Lillie Hsin

Concerned citizen, Educator/Teacher, Explorer, Parent

Education, literature, psychology, travel

One afternoon during a break, after watching a TED Talk in class, a usually quiet student came up to me and, with a hint of excitement in her voice, said, “Maybe my idea isn’t that small.” That moment stayed with me. I was a high school teacher for 28 years, and I loved helping my students see English not just as a subject to master, but as a tool to explore the world and express who they were becoming. In my classroom, TED was more than a resource; it became both a model for expression and a telescope to the wider world. Through these talks, my students discovered that ordinary people could share extraordinary ideas—and that their own voices mattered. I invited each student to present their own Big Ideas, and I watched them grow braver and clearer in their thinking. For me, teaching was never only about language; it was about helping young people believe they had something worth saying. When I retired, I thought I was closing a chapter. Instead, I began a new one and signed up as a TED Translator. Translation has changed me in unexpected ways. It has made me more attentive to my mother tongue and more aware of how ideas travel across cultures. Each sentence asks not only for accuracy, but for care: How can this idea live naturally in Chinese? In searching for the right words, I reconnect with my language—and with my cultural roots. I value being able to continue learning and contributing, choosing topics that move me and collaborating with fellow translators on reviews. Creating captions brings me the same quiet satisfaction I once felt in the classroom. With TED, I am still on my journey with ideas, just in a different role, helping share them.

forgetting things. XD