinson made was that we need diversity in talents and shouldn't be pushing everyone to conform.  Everyone has different talents and different passions and they shouldn't be forced to conform to one single thing.  We can't just have doctors or just have lawyers we need doctors and lawyers and teachers and everything else.