you
I remember my dad vigorously shaking me
awake every single day in elementary
school the funny thing is getting me to
school on time was the last thing he had
on his mind after getting ready in the
morning brushing my teeth taking a
shower I used to approach the breakfast
table and fine and crudely ripped out
newspaper article one that he sifted
through the New York Times hours of
Fords find and a pen breakfast was spent
reading the tough articles and
underlining all the typical words that
he couldn’t even pronounce the car ride
to school was time to practice making
sentences with these newly found words
and if I couldn’t make a proper sentence
my dad would stop the car a few blocks
away from school until I could actually
use the words appropriately as
frustrated as my half awake self
remembers this daily ritual being the
insights I got from those morning reads
never failed to show up at random points
in my life in my classes and all my
assignments and they really helped me do
well as I grew older I started to take
more responsibility over my own
education and for me this meant reading
more articles of my own volition
creating a library of articles that I
thought were really fascinating and
filling up notebooks with vocabulary
words that challenged me I think that
the most comforting thing about forging
my own education like this was being
able to do so at the comfort of my own
desk here’s a picture of my desk at home
that my dad actually sent to me
yesterday and while my parents always
complain to me about how messy chaotic
and unorganized it is I can close my
eyes right now and tell you where
everything I need to study properly is
on that desk my tests what textbooks
hand out pens calculators anything that
desk in every way represents my perfect
learning environment one in which
learning is easy and readily available
now I challenge you all to pick your
picture yourself in a classroom there
are a few chairs and desks but not
enough to fit everyone in the class your
pencil pencil is an inch long because
you’ve been using it for a month now the
walls are a dull gray in fact they
aren’t even really walls they’re made
out of recycled plastic water bottles
that aren’t even insulated so the floor
you’re sitting on is bitterly cold this
was a scene that I walked into when I
visited the wisdom school in San Mateo
Guatemala not too long ago and I was
taken aback at the lack of educational
infrastructure that I
down there I pictured myself studying in
that classroom there’s no way I could
learn material as effectively there as I
could in the sanctity of my own home
this stark contrast between what I found
in places like San Mateo Guatemala and
my own home is what drove my brother and
I to found and constantly work to
develop our own organization global
project hope the organization was
founded when we were both in high school
with the mission of ameliorating
educational disparities
now the first phase of projects that we
took on were authoring and publishing
children’s books based on stories that
our grandparents used to tell us and the
idea was really simple if we can find a
meaningful story insert some complicated
vocabulary into it and make it into a
children’s book perhaps we can help
students achieve greater vocabulary and
for a while we distributed these books
in and around our community in places in
need of educational resources eventually
with the help of our teachers we were
able to translate them into Hindi French
and Spanish to expand our outreach to
the more global community one such
community as I already brought up was
the wisdom school in San Mateo Guatemala
our global project Hope team took a trip
there almost two years ago as part of an
outreach program and throughout the
duration of our trip we help support the
school’s educational infrastructure by
doing things like distributing both
Spanish and English copies of our books
as well as introducing the school to
different technologies like laptops
projectors and USBs now while we were in
town we also paid a visit to local
health clinic that was responsible for
providing basic health needs to the
town’s residents things like wound
healing and providing medications
however that clinic was wildly and
equipped there were but a few rusted
beds pent up in a claustrophobic room
and nurses didn’t even have proper
equipment to draw blood the nearest
hospital was four hours away
clearly health was everything short of a
right in San Mateo and getting sick
meant leaving her daily duties like
going to school for a really long time
and therein lies the next chapter of
global project hope well as an
organization we realized how effective
education is in causing changes in
students lives we know that this isn’t
the complete story health and education
have a profound duality if you’re not
healthy you
can’t pursue proper education and if
you’re not educated you’re more likely
to make unhealthy life choices this
realization has driven and propelled our
latest flagship effort to redefine the
way a health education is conducted
which is the crux of my talk today in my
home state of New York mandatory health
education is mandated at a state level
as it should be however sometimes this
