Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity | Video on TED.com OR "How I fell in love with TED: Part 2"

The fist link listed with Rives' poem was to this talk, the title of which obviously caught my attention. I'd become rather jaded about my job and our educational system in general. I had reread the chapters in Daniel Quinn's My Ishmael on education, specifically how we don't need it; at least not in the model we currently have. I had also stumbled upon a copy of Grace Llewllyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Needless to say, this video was right up my alley for the mindset I was in.

For some, these ideas may persuade one to throw out the whole system. For me, however, they got me thinking about what kind of changes could be made.

Rives remixes TED2006 | Video on TED.com OR "How I fell in love with TED: Part I"

I may have mentioned this, but I had a rather rough first year of teaching. It lead me to leave the classroom voluntarily, which lead to this downward spiral at the current point in which I find myself wielding a price gun at a part-time, minimum wage job with plenty of time on my hands to contemplate my career goals. Ironically, I have decided that my ideal teaching job would essentially be the one I had; the one that I thought had turned me off to teaching forever. That is a brief description of where I am. Here is a small part of the story of how I got here.

After quitting my teaching job in Worcester I was moved to Westchester, New York. When I got there, like now, I was underemployed and therefore had a fair amount of time to mess around on the Internet. While YouTubing various poets I came across Rives' 'Mockingbird'. I was already starting to fall in love with spoken word poetry and this piece made me swoon. I watched it over and over and over again. I'm always in awe of his rhythm and pacing.