José María Álvaro Mondragón Barragán

Brainstormer, Educator/Teacher, Idea generator, Life mentor

Education, Public Speaking, Chess, Traveling and Camping are subjects I can talk about hours. I'm convinced that everyone can learn anything, but not anyone can guide you to learn it, no matter their expertise in the matter.

What if we stop evaluating our level of consciousness about a should-be-automatic process, and start assessing our real level of competence?

The educational authorities here in Mexico decided 3 years ago to incorporate "clubs" as a learning subject during the school period. My principal encouraged us to lead a club within our personal interests. As one of my passions is Public Speaking, I decided to open a "Poetry and Oral Communication Club" thinking I would have my own Death Poets Society...but rating wasn't the expected. I had only 2 people signing up the club. I mean, goodbye group control issues! Ha ha! However, I didn't give up, I knew my students needed to find their own voice to express their ideas, projects and wildest dreams. So, I changed the name of the club to "TED Talks"... the day after this I had 16 students signing up for it. That was the start of our TED path. Long story short: Three months after changing the name of the club, we found out about TED-Ed Clubs and the TED-Ed Student Talks, obviously we applied for a license and it was granted. We had our first TED-Ed Student Talks event in 2019 and a virtual one in 2020. However this snowball keeps growing, we applied for a TEDx youth event license and now we find ourselves happy as ever organizing our first TEDx youth event: TEDxDelmarIntlSchool coming up on April 2021. The magic behind all of this lies on the status and prestige TED talks have all over the world, and we are thrilled to be part of it.

I don't look like a fit person, but I love to workout. I'm pretty athletic without the athletic body.