EDSS 531 Journal 2

Journal 2_Tovani Chart

Quote form the Text/Video	What it Means	Deeper Thinking
1. “Creativity is as important as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.” - Sir Ken Williams	1. Educators in schools should foster creative thinking. Teaching only about what is known to be right or wrong is not going to prepare kids for a future that we ourselves have no ability to predict or imagine.	Kids are not frightened of being wrong, which is a perfect time of their lives to be allowed to create things and let their minds “invent.” Much of the high stakes teaching strategies prepare students to bubble in the “right” answer. When you are bred this way, students get transformed into thinking it is not okay to be different, it’s not okay to get an answer that isn’t what the back of the book says. Fostering students’ creative minds means that we need to prepare them to be “wrong” sometimes, and to learn from their own mistakes. Because, as Sir Ken said in his talk, “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.”
2. “The purpose of public education around the world is to produce university professors.” -Sir Ken Robinson	2. The hierarchy of subjects in school are universally the same. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts.
3. “The education system has mined our minds the way we’ve strip mined the Earth: for a particular commodity.”	This way of education will not service for the future.	We need creativity now more than ever before. The Information Age of the world has exhausted the uses of the left side of our brains. Computers today can do most of what many people used to do for a living. The jobs in those industries that do remain are being outsourced to other countries where labor is cheaper. We need to rethink the way we teach our kids. We need to foster and nurture their creative minds. We need to stop putting the right-brained function in the back seat.
4. “Abundance has brought beautiful things to our lives, but that bevy of material goods has not necessarily made us much happier.” - Daniel H. Pink	“The paradox of prosperity is that while living standards have risen steadily decade after decade, personal, family, and life satisfaction haven’t budged.”	Contrary to how the world has changed so dramatically in the past couple hundred years, our genetic make-up is very much the same. Every person has the desire to be happy. I think that there is something happening, in our peripherals in such a way that when we turn to look at it, it seems to disappear, something that has counter-balanced the awesomeness that has been the technology and information era that we’ve grown up in. I have a deep respect for the laws of physics, and Newton’s Laws of Motion are some that we all live by whether we like it or not. Newton’s 3rd Law says that for every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. I think that we have exploited the system in we live on and call Earth in such a way that “defies” the Laws of Physics. We need to be conscious of our actions. We have exploited the resources of Earth for the material gain of a few. This material gain hasn’t made us happier, and I imagine it likely never will.