The restless voice that keep us up at night

About 2 months ago  I attended a TED.x  event "flipping the switch" at the UNLV and I have to say,  by far Adam Braun's talk was my favorite from the whole session and by trying to figure it why ? Why was I so moved by the words of this 29 year old guy? I found a common denominator we all have, and is the desire to bring balance back into the world and once you are spiritually shocked by a reveling experience ( in Adam's case his journey through India)  you can't go back to be the same person  without feeling that you own something to the world,  and it did click in a few seconds after giving it a thought. 

Adam explains how he found himself in a place in life where he craved to moved out if his confront zone, in his own words: "I experimented this thing that we all have that keeps calling us late at night, I call it, the restless voice than keeps us up,.. It said to me more than anything get out of your confront zone its only when you are out of there, when you start getting to know who you are rather than what you are. "

And I am pretty sure everybody has felt this at least once. Another aspect of the talk than captivated me was the fact than he decided to found "pencils and promises" a for-purpose organization rather than a non-profit that has built  more that 150 schools around rural areas of Africa Asia and latin America , so being a teacher myself  I know for fact that there is nothing that can liberate the human spirit as education can.

But it was not until the very end when he asked a very interesting question : What can the U.S. educational system can learn from the developing world ?  And he started to lay down some techniques organically being used in classroom in Africa, that coincidentally are some of the strategies than I use everyday  in my own classroom , for what I been often criticized as they are not very traditional ways to teach in America, and I never really knew the science behind them ,I just knew they worked, for example the use of Motion and how the brain is not nearly as activated when sitting quietly, also the number of students in a class, lately in  U.S. education I've seen this trend, this obsession with shrinking the sizes of group classes, when I know form working more than 12 years with big classes : students become more independent when they have less personal attention form teacher and this increases their self learning abilities allowing them to be more confident in the target subject.   Here is the complete video of this amazing TED.x UNLV talk, you can actually see me sitting front row at minute 2:20. 

and remember "if your dreams do not scare you, they are not big enough".