Jeff Duncan-Andrade

After watching the video of Jeff Duncan Andrade speaking about our education system I came away impressed. He brought up a lot of interesting points that make you think. I agree with him when he says the education system is designed to do what it's supposed to do. He mentions how the institution known as school has taught the same way his whole life, but in the mean time computers have been introduced to our society and gotten more advanced, but we are still learning the same old way. We are not connecting with the youth and making them want to learn the material. Schools are presenting the material in a straight forward bland manner that does not touch the students therefore making it hard for them to become engaged in the learning process. We are failing the next generation of adults because we are not taking the time to find out about the individual. We are not creating the curriculum around the students, rather we are trying to force feed the students information that they are not passion about. We need to integrate the material in a way that the student feels like the things that they are being taught have some kind of relevance in their lives. If a student has a vested interest in a topic they will participate in discussions and have opinions that they can bring to the table. If they have no interest they will not hear what the instructor is trying to get across. I like his example about giving a kid a phone. They will play around with it until they have mastered everything about it. The reason is because they are passionate about learning something that they feel is going to be of use to them. A lot of times children become bored in school because it's hard to stay focused at that age. You need to capture their attention by teaching in unconventional ways, not just by reading from textbooks, but by giving them real world examples such as current events that are or could be impacting their lives. Children should learn about the past, but a lot of things that are taught are irrelevant today. We should be talking about issues from the recent past and things that are happening in the world today. Jeff Andrade Duncan talks about how we carry cell phones on us that contain all the knowledge that we could ever want to know in seconds. In the meantime we are still teaching students in an old antiquated way. He mentions a quote from Einstein in which he says the definition of "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." What he is saying by this is we need to change how our schools operate fundamentally. They have to adjust their way of teaching to better serve the students that they are trying to reach.