TED Community » Anca Tiurean

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• A reply on Conversation: How have you re-edited your life/space?

  Oct 10 2011: good luck with that! :)

• A comment on Conversation: How have you re-edited your life/space?

  Oct 10 2011: I tend to think that re-editing our lifestyle and lifespace is as good as any change. I wouldn't stay in the same place too much, nor in the same lifestyle. Perhaps for a person who goes to the same office for 20 years and to the same house with the same furniture and same design, the mind and the heart start behaving in a pattern and they get narrow-minded. But when things change for us from time to time, we are force d to adapt, think outside the box, consider alternatives and possibilities and so on. So for a person who's been traveling a lot and moving from one place to another, it could be interesting to experience settling down for a while. Not as a way of staying that way, just as a way of experiencing stability and enjoy the inside of one box in its depth :)
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  A reply on Conversation: How have you re-edited your life/space?

  Oct 10 2011: Perhaps the divorce adds to your happiness or/and perhaps the change in itself feels like a fresh start. I guess your house does not look emptier - I guess it looks like full of possibilities (?) :)
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  A comment on Conversation: What is the future of libraries?

  Oct 9 2011: Libraries I think will be a little like churches: cold, quiet places where one goes to meditate :)
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  A comment on Conversation: How have you re-edited your life/space?

  Oct 9 2011: I am a teacher and a therapist. And it's really hard for me to through anything away because anything can be transformed in a resource as didactic material or play material. And getting creative about class or session preparation is my favorite part of it all. Old clothes turn to puppets, paper gets reused as balls and paper robots, pencils and pens are carefully stored for a life-time of writing, tools that are no longer useful for fixing anything turned into toys, etc.
  If you ask me, I cannot throw anything away.
  Either way, I am not burdened by them, precisely because one can find that kind of useful garbage anywhere.
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  A reply on Conversation: eradicate punishment from the law system. instead, teach.

  Oct 9 2011: The Prison in our city has its doors open for volunteers, closed for people who want jobs there, open for inmates who wish to work for the community and closed for inmates who wish to do nothing all day. I was impressed to see the prison as being a rather animated place. Volunteers work for free - they are not taken advantage of - as they only give a little bit of their time to this endeavor - but being so many, they almost cover all the days of the week with accompanying inmates who wish to be involved in self-development and purposeful activities. Yet many inmates just don't want to participate in anything - similar to school-children who don't really wanna be in class at first, they can grow to enjoy it if they're forced to attend anyway in the beginning. I always start by telling them - you're gonna be here weather you like it or not, so why not like it rather than not? And that's the start of our exploration of resources - inside those people and around them.

• A comment on Talk: Graham Hill: Less stuff, more happiness

  Oct 9 2011: This guy is great
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  A comment on Conversation: eradicate punishment from the law system. instead, teach.

  Oct 9 2011: i would say that punishment doesn't have to have a point to have a point. From the point of view of the "receiver" it's just some effect he experiences in response to his actions. Now from the "giver's" perspective punishment is thought to be a tool of control - in a way it is similar to positive reinforcement, by which for instance we tell the man: "do this and this" and when he does what we want, we give him a bit of what he wants. When you addressed the problem by saying "eradicate punishment" - i thought it is an extreme and perhaps little necessary measure. Your later contributions to the idea tell me that in fact your focus was on teaching people. Much of the teaching process is based on positive and negative reinforcement (we call it operational learning) which turns out to be effective at the level of behavior, but ineffective at emotional and intrinsic motivational levels. I thinks we would agree if I say that the best teaching for offenders would be rather similar to personal tutoring and personal development group activities, such as problem based learning, debates, hands-on group projects and so on. Although in prison, they are part of a specific society in which they can practice transferable skills. For many of them this will turn prison into a boarding school. For some, it might be a taken opportunity to manipulate everyone into thinking they're ok to get out sooner so they can steal and kill and rape, as they've been missing it. My point is, apart from teaching them, they need to want to be taught, they have to need to learn, and nothing makes us feel the need for learning more than problems and obstacles happening to us.

• A comment on Conversation: We must teach the teachers before teaching students.

  Oct 8 2011: what are the most important lessons you would teach teachers?

• A comment on Conversation: eradicate punishment from the law system. instead, teach.

  Oct 8 2011: punishment is just another name for negative reinforcement. throw your hand in the fire, yes, it teaches you never to play with it that way again. prison as any life experience teaches people. helping them integrate such experience and use it constructively - that can be even better than having a crazy killer on the loose hoping he would take notes from your speech about what you think is right and wrong.