can cause problems elementary school
teachers who have little to no
experience with health education are
often forced to teach health with little
guidance and even in schools would
designated health teachers the problem
persists in a survey our organization
conducted of New York City schools we
found several cases where held teachers
were fired over the past year for not
really having done much my brother and I
sought to change this if health is so
vital to individual development it
should be taught effectively which
structure and direction so two years ago
my brother and I made and tailored our
own health education curriculum we
called healthy wealthy and wise the main
component of this curriculum is a
workbook that we both authored that has
several modules including nutrition
bullying sleep hygiene and exercise all
of which are incredibly relevant for
developing elementary school students
fortunately we were we were able to put
this curriculum to the tests in the
Freeport School District which is near
to my home now in running this
curriculum my brother and I used the
workbook material to teach students and
also conducted activities related to the
workbooks materials with the students of
the class and to evaluate the
effectiveness of our program we
conducted a pre and post curriculum
survey and the results were really
inspiring our health education
curriculum helped students increase
their knowledge in all areas by 22
percent on average after only eight days
of full instruction and moreover the
post curriculum survey was given almost
a month after instruction had started so
students were actually remembered these
lessons for a long period of time but
what makes this different than what
teachers are used to why did our
curriculum work typical elementary
school health education is rooted in
rote memorization so telling a student
to memorize a fact like hey remember to
eat half a plate of vegetables today in
educational spheres rote memorization is
known as drilling and killing
by telling students such a high volume
of information in rapid succession you
stifle their motivation to learn and
with little motivation soon to dump all
the information they learned in class as
soon as they exit the door essentially
by telling students to memorize
information you’re educating them out of
their ability to reason because there is
no mental stimulation there’s no mental
exertion when you have a word match it
to a definition and tell student to live
their life by that definition I think
what’s most concerning about rote
memorization is that a high level of
reasoning capacity is what makes us all
uniquely human so why is it that we’re
teaching our students to not use their
reasoning capabilities now by contrast
our curriculum employs three main
methods to help engrain ideas into
memory the first of which is
problem-based learning now in
problem-based learning students are not
imparted facts but questions and nothing
but questions in fact all prompts in
problem-based learning are open-ended
and students are encouraged to engage in
conversations amongst each other to come
up with an adequate solution in fact
problem-based learning first originated
in med schools and for good reason
medicine is a constantly evolving field
our knowledge of the body and
medications changed from an almost
day-to-day basis so for a physician it’s
way more imperative to develop a high
level of problem-solving than to
memorize outdated textbook details
similarly as we grow older our
understanding of health and healthy
behaviors changes from elementary to
middle to high school we start to
witness a whole host of new situations
in elementary school we see playground
bullying and in middle school we see the
dawn of cyber bullying so it’s clear
that problem based learning whereby we
can impart a healthy mindset into
students to tackle of whole range of
scenarios is the ideal model for a
health education curriculum but how do
we achieve this in our curriculum here’s
a snippet from the teachers manual of
our health education curriculum and on
the left-hand side you’ll see a page
from the workbook and the way the
workbook is structured is around one
character whose name is Justin and
throughout the workbook we care we put
Justin in a whole bunch of different
health-related scenarios in this
particular page Justin has witnessed
bullying in his cafeteria in his walking
past and as acting as a bystander the
corresponding page in the teacher’s
manual has questions and again nothing
but questions related to for instance
what does it mean to be a bystander
there are no statistics and there are no
facts that need to be drilled and killed
only conversations to be had and ideas
to be shared now I know what you’re
thinking
what happens if students end up
discussing the wrong idea what happens
if collectively students agree that
being a bystander is absolutely okay and
I think this is great because it leads
right into the second pillar of our
health education curriculum which is
discussing wrong answers many times in
our curriculum students will discuss
long answers wrong answers for a long
period of time but through the questions
we have in our health education teachers
