Juniors Katie O'Neill and Mary Yan bring in speakers with ideas worth spreading.
The TEDxThacherSchool event, now in its second year, brought four new speakers and a talented musical duo to campus last Friday night. The Thacher community, as well as students from Ojai Valley School, Nordhoff, Villanova, and Oak Grove gathered in the Milligan Center for the Performing Arts for three hours of inspiring and thought-provoking entertainment.
TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment, and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics—from science to business to global issues—in more than 100 languages. Meanwhile, independently run TEDx events help share ideas in communities around the world.
With one successful TEDx event under their belt, Katie O
’Neill
’18 and Mary Yan
’18 partnered with faculty member Dr. Jon Swift to present four speakers with diverse topics under the the single theme of
“Unchartered Territory.
” Katie and Mary started arranging for this year's event in the spring of last year and put in an estimated 200 hours of work to bring TEDxThacherSchool 2016 to fruition.
Their long hours of hard work paid off with a seamless and inspiring event. As one Thacher student commented,
“I don't want another weekend to go by without doing something significant.
”Mr. Sawyer remarked,
“The whole evening was enlightening and inspiring, and will definitely contribute to the overall happiness of our community.
”The night was hosted by New York based news reporter for Channel 7 Eyewitness News Sandy Kenyon CdeP 1974, who introduced the night
’s four speakers. Each of the speakers adhered to TED
’s mission of presenting
ideas worth spreading in 18-minutes or less. The live talks were interspersed with two recorded TED talks:
“The danger of a single story” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and
“What's left to explore” by Nathan Wolfe.
Additionally, the audience was treated to the musical talents of The Matheson 2 an identical twin guitar and drums duo.
The night
’s four speakers included:
Heather KnutsonProfessor in Geology and Planetary Science at Caltech
Chris Malloy
Documentary and commercial filmmaker
William Hockey Co-founder of Plaid,
a software startupChristine Carter
Sociologist and Senior Fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and author of
The Sweet Spot and
Raising Happiness