The Myth of Average: Todd Rose at TEDxSonomaCounty

Even after 10 yrs nothing has changed much

Love this. How do we design for the edges in a US public education system where the student teacher ratio is 30:1 and teachers have a hard time just getting by on such low wages?

I watched this and thought "Yes! Maybe we'll finally do something" and then looked and saw this was uploaded like 8 years ago. Oh well

Highly recommend Mr. Rose's book, The End Of Average. Very excellent & persuasive, it will flesh out everything he says here.

I teach a GED class at a prison and I see the end results of this. So many of these guys do just fine in one subject but terrible in another and as a result they got frustrated, dropped out, and in some cases that lead directly to them getting in trouble. Now I am trying to teach them but I am stuck in the same situation that got them there. 25 students, one teacher, not enough funding to even have textbooks for all my students. It's pretty depressing.

Not sure if he ever said it by name, but he is describing UDL - Universal Design for Learning. In case you were wondering...

'Average' made me feel that I am always insufficient because as Dr Rose says, all people have strengths and weaknesses, but the fact that I am 'below average' in certain capacities made me always hate myself. So relieving and happy to hear this talk. It makes me understand that I am normal and that I could be flexible and creative in approaching education etc

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is the concept he is talking about.

They could not teach me trigonometry in one year, in high school. One year later, in electronics school, in the army, they taught it to me in 3 DAYS. I kid you not.

Great talk ... read the book "End of Average" as well. Life changing it was. Thanks for this incredible piece of work Todd.

I just want to say thank you. I was searching for engaging staff videos as part of a principals qualification course that I am currently taking. I came across your video while searching for videos that support reaching all students. I found myself talking out loud to your video, yelling "yes, yes" often. Near the end though, I actually laughed in happiness. My son also was a high school drop out (identified as gifted with a communication learning disability). He is currently in his last year of college in Toronto (for technology), tutoring, working as a TA, and working in an internship program. His professors have personally spoken to him about greater things (creating a published paper about work he is doing, continuing his education in another field, possibly becoming a professor himself). Anyway..., thank you so very much for your video. It is the exact message I was looking for!

From a language and science buff who never got to go to university because i couldn't get any help with math, thank you. "Well, that's unfortunate. Good luck with your factory job" My parents even went as far as letting me work summers in a chicken slaughter house to 'show me what will happen to people who don't pick themselves up by the bootstraps, yadda yadda' instead of actually helping me get help. I almost ended school with 3 highest possible end grades on 3 seperate subjects, the rest was good to average... but that didn't matter to anyone. All they could say is "you spoiled your chances because you failed math!" In this world, you get one chance only to reach for the highest.... in your darn teens. Really? This is the best society can come up with?

I was told i would not pass grade 5 and my parent had to hear from the teacher at the time that i would be a drop out. I struggled with changing schools in secondaries( High school) and barely made it out. I am now a Nurse with 2 specialties, being told I am the best Nurse to learn from and I am also an Instructor at a top university in Canada. Medicine and Nursing is my passion. I always loved studying biology but couldn't do it. The school i was in at the time had other subjects I had to pick by default (combination) with it and I was not good in them. I dropped and had to do math, physics and design where i was a below average student. After high school, I was able to rebuild and joined a Nursing school where I struggled at the beginning but started to excel and finished my studies as one of top performers.

You are so right. Great comparisons.nice to hear someone talk about the situation with real concern and passion.

This means a lot to anyone who ever felt like and oddball outlier in school knowing they had so much more to offer.

I can so relate to the ideas presented in this talk. So good to know that science and technology can help us nurture so many more to success.

I Truly believe this is the is the future of our world. We must create change in our education system. this is time to make a diffrence

As a techie, I've always felt computers would accelerate learning. But it was never clear how this would or could come to fruition. Drill and kill, repetition, automatic marking? Feedback via computerized measurement of the learning process?  The allegory in the talk is that the computer might compensate for weaknesses, reinforcing strengths, and adjusting difficulties in the course materials, and doing this in the background for each user. The computational abilities of the computer become the training wheels for the brain. To be useful we would need to create a list of adjustable criteria, making the text longer or shorter, making the math harder or easier, changing the number of steps in the problem.Then as the student works on the problems, adjustments are made - sort of how a perceptive human instructor will ask leading questions, trying to coax the next bit of progress from the interactive mind.

Wow! Thank you for this talk.

I am one of those kids as well... I will not rest until the idea discussed in this video comes to life and is institutionalized in different areas around the world. So many geniuses are lost due to our poorly designed educational system. We need to start creating a future for our children that allows people to think for themselves and learn in the environments that are best suited(customized) for them. I hope you are all as inspired as I am by this talk. Thank you Todd Rose, there is still hope.