Interesting aside from the movie Men in Black

I was viewing wimp and came across this snippet of the movie Men in Black (Sony Pictures). I find it quite interesting and and amusing as I try to become slightly competent in a technological learning centre!

http://www.wimp.com/describeshumanity/

We have watched a TED presentation through our course work and I have watched more previously to this course as it has some very interesting speakers. I found this one today and part of it sums up how I feel both as a learner in this course (What is the right way, what will get me the best mark in the old sense of the learning world?) and for what I see in my own kids and in the classroom when I help. None of us want to be wrong; we don't want to fail, we don't want to see our kids struggle, to go through the process; we want to protect them from harm (all harm) some times to their detriment. I thought it was well worth watching.


http://www.wimp.com/learnmistakes/

The above point was brought home to me through my daughters work.

My daughter in grade 3 (very into doing the `right' thing) was given a task to write a descriptive narrative about a place- she chose the classroom, was very diligent and wrote a beautiful explanation of what happened in the classroom. When told by her teacher (whom she adores) that it wasn't what was asked for she was very upset and couldn't get it. She was almost in tears and wanted me to fix it for her either by getting the teacher to change her mind or by telling her what to write. As a parent I was very tempted to fix it for her; help her in any way I could; however out of respect for the teacher I resisted and instead discussed with her how she might change it, what could she think of that was descriptive etc. She woke me at 6am this morning to finish her new draft to take to the teacher today. She skipped all the way to class. I could have easily, willingly and naively taken that away from her.