De eerste keer dat ik deze TED talk zag was in 2011. Een collega tipte mij om deze video te kijken. Ik liep toentertijd stage bij Critical Mass in Utrecht. Ik was 21 jaar en had voor het eerst in mijn leven de ervaring dat ik werkte bij een organisatie waar ik gek op was. Er zijn meerdere ervaringen die ik uit deze periode met me mee draag; dit filmpje is er daar een van. Hieronder heb ik een aantal woorden van John Hunter uitgeschreven die mij raken. 

1:50

The project I’m going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space. And I’d like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table.

3:20

She said I had the job teaching gifted children. And I was so shocked, so stunned, I got up and said ‘Well, thank you, but what do I do’. Gifted education hadn’t really taken hold too much. There weren’t really many materials or things to use. And I said, ‘What do I do? And her anwser shocked me. It stunned me. Her answer set the template for the entire career I was to have after that. She said, ‘What do you want to do?’. And that question cleared the space. There was no program directive, no manual to follow, no standards in gifted education in that way. And she cleared such a space that I endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students, an empty space, whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding.

7:25

I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let’s let them solve it. I didn’t want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I’ll make something -- I didn't say interactive; we didn't have that term in 1978 – but something interactive.

10:30

They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way.

12:05

I've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time. There's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that I simply don't have to do what I thought I had to do as a beginning teacher: control every conversation and response in the classroom. It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it to them openly.