Back to their future – together!

This was part of my speech on August 7 at Portland, Oregon during the 8th Annual AERO Conference — Transforming Education & Our World and was originally posted at the TEDxKids@BC website. I hope you will enjoy the video I made for the occasion – bear in mind that this was my first attempt at video editing! I am looking forward to your feedback on my thoughts around bringing the kids into a partnership with us adults and making a social change and shaping the future together

Try to imagine a future without kids. It hurts to even think about this, right? It’s a nightmare we better never see! How about kids without a future? Unfortunately, the world in which many kids have no future already exists — we live in it every day.

I am not talking runaway climate change roasting the biosphere here — from poverty, to no access to clean drinking water, to diseases, to no basic human rights — examples of this kind abound. But the kids also face problems like outdated school systems, inefficient healthcare, disconnectedness from nature, society that values conformity over authenticity…

In our world, adults decide for the kids: From serving chocolate milk during school lunch to opting out from vaccines… From cutting school budgets and enforcing standardized testing to choosing energy sources and CO2 limits… From what to learn and whom to learn with to when and how to play!

Be sure of your dreams!

Piglet sidled up to Pooh from behind.
“Pooh,” he whispered.
“Yes, Piglet?”
“Nothing,” said Piglet, taking Pooh’s paw,
“I just wanted to be sure of you.”

NOTE: This was originally posted at the new TEDxKids@BC blog. I invite my readers to check the blog out as we’re trying to bring various authors to share their stories and ideas around empowering kids, nurturing passion, fostering creativity, supporting authentic learning! 

There were many times in my life when I would dream, often with my eyes open, but it wasn’t until sometime last year that some of those dreams popped out of my head and started running in front of me. It wasn’t something I did that brought them to life. Nor could I control them once they were on their own either. All I could do was to touch them to be sure of them.

Have you ever stopped playing?

It felt like a very long day today — a failure on one of the servers at work almost led to loosing all our customer data! The fact it happened on a Saturday made things worse. Luckily, it all ended up well, but the day almost wore out by then. Still I felt uneasy — it didn’t feel right to finish with the bitter taste that panic, worry and grave seriousness through the day left in my mouth.

A glance through the window let me see the sun still shining and the evening inviting for a play outside with my older daughter. We both jumped on our bikes and off we went to visit the many playgrounds in our neighbourhood. This is when I realized I’ve been reaching out to play as a way to deal with stress and make me feel better ever since I’ve got my first daughter.

I haven’t thought about it until tonight, but I can’t remember doing many “playful” things since almost I was a child my self. I always led a fairly serious life, with great responsibility for my actions and thought that hard-working discipline is the only requirement for success. Not that I haven’t done things for fun, on the contrary, but play to me is when you have fun by being immersed with all the senses into something you do out of joy and without worrying if you “behave” for your age.

What makes you special?

Image credit: Speak to Children

Tonight, my (almost) 7 years old daughter asked me: Tato*, what makes you special?

… pause …

As you can assume, I didn’t know what to make of it! When I asked her what she means by that, she told me that she thinks she is good at drawing, so that makes her “special” in her mind and she wants to know what is it that I am good at?!

This made me think — I did wiggle out of a straight answer, btw! — Am I so good at something that I feel special about it? What does being special mean, after all?

I know I am a unique person with own behavior, dreams and wishes for the future. I know that if someone looks hard enough they’ll find few things that make me different from the other 7 billion people on this planet — but that makes me as special as a zebra is special because of its pattern being unique among all other zebras and that is not what my daughter really meant!

Amazing kids & amazing dreams!

We at World4Children are passionate about helping kids live their dream and apply their own passions to build a better future for themselves. Luckily, we’re not alone and many organizations around the world share similar values. We’re happy to have one of them as one of our greatest supporters and hopefully partners in the future to help more kids follow their dreams!

Amazing Kids! is a children’s non-profit organization offering fun, challenging, and self-motivating educational enrichment for kids and teens worldwide! Their online magazine is created by kids and highly respected by many kids, parents and educators. Their programs are helping kids with opportunities to improve their skills or get resources to help them launch their own dreams.

There’s no age limit for passion — meet Perry Chen, a 10-yr-old film critic, radio show host, animator…

Perry Chen with Oscar-winning director Davis Guggenheim post interview at LA Film Festival, June 2010 -- Photo by Zhu Shen -- © Perry's Previews

When 8 years old Perry Chen entered 3rd grade, his teacher was in for a surprise. Perry was an avid reader and was able to understand the meaning of words at high school level. Instead of drilling him with the same homework practice as expected by an average 3rd grader, the teacher encouraged him to write — and changed his life forever!

