The Challenge of a Lifetime

http://k12onlineconference.org/?p=741

After watching this conference I was pretty inspired. Dr. Tim Tyson has a powerful way with words. He has powerful views and opinions and presents them in an amazing tone and persuasive way. He starts outs speaking by saying, "See the forest not just the trees". We tend to blame the educational policy, system, and teachers for problems rather than looking to the broader, more important issues. To be quite honest I have not even thought about the failed system in such a broad way. I always assumed it must be the school or the teacher in front of the classroom that is failing these students. Yet, Dr. Tyson points out that it goes way beyond one school, one teacher, or one district. It is a national issue.

We can attribute a failing education system to ECONOMY, SOCIETY, and CULTURE. These all have a trickle down effect to our teaching. The problems we face as a culture effects the young minds sitting in front of you. If anyone thinks like me, you thought, these large national problems obviously will not effect my young child; however, I was horribly wrong. We are essentially a broken country, The only time I have seen the nation band together is a direct result from terrorist attacks. So we need someone to attack us and kill our people before we will stand together and face issues? As Dr. Tyson points out Finland has something called SISU. Sisu is the strength, the will, and determination as a nation to succeed. The people of Finland act together while all we want to do is oppose eachother. We want to seperate differences rather than drop our differences and stand together.

As Dr. Tyson says, we need to become agents of meaningful change. We need to care about all of the failure in our society (specifically leaders) and take a stand, do something about the issue at hand. Although this is a tough issue to take on, we must try to change our failing system. We do not want our children growing up thinking an education isn't going to get them anywhere. The children of today do not even realize how important education is because of how much it has failed them.