Inspiration to Keep Going

Our assignment for this week is to review a TED Talk and give our opinion on it. I'll preface this with a link to the talk.

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

Following are the questions:

1.  What would you pursue or study if you had unlimited time and resources?
2.  Which has more influence, Aptitude or Attitude, and Why?
3.  Do you think that our current grading system needs to be abolished? What alternative do you recommend?
4.  Some of the HMP class goals are: to help students develop time management skills, foster a sense of independence and accountability, and real life problem solving. This class requires a lot of student motivation since you are not meeting with a teacher on a daily basis. What areas of improvement or areas of personal growth has this class brought to your attention (time management, procrastination, self advocacy, computer skills, writing or communicating deficits, etc.)?

And my answers:

1. If I had unlimited time and resources, I would study and participate in railroad operations to no end.

2. Attitude has a larger influence in how we live our lives because just "getting by" doesn't cut it. Our abilities may be strong, but if we hate what we do, then why do it? Here is a particular example; I want to live beside the train tracks, and a woman in Tyrone, Pennsylvania wants to live away from the train tracks. While we are both surviving where we are, we both want to be in each other's place. So why not trade? My attitude is that I want to live by trains, where I will be happy; and hers is that she wants to live away from trains, where she will be happy. If we were to trade places, we would not just survive, but we would thrive.

3. Our grading system doesn't need to be abolished, but it does need modification. Of course, there will always be exceptions. Honors Mentorship (HMP) and International Baccalaureate (IB) students are going to naturally seek out scholarships and apply to colleges; however, students in regular-ed classes are much more likely to need prodding to go to college.
In school, those of us in HMP and IB push ourselves to succeed at a higher level than others. We are in IB Economics or are mentoring at a structural engineering firm for no pay because we want to. I want to work in a rail company's upper management, which requires college. I want to go to a college where I can make the most of my three or four years. That takes money, and I don't have money. Doing IB and extracurricular activities like HMP, Beta Club, National Honors Society, Fellowship of Christian Athletes, etc., will put me ahead of the rest of the applicants, so I will hopefully get the scholarships to pay for my future.
So, I want my school to be graded in a manner that doesn't matter whether I pass, but in a matter that determines whether or not I am wasting my time in the particular way I want to put myself ahead.

4. Just filling up five extra hours per week in my mentorship has crammed the amount of time I have to do my schoolwork, take care of myself (sleep), and work on my future and hobbies. At my mentorship, I work on a computer doing Computer-Aided-Drafting (CAD) to make official drawings for construction projects. The terminology between me and my mentor must be the same to make sense out of a "red arrow with a line through it" on a sketch-up I am putting into CAD.

So many struggles have come out, and I really don't like my mentorship. In fact, I dread it; however, this TED talk has reminded me that I am doing Honors Mentorship to reach the exact future I want--to make the most of my life. That is what keeps me going.

Thanks for reading!