manual instructors can shape the
conversation of student have so that
they reach the right answer eventually
seemingly all on their own and when they
do the idea sticks with them even more
because they were motivated to learn and
were actively engaged in the process I
think in many ways this relates very
much to what my dad had me do in the car
oftentimes I wouldn’t be able to make
sentences out of the words that I just
found and I would struggle but I would
eventually get it right and the more I
struggled to make the sentence the more
the words stuck with me in the very end
now to explain the third pillar of our
health education curriculum I want to
take a slight tangent and just ask all
of you how many of you have heard of the
band van Halen yeah a lot of you I
assume so Van Halen’s an iconic band
largely appreciated for the riveting
live performances many of which involved
dangerous pyrotechnics laser light shows
and fog machine work now before van
Halen would go to a venue to perform
they provide the stage manager with a
huge manual of safety precautions to
take when setting up all the props and
hidden in that manual was one clause
saying that van Halen wanted a bowl of
M&Ms in their dressing room and that
bowl of M&Ms couldn’t have any Brown
Eminem’s so what’s with this were they
neurotic did they hate the color brown
no in fact this brown I’m an employee
was fairly genius you see van Halen
didn’t have the time themselves to go
around and check whether all the props
were set up safely but by checking
whether or not the brown M&Ms had been
removed from the bowl they got a good
sense of how detail-oriented the stage
managers were and they could trust the
props are set up effectively if they
walked into a room and I saw that the
brown M&Ms were there they wouldn’t even
put on a show on a similar token our
organization can’t trust that the
curriculum we’ve developed is accurately
teaching students the knowledge that it
needs to without testing for
eminem’s or testing to see whether
students are picking up on the nuances
of each and every subject and for this
reason after we conduct a workbook
lesson we always on the following day
conduct an activity related to the
previous day’s lesson and what we see is
that students are actively engaged in
this material in conducting these
projects and are collectively able to
recall much of the information from the
previous day and even when a few
students forget some of the information
their collaborative discussions they’re
able to fill in each other’s gaps and
knowledge I think what’s most
fascinating about our health education
curriculum and it’s three prongs
problem-based learning discussing wrong
answers and conducting activities is
that all of them are sounds even on a
biological level learning occurs in the
brain when neurons exhibit plasticity
and plasticity is when neurons increase
in the number of connections they have
to each other and according to the
hebbian model for learning which is a
leading model for learning that
neuroscientist have today if we increase
the frequency with which neurons talk to
each other we increase the efficiency
which with which they can talk to each
other in the future now if we put these
two ideas together we can understand how
an idea when tackled from multiple
different angles multiple different
modalities can be very effectively
ingrained into memory very effectively
encoded into the brain and also
effectively recalled later on so knowing
this information let’s go back and look
at rote memorization in rote
memorization we’re forming associations
between things like words and
definitions the neuronal connection is
singular it’s very very weak by contrast
in our curriculum we’re forming
associations between ideas and
experiences and these experiences can be
that one time student got a question
wrong in a class that one time he felt
an emotional when listening to his peers
story or that activity that he conducted
the sheer amount of neuronal
communication is very very large making
encoding and recall all the more easy so
indeed our organization has distilled an
educational tool that really does work
and we can’t wait to expand it to
schools outside of New York in the near
future but what’s the broader goal here
what’s the implication of all this
outside of the project that we’ve
already conducted there are some ideas
in this world that are very difficult to
convey
this past summer my brother and I took a
trip to India where we shattered a
nutritionist who was giving a lecture on
nutrition to childhood cancer survivors
now childhood cancer survivors have an
incredibly suppressed immune system so
they very acute dietary and hygienic
restrictions this nutritionist however
was unable to convey effectively what
these restrictions were so halfway
through the lecture half of the audience
just got up and left it is in situations
like these where education is available
but not effective that the techniques
from our curriculum need to be employed
and that’s where global project hope is
headed next
with the right intent insights and
techniques were confident that we can
make any idea stick thank you
[Applause]
I remember my dad vigorously shaking me
