TEDRecommends Recap (April)

Hey TEDxErs!We hope you’ve had an excellent month. School is almost out, giving many of us more free time during the week. And in case you were looking for something to stimulate your mind, we’ve got just the thing. We are bringing you some of our TED talk recommendations. We’ve recapped four talks that are all extremely interesting and invigorating for you to check out whenever you can.

The Mental Health Benefits of Storytelling for Health Care Workers - Laurel Braitman

With the pandemic occurring, it’s become apparent now more than ever how critical our healthcare workers are for our society. They are the ones that help to take care of us, make us feel better, and give us a chance at becoming healthy once more. Laurel Braitman addresses this in her TED talk, even stating that doctors are the most important workers of our society. 

They work endlessly to help address our health concerns. And yet, Braitman points out that sometimes the mental health of our healthcare professionals goes by unaddressed. 

Oftentimes, healthcare workers can feel themselves burning out. The emotions, the pressure, the feeling of isolation or imposter syndrome all weight down on these people. Braitman brings light to this issue of how physicians' own emotional well-being are rarely addressed or acknowledged, and can even become a physician’s downfall in their career path. 

So what can we do if the people who save lives, have their own lives at stake?

Storytelling is what Braitman prescribes. Storytelling provides a way to convey the intense emotions that physicians may feel, the pressure they face. And the vulnerability that occurs from sharing their stories can resonate with other physicians, and bring a sense of solidarity amongst physicians. The communication can create empathy, compassion, devotion, and passion, and ultimately, creates a healthier mental environment for our physicians.

The Game That Gives You 10 Extra Years of Life - Jane McGonigal

Oftentimes, we associate gaming with being a leisure activity, something that is as unproductive and as a “waste of time.” Yet, despite this negative reputation that gaming holds, it allows us to utilize something that can ultimately benefit us. When we play games, we adapt a certain mindset. A mindset that can encourage us to challenge ourselves and push ourselves outside of our comfort zone.

Jane McGonigal, a game designer, tackles this concept in her talk. She explores how the concept of gaming could potentially add years to our lives. But before she delves into that, it’s necessary to understand the context behind her talk.

We, as a society, typically want to live our happiest and best possible life before we depart this world. But oftentimes, people have deathbed regrets regarding the decisions they made. These regrets range from working too hard to not spending enough time with loved ones. McGonigal says that we can play a quick game to help build up resilience in our life. By viewing small tasks to build up resilience as quests, we’re more likely to push ourselves and even have a bit of fun doing so. The four types of resilience we should work to increase are: social, emotional, physical, and mental. Building up our resilience over time allows for us to grow, and ultimately, live longer and happier.

Grit: The power of passion and perseverance - Angela Lee Duckworth

 Often as students, we are over-worried about grades and how that must be the most evident measure of success. Well in this talk, Angela comes to restructure our thoughts on measures of achievement, in a passionate and well-thought way. When she was 27 years old, she tells us how she left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching math.

She expounds how in education, we are taught that the perfect measure of intelligence is IQ, but she proposes your educational abilities and life depends on much more than that. Deciding to pursue grad school in psychology, she begins to analyze everyone from West Point military academy to Spelling bee participants, from rookie teachers in tough neighborhoods to people in sales and find out what it was exactly that defined who would end up more successful than the other. It was not IQ, GPA, or valedictorian status; the most significant predictor of success was Grit. Grit is a term defined as: passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. It is about working really hard to make your imagined future into a reality. It is possible to teach anyone this by developing a "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Watch and see how you can develop your Grit and find the drive you need to achieve all of your goals, independent of where you are in life today. 

Let’s Grow a Generation of Data Natives - Joel Walsh

Our 2019 conference “Origins of Tomorrow” was full of innovative and captivating speakers, Joel Walsh, a third-year STEM Education Ph.D. student, was one of them. He proposed a radical restructuring of how we teach children mathematics and computation to create the data literate, automation-resistant workforce of tomorrow. Walsh was a public-school teacher dedicated to motivating students in the classroom. Now in grad school, he uses what he learned with his students to research ways of improving classroom learning outcomes and reforming K-12 mathematics standards that change with the annual surges in technology. 

Mathematics can be confusing, but when properly taught it can restructure flawed systems. Therefore Walsh invites us to change the way they teach probability and computational thinking, while offering Introduction to data science in all high schools. Specific attention to ethics and accountability in algorithms, because as he mentions “Big-data and automation are moving on with or without us”. His interactive talk wraps up with a list of ways we can all contribute in turning his proposals into reality. You are sure to end this video enlightened. 

We hope everyone enjoys these talks! 

Until next time we connect,

TEDxUTAustin