Ted Talk #4 (choice)

I choose to watch a Ted talk by Kiran Bir Sethi. She is from India and is the director of a school called Riverside. Her ted talk was about how contagious is a good word and to infect, is a positive thing. She talked about how when kids want to make a change and when they believe they can do something for the world, it is contagious and we all get infected by this great new outlook on life. I found this Ted talk very  inspiring. One of the mottoes at there school is I can. She said that adults need to provide the motivation to kids. They need to tell them that they can. They did a project at there school that was about child labor. First they put the kids through 2 hours of child labor, then they sent them out to the streets to talk about how horrible it is and how it needs to be stopped. She showed a video of the children talking to a man and making him see the horrors of child labor and change his mind. The child's face just lit up because he made a difference. She talked about "infecting" places. Her school started in there city where every other month for two days they close down the streets and give it to the children to play, draw, read and listen. One of the adults said if you give back to the children now, they will give back when they grow old. Then they sent  a kit of "I can" to 32,000 schools. In the kit it told the kids to have one idea and go out and change a life. The stories of kids teaching adults to read or teaching a city to recycle was amazing. These kids testing score were higher then almost all of the other schools in India. I cant agree with this video more. I think a lot of times kids are put in a box and are not always told that they can do whatever they want to. We are put in a stereo type of teenagers that only cause problems. But I believe that inspiring, motivating and enabling kids to make a change, we will respond and can really do amazing things. There are so many issues in the world right now and I think children can bring a fresh sense of innocence  to these problems. They don't look at the negatives, they see the problem and do whatever they can to fix it because in a child's mind, impossible is nothing. School should focus more on going out in the world and being the change, instead of learning what the value of x is or what the correct grammar for a sentence is. Personally I would love to help out around the world, but sometimes I think that why should I? I am just a kid. This video sends the exact opposite message out and shows people that life is about listening and changing.  Karin used videos of amazing things but talked during the videos and then went back to just talking. She presented herself nicely and made an intentional effort to inspire the people around her. I know by watching her video, it brought a smile to my face and spark in my heart, if I can put that effect into my Ted talk, I will consider it a success. If more kids believed " I can" it would eventually infect the world to a "we can" and people would look back and say " They did"