TED talk--Do schools kill creativity?

1. Summary

There are three themes that Sir Ken Robinson talks about in this TED talk.The first one is the evidence of human creativity in all people. Picasso once said,” all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.” Why we get educated out of creativity? This led to the second theme he talks about - education. All kids have talents, but through the process of education, they are squandered. All education systems on earth have the same problem, which is that they focus mainly on academics and think that arts are the less important things, but they should be equal. The third theme is the capacities for innovation that children have. Most kids have lost the capacity by the time they get to be adults. Education system makes us think that mistakes are the worst thing we can make, so we are afraid to be wrong. And the result is that we are educated out of creativity. Robinson said, ''If you are not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.'' 

2. What can listeners learn from this talk?

Robinson shows us an example of Gillian Lynn, who did “Cats” and “Phantom of the Opera”, to illustrate his idea. When she was a child in school, her teacher told her mom to take her to the doctor for being unable to concentrate and having a learning disorder. The doctor let Gillian sit on a chair in an empty room with music playing and watched through the window with Gillian’s mom. When Gillian danced, the doctor asked her mom to take her to the dancing school, and she then became the famous artist. 

I think listeners can learned from the three min themes that Robinson shares in this talk, and also look inside this example more deeply. What if Gillian’s mom believed in the teacher’s words and thought her daughter as a failure in the process of education? Then maybe Gillian will live an unhappy life and we would lose a great artist. We should avoid being affected by the education system and protect our creativity from being destroyed by it. Or we can make our efforts to change this system and save the future youth.  

TED talk--Who am I? Think again

1. Summary

It's a TED talk from Hetain Patel, who is an Indian born in England. Patel is an artist who didn't want to follow the traditional Indian cultures, dress, and the way of living although he looks like a local Indian. In this talk, he shares about the artwork he's been doing and the ideas about self-identity. At the beginning of the talk, he uses a really funny and humorous way to express his ideas to us, which is whether we can be identified by our gestures, hobbits and moves or not. He keep repeating the same paragraph in Chinese in different tones to pretend that he is speaking in Chinese and ask the girl beside him to translate into his English introduction. He then shares his own experiences to express that by imitating, we can reveal something unique inside ourselves.

2. What can listeners learn from this talk?

Very often, we identify someone only by his or her appearance, by the language the person speak, the accent, the race, and the gestures. However, we have to think deeper than surface appearance, to look inside the person. Also, we don't have to be identified by who we are or where we are from, we must be formless and shapeless like water, then we can learn who we really are by copying others.

movie clip--Life of Pi

Which movie does this clip come from?
Life of Pi

What is this movie about?
Life of Pi is talking about an Indian boy named Pi who was on a ship with his parents and brother in order to immigrate to the US. However, they were in a horrible shipwreck and Pi was the only survivor who lived on a little boat with a furious tiger for hundreds of days. They started a surprising journey and tried to live in the ocean. You will be amazed by lots of gorgeous scenery and awesome sites, and also be touched by the friendship between the boy and the tiger.  

What is happening in this clip?
When Pi woke up finding that his family was gone and there was only a tiger with him, he tried every way to make himself alive and force himself not to give up. He wrote letters and put them into bottles, hoping they someday will go to another person's hand.