An imaginary application to participate in TED talks as a 2013 TED Fellow:

TELL US ABOUT YOURSELF

We take this portion of the application very seriously. Please take the time to answer the questions thoughtfully, with enough detail to help us understand who you are. 

All responses are limited to 1500 characters except where noted.

What is your current primary activity? *

 

I am the facilitator of a child-run animation workshop and the Creative Director of the nonprofit wehearyou.net.  Our mission is to carefully listen to the children’s ideas and concerns and to encourage them to express these things in animation.   And they do.  The children set up the camera stand and lights for each session, create the animation, shoot all the frames, input them to a computer, edit the frames, make the soundtrack.   There is virtually no creative input from adults, whose role is to keep an eye on the clock and make sure things run smoothly.  Being this hands-off is hard work, too, and requires a high degree of calmness, alertness, discipline, attentiveness and humor.  Also, perhaps most importantly, flexibility on the fly.    

In addition to my work as lead facilitator of the workshop I am also the organization’s Director of Development, recruiter, fundraiser, corresponding secretary, trainer, marketing and branding officer, writer, webmaster, social media director, head of outreach, bookkeeper.   I also do the final edit of the weekly animations and mix the soundtracks.   (1,068 characters)

 

What are you best known for? *

Oddly enough, cool under fire, sang froid.  I’m aided in this by an overdeveloped sense of irony acquired during constant warfare in the contentious family of my childhood.   I am known for several skills and talents that I’ve made no efforts to exploit financially, to the puzzlement of many.  I am considered an inventive draftsman, I play guitar and keyboards and arrange, I’m a clear, concise and sometimes moving writer.  I am also known for dreaming and my many ideas, which I have never hesitated to share.  Also for a sometimes uncanny memory. 

In the professional realm, I am best known for variations on the above.  As a subsistence lawyer I was probably best known for my deadpan style, quickness of tongue and odd grace dancing before judges, especially when they were being disrespectful.   As a teacher I was probably best known for my easy rapport with children, candor and quickness of retort.  I also gave a high priority to the students’ creativity and took pains not to pour water on any idea they expressed.  Parents and colleagues often remarked on how creative my classes were.

As a young man I was probably best known for my angry words.   I have been transforming myself into a more deliberate, milder person.   A quick, cutting response may be fun to make, and satisfying in the moment, but one learns (with luck) that it does little to advance a real conversation.  I am known for being someone you can have a meaningful conversation with.  I place a high value on real conversation.

 

What other achievements (not only academic) would you like to share? *

As hinted at above, my achievements are difficult to quantify, in worldly terms.   My biggest achievement to date has been my ongoing dedication to my beliefs as embodied in wehearyou.net.  My creation of and involvement with this program, which I consider radical and sorely needed, has necessitated many positive changes in my thinking and action.  

I’ve come to understand that most people are mostly preoccupied most of the time and that the modern attention span is very short.  I’ve had to learn things I’d never thought about.   I’ve had to learn, for example, that most people don’t give a rat’s ass about whether or not poor children in Harlem make animation.   I am, after a long digestive period, able to keep those perceptions in mind without letting them deter me or slow my progress.

My mission is to encourage people to listen to and respond to each other gently.  It’s a life-affirming thing for a child to be listened to attentively by an adult, to have a moment to dream out loud uninterrupted.  While this is a sadly rare thing (for anyone of any age) in our hyper digital world of virtual connection and overloaded distraction, the program and I have made some very encouraging first steps in this direction.

 

Beyond your work and studies, what are you passionate about? (e.g. hobbies, causes, activities, issues — please do not talk about your work in this section) *

I am passionate about playing music, listening and preserving the spaces in music that are where the action is.   I am passionate about improvising and helping to bring out the creativity of others.   I play the guitar, mostly, and am always most pleased when another musician comments on how much space I leave for other people’s ideas.  I also enjoy accompanying singers.

I am passionate about justice, which is one reason the law was such an unappealing detour on the road of my life.  Justice in America is largely the justice you can afford to purchase.   I can point you to the relevant provisions in our constitution which obliquely say as much.  The gulf between what is legal and what is right is an enormous, stinking crevasse.  My powerlessness in the face of recent injustice,  “the war on terror” and its related excesses, the widespread,  crippling criminality of the financial sector, led me to imagine a program that would encourage children to plan, stage, critique, problem-solve in groups.  To help them become informed, effective citizens of a democracy.

I dream of helping create articulate young citizens who are able to inform themselves about issues, argue them and organize to change intolerable conditions in our democracy.  I plan to give a digital megaphone and increased sense of agency to children, particularly those society has decided get all the help they need from programs for “at-risk” and “underprivileged” kids.   