awake every single day in elementary
school the funny thing is getting me to
school on time was the last thing he had
on his mind after getting ready in the
morning brushing my teeth taking a
shower I used to approach the breakfast
table and fine and crudely ripped out
newspaper article one that he sifted
through the New York Times hours of
Fords find and a pen breakfast was spent
reading the tough articles and
underlining all the typical words that
he couldn’t even pronounce the car ride
to school was time to practice making
sentences with these newly found words
and if I couldn’t make a proper sentence
my dad would stop the car a few blocks
away from school until I could actually
use the words appropriately as
frustrated as my half awake self
remembers this daily ritual being the
insights I got from those morning reads
never failed to show up at random points
in my life in my classes and all my
assignments and they really helped me do
well as I grew older I started to take
more responsibility over my own
education and for me this meant reading
more articles of my own volition
creating a library of articles that I
thought were really fascinating and
filling up notebooks with vocabulary
words that challenged me I think that
the most comforting thing about forging
my own education like this was being
able to do so at the comfort of my own
desk here’s a picture of my desk at home
that my dad actually sent to me
yesterday and while my parents always
complain to me about how messy chaotic
and unorganized it is I can close my
eyes right now and tell you where
everything I need to study properly is
on that desk my tests what textbooks
hand out pens calculators anything that
desk in every way represents my perfect
learning environment one in which
learning is easy and readily available
now I challenge you all to pick your
picture yourself in a classroom there
are a few chairs and desks but not
enough to fit everyone in the class your
pencil pencil is an inch long because
you’ve been using it for a month now the
walls are a dull gray in fact they
aren’t even really walls they’re made
out of recycled plastic water bottles
that aren’t even insulated so the floor
you’re sitting on is bitterly cold this
was a scene that I walked into when I
visited the wisdom school in San Mateo
Guatemala not too long ago and I was
taken aback at the lack of educational
infrastructure that I
down there I pictured myself studying in
that classroom there’s no way I could
learn material as effectively there as I
could in the sanctity of my own home
this stark contrast between what I found
in places like San Mateo Guatemala and
my own home is what drove my brother and
I to found and constantly work to
develop our own organization global
project hope the organization was
founded when we were both in high school
with the mission of ameliorating
educational disparities
now the first phase of projects that we
took on were authoring and publishing
children’s books based on stories that
our grandparents used to tell us and the
idea was really simple if we can find a
meaningful story insert some complicated
vocabulary into it and make it into a
children’s book perhaps we can help
students achieve greater vocabulary and
for a while we distributed these books
in and around our community in places in
need of educational resources eventually
with the help of our teachers we were
able to translate them into Hindi French
and Spanish to expand our outreach to
the more global community one such
community as I already brought up was
the wisdom school in San Mateo Guatemala
our global project Hope team took a trip
there almost two years ago as part of an
outreach program and throughout the
duration of our trip we help support the
school’s educational infrastructure by
doing things like distributing both
Spanish and English copies of our books
as well as introducing the school to
different technologies like laptops
projectors and USBs now while we were in
town we also paid a visit to local
health clinic that was responsible for
providing basic health needs to the
town’s residents things like wound
healing and providing medications
however that clinic was wildly and
equipped there were but a few rusted
beds pent up in a claustrophobic room
and nurses didn’t even have proper
equipment to draw blood the nearest
hospital was four hours away
clearly health was everything short of a
right in San Mateo and getting sick
meant leaving her daily duties like
going to school for a really long time
and therein lies the next chapter of
global project hope well as an
organization we realized how effective
education is in causing changes in
students lives we know that this isn’t
the complete story health and education
have a profound duality if you’re not
healthy you
can’t pursue proper education and if
you’re not educated you’re more likely
to make unhealthy life choices this
realization has driven and propelled our
latest flagship effort to redefine the
way a health education is conducted
which is the crux of my talk today in my
home state of New York mandatory health
education is mandated at a state level
as it should be however sometimes this
