10 talks from inspiring teachers

Professor John Keating of “The Dead Poets Society.” Calculus teacher Jaime Escalante of “Stand and Deliver.” Marine-turned-teacher Louanne Johnson of “Dangerous Minds.” Hollywood might want to take note of a new award-winning teacher on the block, Stephen Ritz, who gave this fast-paced, highly inspiring talk at TEDxManhattan.

A parent and teacher in the South Bronx, Ritz has noticed his students getting larger and more sickly over the years, not to mention the fact that they’re parsing fewer options for earning a living. So Ritz began working with his students to grow “indoor edible walls,” beautiful living murals, full of greenery. Not only does food from the walls get served in the school cafeteria as well as in local shelters — creating the walls has become a full-scale business for Ritz’s students. The project has snowballed into designing an office wall in Boston, building green roofs in South Hampton, making gardens for 100 other New York City schools and even installing a large wall in Rockefeller Center.

“Kids from the poorest Congressional district in America can build a 30 x 15 foot wall — design it, plant it, and install it in the middle of New York City,” says Ritz. “This is the new green graffiti.”

Since starting the edible wall project, Ritz has seen his kids’ attendance jump from 43 to 90 percent. Through the project, one of his students became the first in his family to open a bank account. His students have developed relationships with local contractors through the project, and have gone on to lucrative jobs in their area.

“I’m putting the bake sale to shame,” says Ritz, explaining that more projects are in the works for his students, including growing pumpkin patches in New York City subways and planting mini farms along major city roads.

In honor of Ritz’s work watch nine more talks from truly inspiring teachers after the jump.

Arthur Benjamin: Teach statistics before calculus
Arthur Benjamin makes numbers dance. A math professor at Harvey Mudd College, he’s also a “Mathemagician,” taking the stage in his tuxedo to perform high-speed mental calculations and other astounding math stunts.  In this talk, he offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age — ditch calculus and teach statistics and probability.

John Hunter: Teaching the World Peace GameIn 1978, at the Richmond Community High School, Hunter led the first session of the World Peace Game, a hands-on political simulation where he puts all the problems of the world on a 4′x5′ plywood board and has his 4th-graders solve them. The game is now played around the world.

Emily Pilloton: Teaching design for change
Designer Emily Pilloton moved to rural and impoverished Bertie County, North Carolina, to see what could happen with design-led community transformation. While there, she’s teaching a design class called Studio H that engages high schoolers’ minds and bodies while getting rid of trailer classrooms and bringing new opportunities to the poorest county in the state.

Dan Meyer: Math class needs a makeoverWhy is the focus in math class always on solving problems? High school math teacher Dan Meyer thinks the focus should be on formulating solutions rather than paint-by-number homework. “I’m selling a product to a market that doesn’t want it but is forced by law to buy it,” he says in this talk, in which he offers some new approaches.

Aaron Sams: How to speed up chemical reactions and get a dateColorado High School teacher Aaron Sams encountered a big challenge in his rural school — that students miss a lot of class.  In 2007, he began recording his lectures and posting them online so that even absent students could keep on top of their work without falling further behind. He calls this “the flipped classroom,” a concept he explains in greater detail in this article. Above, watch his TED-Ed lesson on chemical reactions made relatable to anyone hoping to go to prom.

Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education
Education scientist Sugata Mitra tackles one of the greatest problems in education — that the best teachers and schools don’t exist where they’re needed most. In a series of real-life experiments from New Delhi to South Africa to Italy, he gave kids self-supervised access to the web and saw results that could revolutionize how we think about teaching.

Liz Coleman: a call to reinvent liberal arts education
Bennington president Liz Coleman delivers a call-to-arms for radical reform in higher education. Bucking the trend to push students toward increasingly narrow areas of study, she proposes a truly cross-disciplinary education — one that combines all areas of study to address the great problems of our day.

Conrad Wolfram: Teaching kids real math with computersFrom rockets to stock markets, many of humanity’s most thrilling creations are powered by math. So why aren’t kids interested? Conrad Wolfram says that the math we teach — calculation by hand — isn’t just tedious, it’s irrelevant. He presents his radical idea: teaching kids math through computer programming.

Clifford Stoll: The call to learn An astronomer, researcher and internationally recognized computer security expert — who happens to be a vocal critic of technology — Stoll makes a sharp, witty case for keeping computers out of the classroom. Currently teaching college-level physics to eighth graders at a local school, in this talk, he shares intriguing ideas on why we want to learn.