Humanities Homework Help

• FIRST…View the following videos found in the media gallery: 1. “How Thinking Works” by Dr. Derek Cabrera; 2. “A Little Film About a Big Idea” (created by Dr. Cabrera’s Research Lab on “Systems Thinking”);  3. “Do Schools Kill Creativity” by Sir Ken Robinson; and 4. “Seven Skills Students Need to Survive” by Dr. Tony Wagner.

SECOND…Discuss the way in which you believe the K-12 school system in America prepares–or fails to prepare–students to be critical thinkers, independent thinkers, and/or free thinkers.

Be specific in your response, and be sure to cite SPECIFIC points, words, or phrases by the poet and speakers. 

NOTE THIS: the two videos by Derek Cabrera (#1 and #2 in the list above) are all about something called “systems thinking” and four key ways to make connections between items or works in a set as a systems thinker. This prompt, like all of the other prompts, contains sets of works that must be viewed as a whole set and analyzed through connections. Therefore, in this prompt and all other prompts, DO NOT address each work in isolation from the others. They are a set that requires you to take a “systems” approach to discussing the set organically as a whole. Oh, don’t get too obsessed with equal representation of each work from a quantitative standpoint; organic discussion is naturally-flowing, and that automatically means the various items in a set will not get equal treatment. Nonetheless, with that said, the difference between treatment of one work over the others should not be drastic and none of the works in a set can be left out altogether.