Talks trigger thought

Technology, Entertainment and Design talks have been led by some of the brightest minds of this generation such as Steve Jobs and Stephen Hawking, and The Honors College has brought these intellectual and inspiring conversations home.

A group of more than 20 high school students, undergraduates, graduate students and professors gave TED talks Saturday in a lecture series called TEDxYouth@UH in which they spoke about topics varying from cultural understanding to intellectual understanding in learning styles.

“I’m a fan of TED talks. So when we had the opportunity to do our own, I thought this was a great opportunity to marry it with one of our motivations in The Honors College, which is to engage with the community around us,” said Christine LeVeaux-Haley, a political science professor and assistant dean for academic programs at The Honors College.

“I thought it would be nice to get area students to pick their brain and see what they think about the education they are receiving. We received all sorts of different proposals from high school students in the area with great ideas about how to change education,” LeVeaux-Haley said.

The lecture began with a short presentation from English literature seniorChris Powell on how the word “foreign” must be redefined to “unfamiliar” in order to learn more about the world and to achieve “bigworldedness,” a concept in which we pursue encounters with the unfamiliar.

“I enjoyed his presentation about being global in the sense of reminding yourself that foreign is not a word we should be using; it should be more along the lines of unfamiliar and actually looking in on yourself and finding those things that you’re not familiar with in the pursuit of knowing more,” said hotel and restaurant management junior Sarah Rennalls.

“I liked the idea of being global in your learning and never ceasing to find a solution to something that you don’t know,” Rennalls said.

Although a few university students, such as Powell, presented their own TED talks, the majority of the lectures were given by high school students.

“I was amazed by the potential of young people. Most TED talks I see are from seasoned professionals or professors that hold doctorates, but a lot of the presentations today were amazing, and they were done by high school kids,” said sociology junior Michael Lenmark. “They really have the capacity and the proactivity and the motivation to do a TED talk, and that was simply amazing to me.”

Many of the short lectures from high school students portrayed that young minds are craving a revolution in the way materials are taught in schools, and each offered its own solutions to the issues that are crippling classrooms today.

A presentation given by Bellaire High School student Kangdi Li titled “That Awkward Moment When Instead of Saving Princess Peach, You Save the World,” which was about the importance of progressing education with each generation, hit a resounding note with the audience.

“Her lecture was the beginning of an innovation. She gave what’s wrong and how we should fix it in a fun way. Also, it resonated a lot when she said things like ‘social obligation’ and ‘human education’ because that’s a thing that we don’t have,” said psychology junior Alice Yang.

“If you think about the world and what it is right now, those are things that we so severely need and no institution teaches it. Why not teach the things we need the most? The details and the math and the formulas and the critical thinking are processes of how we do things, but they don’t explain why we do things,” Yang said.

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