Scrolling through Pinterest one day, I came across a sentence that floored me. As a somewhat disenchanted secondary school teacher, it articulated brilliantly what I had been feeling about our education system for some time. It simply said: “We need to care less about whether our children are academically gifted and more about whether they sit with the lonely kid in the cafeteria.”
Martin Luther King Jr. once spoke about the equal need of both intelligence and character as the true goal of education and yet so often, teaching our young people to be decent human beings seems like an optional extra. An “if only we had the time” or “but isn’t that the parents’ job” cliché. And thus we end up with this important (but not equal) emotionally intelligent elephant in the classroom!
In my quest to make space for this ‘giant’, I created Noble Doughnut – a digital magazine for tutor times. Each week, I curate the waters of the World Wide Web and share videos with something substantial and captivating about them. I then provide additional resources for teachers to dig deeper with their students.
Why video?
The statistics about teenagers’ engagement with video are stark – 77% of teens subscribe to a YouTube channel, 65% watch YouTube daily and 75% say they seek advice through YouTube.
The aim, therefore, is for Noble Doughnut to be a creative and positive filter for young people in this information-saturated (yet often shallow and dangerous) digital online world. It is my hope that the videos shared will challenge, encourage and inspire young people on those all-important cognitive, emotional and spiritual levels.
In each edition, we share three videos that fit into the category of either Ideas, People or Wonder. For example, a recent edition of Noble Doughnut featured an idea about using drones to deliver blood to remote clinics in Rwanda, the story of a 103-year-old woman who is still a dancer and a photographic time-lapse showing how snowflakes are formed!
By its nature, Noble Doughnut will also become a platform for sharing the inspiring work and stories of various individuals, organisations and non-profits to a young audience.
For educators, Noble Doughnut will help foster an active and fruitful tutor time-space, which supports healthy child development and positive relationships between staff and students. It is easy to use and designed specifically to save teachers time and stress.
Our vision at Noble Doughnut is to be part of promoting a positive youth counterculture of exploring ideas, recognising that every person has a story to tell and being open to the state of wonder where we can better explore the world and our place in it.
Ultimately, the message is that even though we are all doughnuts, we each have a divine spark and can do noble things to help make the world a better place. Come say hi at Bett, stand FS11.
For more information, visit Noble Doughnut’s website.