Today, less than a month shy of his 11th birthday, Perry is famous as the youngest film critic in the world and gets free passes to screenings of the newest films for kids, interviews movie makers and actors, even joins them on the red carpet. As a young reviewer, he has a unique way of rating movies by giving them starfish and is not looking just for the visual effects and their appeal to kids, but is very interested in the story — particularly the moral message coming out of it.

You would think he’s too excited about being a movie critic, but Perry’s passion doesn’t end with film reviews. He already had an interesting career doing book reviews in the past and recently added restaurant reviews to his growing portfolio. He enjoys drawing and essentially turning any kind of materials into art and have recently ventured into doing animation films. Since his interests are far and wide, there’s no knowing what he may end up doing next!

The (truth about) fear of change

25% of my contacts on Linkedin have started in a new job last year

Just over a year ago, on January 24, 2010, I posted the big news to my family and friends — I am starting a blog! Haven’t yet figured out what it was going to be exactly about, but I was convinced it would be another New Year’s resolution that will stay out of the drawer for few months only — before it would go back to the pile of other ideas that for some reason people usually deliberate around the turn of the new year and never truly take the effort to follow up on them. Still, I thought, it would be fun to try — little did I know how much so!

Want a chimp for a pet? 10 years old Brandon says you better make one smile!

Brandon Wood and Dr. Goodall ~ Copyright ©JGI 2010

We are so pleased to introduce 10 years old Brandon Wood — another greatly inspiring kid in our interview series!

As most 10 years old boys, Brandon has a great love for animals, but not in the way you would expect. He is passionate about saving his favorites — our closest cousins among the Great Apes — from captivity!

Back in 2009, Brandon decided he wanted a chimp as a pet. Being curios if that is possible, he decided to research and learn more about these amazing animals, but what he found out caused a change of heart — instead of getting one as a pet, he decided he wanted to help save those held in captivity!

Since then, Brandon has been successfully raising awareness about the bad conditions in which chimps held in captivity for biomedical and other research live. He continually raises money to organize adoptions and transfer for such chimps to the Save the Chimps Sanctuary using his Make a Chimp Smile blog.

Brandon recently spoke at the TEDxYouth@TampaBay conference organized on Universal Children’s Day on November 20, 2010 (see video below) and is actively engaged with people and organizations that are interested in helping these endangered species!

Our split identities

Today, I had a chance to meet Judge Robert Watt, an appointed Citizenship Judge for Vancouver, BC. Yes, you guessed it, I got the honor to sing “O Canada, our home and native land” together with him, my family and 77 other immigrants to Canada — who like us, have come to this country about 4-5 years ago, leaving their home land, extended families, even parents, brothers and sisters, seeking a better life!

As Judge Robert was using his charming baritone and inspiring words to warm our hearts giving us one of the best motivational speeches I have ever listened to and congratulating us on our wise choice to pick Canada as our new home, I started thinking — Why is it that we care so much which piece of land we are going to call home country? Is there an intrinsic value that one could claim when choosing to “belong” to this and not another part of the world?

“Albania, Argentina, Bangladesh, …, Macedonia, Myanmar, … United Stated of America, Vietnam” — Judge Robert’s voice still echoes in my head, as he was reading the 24 countries we, the 77 immigrants, called our home land before coming to Canada … 24 countries!! … What a diversity! … I still can’t grasp the grandeur of this number … it means that there were very few countries represented with more than one family in  that room today … For real, the diversity is striking! … It made me appreciate the total number of countries in the world!

What is in a year, really?

Photo by Goran Kimovski, December, 2010

If a year was a bucket, it would start half empty…
But sadly, finish half full…

Somewhere death comes by night,
While a newborn smiles at his first daylight
An old man says last goodbye at work,
A child says Hi to her first homework
Mother’s cry, father’s pride,
Children’s voices race for the clouds
If a year was a bucket, it would hold life…

One child is born to never learn food is scarce,
Another is raised to respect nature’s resources
Yet another brings doom to many with his gun,
While his friends are looking up to the sun
White, black, girls, boys,  fast, slow, short, tall
Different but same, happy dreams for all
If a year was a bucket, it would hold hope…