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Like many people who have posted, I found one of the most thought-provoking (and at the same time frustrating) things about our first class to be the labels we tossed around.  We mentioned things like “education,” “teaching,” the “problem(s)” with education, the important “things we’ve learned” outside of the classroom, and many more discussion-worthy topics.  Each of these phrases or terms probably means something very different (as someone pointed out about the brain drain activity) to each member of the class, yet we never set a common definition to refer to.  Perhaps this is because all of these terms are so focused on the individual’s experience and are hard to pin down for a group of people.   I think it would be a worthwhile exercise to try and really understand each of these terms and see if and how our personal definitions overlap.   

One of the other things I am most interesting in discussing further is the “problem with education.”  I know there are many small and large problems that need to be addressed, and I would be interested in hearing different perspectives on what the problems actually are and how they would ideally be fixed vs. the reality of how they can and are being worked on.  I am excited to see how the workings of the brain play into this discussion.  I was talking about these issues with a friend and she mentioned that she believes the innovation in education should come about in its execution rather than an overhaul of the entire system.  I agree with this and think that although it’s tempting to theoretically scrap the entire system and work from a clean slate, it’s important to look at what’s being done well within education (maybe related to more modern research about how the brain works) and keep those elements while making modifications to those parts of the system that are not shown to be worthwhile - although how we define "worthwhile" is yet another question and discussion to have…