TED Community » Drew Bixby

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Making a difference in education. We need be constantly reevaluating how we do education.

An idea worth spreading

The process of education should be constantly evolving, fluid, adapting, focused on innovation and improving itself. There needs to be a feedback loop between recent graduates at each level and the previous level of education to identify what it missed or what it could have done better. The system then needs to be able to adapt in real time to these suggestions. Long gone are the days when teachers can continue teaching the same curriculum the same way they have done for years. If teacher are not fluid and innovating, why should they expect their students to be?

Talk to me about

innovations in education that allow the system to continually improve on itself.

People don't know that I'm good at

being the one to blame.

My TED Story

Long ago, I started recognized my intricate connections to all the events in the world. Whenever I would ask, "why did this happen" or "who let that occur", I always came back to myself. I realized I, not anyone else, was the one to blame. In working through the logic of this, I wrote the book, "Why Not Blame Drew? How all your problems originate from him". In it, I show why I am the one person to blame, what that means, and what I plan to do with it. Interfacing with TED helps me better understand what is going on and what I can do about the issues, particularly education.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +6.90 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• A comment on Talk: Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

  1 hour ago: His solution is to limit choices. How about teaching people how people respond to choices rather than limiting choices?
  
  In reality, we make billions of choices every minute by where we chose to be and not to be, do and not do. We are simply immune to most choices because we block them out. So, we already have learned how to manage choices on one level. We simply need to learn to manage them on a different level.

• A reply on Talk: Barry Schwartz: The paradox of choice

  1 hour ago: How do you expect children to learn to make and manage choices when adults if you don't let them make choices as a child?

• A reply on Talk: Timothy Bartik: The economic case for preschool

  May 7 2013: Thank you for your reply and interaction in this forum. It is very meaningful.
  
  Saying "just another X% more in taxes" is a slippery slope because many programs can claim that. The value is not that it "pays for itself" as much as that it "pays a better return than other programs". You also have to consider that the X% coming out of my wallet might also have had a positive return. In the end, the selling point would be showing a better return than other potential investments.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Timothy Bartik: The economic case for preschool

  May 7 2013: I fully believe in the value of Pre-K programs, but I don't like the question "Are we willing to pay MORE taxes now..." Instead, I would prefer to redirect EXISTING taxes spent of other programs with lower returns and put them into this higher return program. Let's look at the returns of many programs (such as adult literacy programs or business incentive programs) to properly allocate existing funds to the ones with the highest return.

• A reply on Talk: John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

  May 3 2013: No, what I meanto show was a potential ambiguity. The difference in time and effort evaluating those words is so minute that it is probably not apparent. So, of course you "didn't perceive any difficulty". Compounded, though, it could add up into a "big deal". That is merely my unproven theory. I will leave the true findings to the scientists. I am open that I may be wrong.
  
  perhapsourgrandchildrenwillfindevenspacesawasteof... well, space.

• A reply on Talk: John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

  May 1 2013: Not only are "Let's eat grandma" and "Let's eat, grandma" different, but if I leave out the comma, I save the time of writing the comma, but I force the reader to devote extra energy (albeit small) to find the right meaning based on the content.

• A reply on Talk: John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

  Apr 30 2013: No, what I meant was something different. :}
  
  Seriously, I would be interested in brain research on this. Case in point, your brain either needs to store "know" and "no" as two words possibly meaning the same thing and then determine which is appropriate based on the rest of the sentence or you have to sound it out in your head to "hear" the "no" and translate it that way. Either way seems like more brain power on your part. It would be just easier on you for me to type two more letters and be clear. But, what do i no.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

  Apr 29 2013: I appreciate the different perspective on texting. My concern is how it is spilling into blog posts and other writing. Writing with abbreviations and without capitalization, punctuation, grammar makes it more difficult on the recipient to "decrypt", particularly when you add the element of typos. no what i mean...

• A reply on Talk: John McWhorter: Txtng is killing language. JK!!!

  Apr 29 2013: It would be interesting to see the parallels between this and bilingualism.
• +2

  A reply on Conversation: Colin Powell

  Feb 12 2013: Thank you for clarifying it. Well done!