can cause problems elementary school
teachers who have little to no
experience with health education are
often forced to teach health with little
guidance and even in schools would
designated health teachers the problem
persists in a survey our organization
conducted of New York City schools we
found several cases where held teachers
were fired over the past year for not
really having done much my brother and I
sought to change this if health is so
vital to individual development it
should be taught effectively which
structure and direction so two years ago
my brother and I made and tailored our
own health education curriculum we
called healthy wealthy and wise the main
component of this curriculum is a
workbook that we both authored that has
several modules including nutrition
bullying sleep hygiene and exercise all
of which are incredibly relevant for
developing elementary school students
fortunately we were we were able to put
this curriculum to the tests in the
Freeport School District which is near
to my home now in running this
curriculum my brother and I used the
workbook material to teach students and
also conducted activities related to the
workbooks materials with the students of
the class and to evaluate the
effectiveness of our program we
conducted a pre and post curriculum
survey and the results were really
inspiring our health education
curriculum helped students increase
their knowledge in all areas by 22
percent on average after only eight days
of full instruction and moreover the
post curriculum survey was given almost
a month after instruction had started so
students were actually remembered these
lessons for a long period of time but
what makes this different than what
teachers are used to why did our
curriculum work typical elementary
school health education is rooted in
rote memorization so telling a student
to memorize a fact like hey remember to
eat half a plate of vegetables today in
educational spheres rote memorization is
known as drilling and killing
by telling students such a high volume
of information in rapid succession you
stifle their motivation to learn and
with little motivation soon to dump all
the information they learned in class as
soon as they exit the door essentially
by telling students to memorize
information you’re educating them out of
their ability to reason because there is
no mental stimulation there’s no mental
exertion when you have a word match it
to a definition and tell student to live
their life by that definition I think
what’s most concerning about rote
memorization is that a high level of
reasoning capacity is what makes us all
uniquely human so why is it that we’re
teaching our students to not use their
reasoning capabilities now by contrast
our curriculum employs three main
methods to help engrain ideas into
memory the first of which is
problem-based learning now in
problem-based learning students are not
imparted facts but questions and nothing
but questions in fact all prompts in
problem-based learning are open-ended
and students are encouraged to engage in
conversations amongst each other to come
up with an adequate solution in fact
problem-based learning first originated
in med schools and for good reason
medicine is a constantly evolving field
our knowledge of the body and
medications changed from an almost
day-to-day basis so for a physician it’s
way more imperative to develop a high
level of problem-solving than to
memorize outdated textbook details
similarly as we grow older our
understanding of health and healthy
behaviors changes from elementary to
middle to high school we start to
witness a whole host of new situations
in elementary school we see playground
bullying and in middle school we see the
dawn of cyber bullying so it’s clear
that problem based learning whereby we
can impart a healthy mindset into
students to tackle of whole range of
scenarios is the ideal model for a
health education curriculum but how do
we achieve this in our curriculum here’s
a snippet from the teachers manual of
our health education curriculum and on
the left-hand side you’ll see a page
from the workbook and the way the
workbook is structured is around one
character whose name is Justin and
throughout the workbook we care we put
Justin in a whole bunch of different
health-related scenarios in this
particular page Justin has witnessed
bullying in his cafeteria in his walking
past and as acting as a bystander the
corresponding page in the teacher’s
manual has questions and again nothing
but questions related to for instance
what does it mean to be a bystander
there are no statistics and there are no
facts that need to be drilled and killed
only conversations to be had and ideas
to be shared now I know what you’re
thinking
what happens if students end up
discussing the wrong idea what happens
if collectively students agree that
being a bystander is absolutely okay and
I think this is great because it leads
right into the second pillar of our
health education curriculum which is
discussing wrong answers many times in
our curriculum students will discuss
long answers wrong answers for a long
period of time but through the questions
we have in our health education teachers
