I Want My District to Hire This Speaker

Kevin Jar­rett posted this arti­cle today and the title is absolutely on target:

Every. Edu­ca­tor. Must. Watch. This. NOW!

The video is amaz­ing and I plan to share it with a num­ber of admin­is­tra­tors and teach­ers in my dis­trict. Watch it. Now.

I find it inter­est­ing that as I was watch­ing it, though, I felt my cyn­i­cism ris­ing and had to fight off the urge to brush it off as ide­al­is­tic glurge while think­ing, “Yeah, well, this is just one kid. What about all the rest of them…?”

Some have com­mented that he is obvi­ously coached and deliv­er­ing a speech writ­ten by some­one else. So what? Many skilled moti­va­tional speak­ers do the same. In fact, a sim­i­lar scene (with a not-​​so-​​different goal, now that I think about it) is tak­ing place in Den­ver this week: a well-​​rehearsed, well-​​coached man will be giv­ing a speech writ­ten by some­one else which deliv­ers an impor­tant and inspi­ra­tional mes­sage to his audience.

I’m glad the cynic in me didn’t win. I hon­estly feel that if I can believe in my stu­dents and pro­fes­sional col­leagues the way Dal­ton believes in him­self and encour­ages his teach­ers to believe in him, any one of the stu­dents in my dis­trict could have been up there on that stage doing what he did. Any of them.

Now, all that’s left is to find a way to keep that atti­tude past the first week of school.…