I am passionate about letting the larger society, the one busy piously acquiring wealth, see what is in the minds and hearts of young people who are seen, if at all, as profitable widgets for privatized prisons. 

I am passionate about drawing, writing well and, whenever possible, having deep conversation.

 

Share an example of something you have been a part of (including created, led, or joined) that you consider unique, even if no one else does. Why do you think it is mould breaking? (Limit 2250 characters) * 

Not to harp on wehearyou.net, but I consider our approach unique and mould breaking.   Here’s the idea, with illustrations at the end.  The creative potential of young children is increasingly discounted.   When children are allowed to choose their projects, &  control all aspects of production, remarkable things emerge.  Week after week children ages 7 to 11 create, in the chaos of a free-form workshop, surprisingly inventive animation.   I am amazed by some break-through just about every session.

The great Sugata Mitra demonstrated children’s ability to self-organize, learn and teach each other things they are passionately engaged with.   Mitra used a computer embedded in a wall and documented the progress of illiterate children, as a group, who mastered the technology with no outside help.   Wehearyou.net is using the canvas of animation to help demonstrate the rich creative lives of children who are increasingly forced into ever more restrictive learning environments where most of them will learn failure rather than any kind of success.

In the test-prep age of No Child Left Behind children are seen as passive vessels to be filled with information and skills geared to standardized tests rather than as partners in their own education.  Kids are capable of learning much more than most educators give them credit for, particularly if license is given for their creativity to enter the classroom.

8 year-old with cut-out and three foil coins asks how to make the little character juggle.  I tell him I have no idea, see what you can do.  Within moments the little cut-out is juggling, the kid is already on to the next thing, with barely a backwards glance.  Two seven year olds create a guitarist and drummer.  Passing by I suggest they cut off and move the guitarist’s arm to make him strum.   A short while later they shoot a sequence where the two tiny musicians play perfectly in sync, the guitarist strumming then flipping his guitar in the air to catch and strum it on the beat.  The drummer, meanwhile, flips his drumsticks in the air, catches them and, bam!, exactly on the same beat.  How they did it, truthfully, I have no idea.

Idea Girl, nine, with five ideas a week she is too distracted to carry out, describes sequence where character will take part of his stomach, make a basketball backboard and hoop out of it, dunk a basketball, turn a somersault, pick up the backboard, eat it, get fat and then turn into a ball.   I ask if she’ll do this with clay.  She nods.  A few hours later, when first looking at the frames they shot during the session, I am amazed to see the frames, which needed no editorial improvement, doing exactly what she described.  (2732)

 

What questions should we have asked, but didn’t? Please write them down and answer them! (in other words, tell us something about yourself that we don’t know yet). (Limit 2250 characters) *

(I’ll get back to them on this one) 

Can you share a memorable anecdote from your life that will give us a further sense of what makes you tick?

My father was brilliant and very funny but also brutally defended at all times.   I learned, at age 40, that he’d been the victim of atrocious abuse from his mother, whippings as soon as he was old enough to stand.  Learning this unspeakable secret, from Eli, an older cousin, gave me great insight I could never have had without knowing about the abuse he’d endured.

My father and I had a life-long debate about whether people could change.   He argued that only superficial things could be changed, that deeper personality traits were ingrained and set.  I said changes in response were the first step toward making the deeper changes.  He angrily denied any insights I may have thought I’d received from Eli, pointing out that his cousin was a problematic historian and tyrannical father.

At 1 a.m. on what turned out to be the last night of my father’s life I visited him in the hospital.  His first comment: “Eli hit the nail right on the head, only he didn’t tell you the worst of it.”  He hadn’t recovered from being whipped as an infant.  This brilliant man remained somehow convinced he’d been the dumbest kid in town.  He told me I was right about change.  He wished he’d had the insight to try to change himself.  “I imagine how much richer my life would have been if I had not seen it as a zero-sum war.”  

As sun set the next evening he breathed his last, I closed his eyes. The profound gift of these last moments with my father remains with me, and sustains my beliefs.  (1476)

How did you hear about the TED Fellows program?

I don’t recall exactly.  I think I stumbled on a TED talk on youTube and have watched many since.  I also subscribe to the podcast on WNYC.   Several friends, it turns out, are also great fans of TED (how can you not be?) and I have done some evangelizing and turned a few others on to these remarkable talks.  I probably learned of the Fellows program on the TED website.

 

Have you participated in TED before? If so, to what extent? (e.g. you watch TEDTalks, you’ve attended / hosted / spoken at a TEDx event, you’re a TEDTranslator, etc) 

Only to the extent of being inspired by many of the talks.  The inspirations have been too many to list in 1,500 characters, but for purposes of wehearyou.net, the talks of Sugata Mitra, Ken Robinson and Seth Godin cannot be praised enough.