manual instructors can shape the
conversation of student have so that
they reach the right answer eventually
seemingly all on their own and when they
do the idea sticks with them even more
because they were motivated to learn and
were actively engaged in the process I
think in many ways this relates very
much to what my dad had me do in the car
oftentimes I wouldn’t be able to make
sentences out of the words that I just
found and I would struggle but I would
eventually get it right and the more I
struggled to make the sentence the more
the words stuck with me in the very end
now to explain the third pillar of our
health education curriculum I want to
take a slight tangent and just ask all
of you how many of you have heard of the
band van Halen yeah a lot of you I
assume so Van Halen’s an iconic band
largely appreciated for the riveting
live performances many of which involved
dangerous pyrotechnics laser light shows
and fog machine work now before van
Halen would go to a venue to perform
they provide the stage manager with a
huge manual of safety precautions to
take when setting up all the props and
hidden in that manual was one clause
saying that van Halen wanted a bowl of
M&Ms in their dressing room and that
bowl of M&Ms couldn’t have any Brown
Eminem’s so what’s with this were they
neurotic did they hate the color brown
no in fact this brown I’m an employee
was fairly genius you see van Halen
didn’t have the time themselves to go
around and check whether all the props
were set up safely but by checking
whether or not the brown M&Ms had been
removed from the bowl they got a good
sense of how detail-oriented the stage
managers were and they could trust the
props are set up effectively if they
walked into a room and I saw that the
brown M&Ms were there they wouldn’t even
put on a show on a similar token our
organization can’t trust that the
curriculum we’ve developed is accurately
teaching students the knowledge that it
needs to without testing for
eminem’s or testing to see whether
students are picking up on the nuances
of each and every subject and for this
reason after we conduct a workbook
lesson we always on the following day
conduct an activity related to the
previous day’s lesson and what we see is
that students are actively engaged in
this material in conducting these
projects and are collectively able to
recall much of the information from the
previous day and even when a few
students forget some of the information
their collaborative discussions they’re
able to fill in each other’s gaps and
knowledge I think what’s most
fascinating about our health education
curriculum and it’s three prongs
problem-based learning discussing wrong
answers and conducting activities is
that all of them are sounds even on a
biological level learning occurs in the
brain when neurons exhibit plasticity
and plasticity is when neurons increase
in the number of connections they have
to each other and according to the
hebbian model for learning which is a
leading model for learning that
neuroscientist have today if we increase
the frequency with which neurons talk to
each other we increase the efficiency
which with which they can talk to each
other in the future now if we put these
two ideas together we can understand how
an idea when tackled from multiple
different angles multiple different
modalities can be very effectively
ingrained into memory very effectively
encoded into the brain and also
effectively recalled later on so knowing
this information let’s go back and look
at rote memorization in rote
memorization we’re forming associations
between things like words and
definitions the neuronal connection is
singular it’s very very weak by contrast
in our curriculum we’re forming
associations between ideas and
experiences and these experiences can be
that one time student got a question
wrong in a class that one time he felt
an emotional when listening to his peers
story or that activity that he conducted
the sheer amount of neuronal
communication is very very large making
encoding and recall all the more easy so
indeed our organization has distilled an
educational tool that really does work
and we can’t wait to expand it to
schools outside of New York in the near
future but what’s the broader goal here
what’s the implication of all this
outside of the project that we’ve
already conducted there are some ideas
in this world that are very difficult to
convey
this past summer my brother and I took a
trip to India where we shattered a
nutritionist who was giving a lecture on
nutrition to childhood cancer survivors
now childhood cancer survivors have an
incredibly suppressed immune system so
they very acute dietary and hygienic
restrictions this nutritionist however
was unable to convey effectively what
these restrictions were so halfway
through the lecture half of the audience
just got up and left it is in situations
like these where education is available
but not effective that the techniques
from our curriculum need to be employed
and that’s where global project hope is
headed next
with the right intent insights and
techniques were confident that we can
make any idea stick thank you
[Applause]
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