Blog post 12

Samantha West, Morgan Rushlow, and Daniel LoVette

Sir Ken Robinson had many key points in his first video. He pointed out a very important key point to me, and that is ADHD. When my brother was little, he was sent to two specialists. One doctor diagnosed him with ADHD. The other said he was just a normal little boy, and he was. There was nothing wrong with him besides he didn’t want to sit in a classroom all day. They wanted to put him on medication that he did not even need. Doctors all over America are doing this now. It’s like we go straight to medication without even looking at what could be causing the problem. I find it interesting that my special education class was just speaking on this same topic Tuesday night. Do I believe our children should be drugged at such a young age? Of course I don’t. Do I think we should try every other thing in the book first? You better believe it! If nothing works should we resort to medication? That is the parent’s decision. Sir Ken Robinson and my point is how can we expect for every student to pay attention to, and I quote, “boring stuff”, when they could be watching TV, playing on their phones, ect. School is going to be boring at times, and teachers have to understand just because a child finds a subject boring does not mean they have an attention disorder.
Which leads me to another key point I would like to point out from the video. Sir Ken Robinson states, “ We shouldn’t be putting our kids asleep, we should be waking them up.” Hello! This is a wake up call to all of us soon to be teachers! He is speaking directly to us in this statement. My educational teacher always talks about how every teacher wants to teach to that perfect circle of students. Not the students that learn to fast, and not the students who learn to slow. Teachers want a class full of students that come in and understand everything on the day it is taught, and it can not be like that. We have to find a way to interest all the students, such as group learning. Group learning can keep all students busy and entertained. This keeps them from having time to act out. If you have not watch Changing Education Paradigms, Watch it. Sir Ken Robinson can teach everyone a thing or two about what should change in our educational programs.

How to Escape Education’s Death Valley

In this particular lecture, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the problems with No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and the supposedly Attention Deficiate Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) epidemic. In addition he summarizes what the role of the teacher should be in order to counteract these problems.
Being from Great Britain, Sir Robinson begins his lecture with a joke: “Before I moved to the United States, people told me that Americans didn’t get irony.” He then explains that Americans in fact do get irony and that it is visible through the education program NCLB. H says that NCLB should instead be called, “millions of children left behind.” The American classroom is changing for the worse because our dropout rate continues to rise and students are disengaged in the classroom. Sir Robinson attributes this to the natural personality of humans in that we are naturally diverse and that NCLB promotes conformity and the two cannot co-exist. I agree with this because NCLB implements standardized testing. Standardized testing should not be the main focus in education and Robinson states that they should instead be used to “support learning and diagnose.”
Sir Ken Robinson also believes that ADHD is not an epidemic. To him, children are not disengaged in the classroom because they are suffering from ADHD, they are “suffering from childhood.” This is a great point because children are not meant to sit and listen for hours at a time. They should be creating, and working through projects that are educationally fun. However, for this to happen, teachers have to change. Robinson says: “Teachers are the lifeblood of society.” Teaching should be a creative profession in which they mentor, stimulate, and engage students to promote life-long learners. instead of feeding facts to students, teachers should facilitate and let learning happen naturally.

The Importance of Creativity:
Ken Robinson in this video made a wonderful point about creativity- that we need creativity in order to discover ourselves and to figure out who we are as a person-our identity. Creativity is the key, as Ken states in this video, to being successful people but, however, as Ken states in this video creativity is not being encouraged in schools today and instead students are taking a path toward where the most money is made and what society believes is important to the economy. Ken believes students are not allowed to be creative in schools and schools kill creativity because society wants this cookie-cutter image of people and so instead of individualizing learning to each student as we should be doing, education has been designed to produce graduates in this cookie-cutter design in which all students are taught the same way-with what is believed to be the “most useful subjects” prioritized in school while creative subjects are not being prioritized. Ken believes in this video that education is teaching students to not be creative because of the idea that creativity isn’t needed in the workforce. Ken believes that students are taught today that it isn’t ok to be wrong and that it’s not ok to be their creative selves in which they have their individual talents and skills which are unique to each person. Ken believes that the education system today caters to industry demands but it should be catering to individual student needs and passions/desires. Ken believes allowing creativity is important to each students’ success and fulfillment in their lives. Ken believes that by not allowing creativity in school, many students are being left out in the system because some students’ talents are not being recognized because their talents do not lie within the frame of this cookie cutter image that is seen as desirable and important, but instead in the areas of study that are seen as less important and less desirable.