Can you change in a week?

During Ovation, Mrs Giraud showed the students a video on TED. TED is an organization committed to the spread of ideas usually with short videos or presentations with the slogan “Ideas worth spreading.” The non-profit organization was founded in 1984 and has since made over 1000 videos and has acquired an audience of over 1 billion viewers.

“I love TED! TED is a feast of interesting people talking about the world’s greatest ideas! It’s the best way to get smarter while procrastinating,” gushes Ms. Giraud.

On Wednesday, Giraud shared two of her recent favorites. The first talk was “Why a Good Book is a Secret Door” by Mac Barnett. In this talk, Mac talks “speaks about writing that escapes the page, art as a doorway to wonder — and what real kids say to a fictional whale.” In the discussion, he says that all children should have a creative environment to imagine and create. He owns a non-profit in downtown L.A. were the front of the building is a shop full of odd stuff that promote a creative space to learn and in the back of the building, behind the “employes only” door, is a space created to encourage kids to write and, once again create. He says he has seen a lot of support and is very encouraged with the current direction of the organization.

The second was a shorter video, by Google engineer Matt Cutts. The talk was called  “Try Something New for 30 Days.” In the video, Cutts shares that he “was stuck in a rut” and that he “decided to follow in the footsteps of the American philosopher Morgan Spurlock and try something new for 30 days.”

He says that “30 days is just about the right amount of time to add a new habit or subtract a habit.”

After the videos, Ms. Giraud invited students to challenge themselves during the month of October to try something new. Whether the action be writing a novel in 30 days, as Cutts did, or biking to school for 30 days, or even running 3 miles everyday for 30 days the challenge remains the same: Can you change in 30 days? Can you grow new habits in 30 days or completely reinvent the way you think in 30 days?

“I feel positive about it and actually I had been meaning to do it for a while, but never got to it”, says Miss. Mandel.

The challenge is now passed to the students. So the question is: can you change in 30 days? We will find out soon enough…