In the course of six minutes, Mady Kung explained there are about 7,000 languages at risk of extinction, revealed that the cause is globalization and detailed what could be done to help.
Kung, a sophomore at Lake Forest High School, was one of 15 speakers during a TEDx conference hosted by the school at the Gorton Community Center on May 16.
The nonprofit TED organization hosts conferences featuring talks by expert speakers on any number of topics. The TEDx events are individually organized and licensed by TED and must follow certain rules including the size of audience and length of the talk.
The idea for the event came out of a social studies course taught by Joe De Rosa during the previous school year.
“In lieu of an exam, they were essentially giving TED talks in class,” said Jimmy Juliano, an educational technologist at Lake Forest High School and a co-organizer of the event. “We had a conversation about ways to up the ante a bit and I suggested we apply for a TEDx license and we could host an actual TEDx event at our school.”
The first event was held at Lake Forest High School in spring 2014 and was limited to an audience of 100.
Many of the speakers at Monday’s event used personal anecdotes in their talks.
Thomas McAfee, president of Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital, started his ten minute talk by describing how at age 15 he found his father on the floor of his house after suffering a massive heart attack. It was that event that inspired him to go into health care. The rest of his talk dealt with various changes in the profession over the last 35 years including technology that allows surgeons to conduct less invasive robotic surgeries.
Other talks touched on topics like the relationship between time and music, how to categorize movies and the advantages of project-based learning over lecture-based instruction.
“We kept it deliberately broad,” Juliano said. “We had a student speaker’s selection committee. If you have five submissions for social media, you don’t want to pick them all.”
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