Blog Post #13

Shane Koyczan: To This Day...for the bullied and the beautiful
By: Jennifer Hamrick

The main thing that should be learned from this video is how damaging bullying can be for a child and what an impact adults have on shaping a child’s future. This video is the best one that I have watched all semester long and think that all teachers, present and future, should watch this video. Children are constantly being asked what they want to be when they grow up and then being told what not to be. Their dreams are being called silly or impossible. Children are being expected to define themselves at young ages and if they don’t, others define them. They are labeled slut, geek or fatty and told to accept the identity that others give them. We tell children to stand up for themselves but that is hard to do if they don’t know who they are. People often mistake standing up for themselves as embracing violence. Koyczan begins to address these issues in poem form and makes some very profound statements that I believe all people should watch and listen too. I am not going to quote this entire video, even though it deserves it, but I am going to end with my favorite quote from this talk.

“And if you can’t see anything beautiful about yourself,
get a better mirror.”

Alison Gopnik: What do Babies Think?
By: Dominique Jones

30 years ago psychologists thought babies could not think. Alison Gopnik is a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley and in this video she talks about what babies are actually thinking. Most people think that babies are dumb and useless. Alison wants people to know that babies are smarter than we think they are. Studies show that babies are able to distinguish that people will not like the same things by the age of 18 months. Babies and children are always learning. Studies also show that 4 year olds are able to find out an unlikely hypothesis than adults given the same test. Alison explains what it is like to be child. Children can take in lots of different information from a lot of sources compared to an adult who have a more focused driven conscious. She goes on to say that being a baby is like, “being in love in Paris for the first time after you've had 3 double espressos.” Alison says that there is nothing wrong with being an adult but being a baby has its benefits such as open learning, imagination, and creativity.