Random Thoughts

My friend Angie shared an assignment she did in college.  The professor asked them to

“create something that showed your journey as a reader”

and she wrote 12 little books about her literacy journey.  She then personalized this even more by placing the books in a box made to look like a grandfather clock – creating another connection with her reading history.

I love this idea!  I can’t yet see exactly how I would have students do something similar, but I know it will come to me.

Thanks, Angie!

I have talked before about my feelings of not being creative.  As I was walking to work this morning and passed the tree that I took a picture of the other day, I started wondering if I maybe really AM not creative.  If that is true, I am sure it is because I never developed that part of my brain rather than some congenital condition.

What I know is that I am not a visual person.  I really think that even when I see things, I see them as words and not as pictures.  Is that crazy?  That tree today was twisted and bent.  It didn’t speak to me in the same way that it did the day I took the picture of it.

But I want to be a visual person.  I want to see things and respond in non-verbal ways.

This is something I have been working on and thinking about for a couple days.  For the EVO sessions I am supposed to be working on this year (And I do mean “supposed to be” because I have done almost nothing!) I was working on an online portfolio.

You may or may not know tht I have an online portfolio.  It is nice and neat and filled with words.  But I wanted something visual, something more dynamic.  I have not really come up with anything that I like, but I have come up with something different.  Yesterday I added the flakes that at least make the online parts of my portfolio come alive a little more.  Today, after I read Jane’s post about Lovely Charts, I created and added the chart. This is still not toally what I was looking for, but it is getting there.

But this brings me back to the idea of learning to be visual.  I wonder why I don’t seem to see images.  To me, it explains why I cannot really take good pictures and why everything in my life is very word-oriented.

Does this make any sense?

Ewan has a post including a video of John Cleese talking about creativity. It is a wonderful way to spend 10 minutes if you like John Cleese, and a pretty good way to spend the time even if you don’t know who he is.

Ewan summarizes the video in 7 points.  They are all true, I think, but it is number 6 that most struck me.  He said:

The problem with some teachers is that they may not know that they are not very creative, and therefore they may not value creativity even if they can recognise it.

This is something I really, really believe.  Until participating in a summer institute sponsored by the Southeastern Louisiana Writing Project, I did not believe I was creative.  The Writing Project changed my perception of myself.  It, therefore, changed the way I teach.

So, in addition to encouraging you to watch John Cleese, I encourage you to check out the National Writing Project and look for a site in your area.

Over at Teen Literacy Tips I found a link to a blog I wasn’t familiar with, Not So Distant Future.  In this particular post, the author is talking about the need for us to take time to do something creative, to write or take pictures or do whatever it is that we enjoy doing.  I started to post a reply but couldn’t get it to go through, so I decided to post my comments here instead.

She (I assume the author is a she.  My apologies if I am mistaken!) says:

I suggest that an artist’s date is an excellent assignment for both students and for ourselves–to carve out time for exploration and nothing else, to make it a way to treat yourself, indulge yourself in seeing the world in a different way.

When we model for students that spending time nurturing themselves isn’t frivolous or unnecessary, but that it is a key to supporting themselves intellectually and creatively, then we have done them a great favor.

I wanted to agree with the author and share my experiences.  Since undertaking my new job last August, I have met with a group of women every week for what they call “Creative Thursdays”.  We start with writing, talk a lot, drink some coffee and then try to do something else creative — more writing, drawing, knitting, or whatever we want.  As I went through a lot of ups and downs with my new job, this weekly meeting saved me.  It kept me sane.  It gave me a way to refresh and renew myself so I could face another week.

I have never thought about sharing idea of a creative renewal with my students.  I am not sure why.  But I like the idea of doing so.  I wonder what I can do, how I can build that into what I do with my students.  Obviously I will have to think about it more.  But I want to find a way to fit this concept and this practice into my classes.

Miguel’s response to my post about a good teacher provided more food for thought. He wrote:

But quickly, I believe that we’ve set teachers up to atrophy that creative engine of their’s. Experience teaches me that it doesn’t atrophy, but that you can lose confidence in your own ability…creative juices flow strong as ever, you just don’t think they’re there.

First of all, I think Miguel is very right about the creativity existing long after we have confidence in ourselves. I think of my own experience and know that. As a child, my brother was the artistic, creative one and I was the smart, studious one. I never thought I could be creative at all. But as time passed (and as we discovered my brother was smart and could be studious, too!) I realized that I was as creative as he was. But it took a long time for me to believe that.

I think this is really true for teachers. Teaching is a creative art. Every day we have to go in the classroom and respond to our learners and their needs. We have plans, the broad outline of the painting, but the details must evolve. That is where the creativity comes in. As teachers, we do this on a regular basis. We start a lesson, see it isn’t working, and find a new way to present the material. I think that most of us do this even when we have a very rigid curriculum that we have to follow — or maybe because we have a very rigid curriculum. It requires a great deal of creativity to make that kind of curriculum work.

But we do start to lose confidence in our abilities to be creative when people are second-guessing us, when we have to be too accountable.

Miguel also said:

Reflecting on instructional practice is the catalyst for change, not what you use to accomplish it…however, being connected via blogs and wikis helps accelerate that change tremendously.

I agree with that statement, of course. The connections that we make online can give us ideas we might never have had on our own. We are constantly challenged by the people we read and the ones who read us. We are inspired to action by the success of others.

Change is not easy. If our institutions are not open, innovative places, it is hard for us to find support for change there. The online community meets that need. I still struggle with the question of how to actually bring about the change I want, I but I know that there are people out there who will give me advice, who will let me learn from their successes and their mistakes.

Thank you all.

Coming after my last post, I was interested to read Barbara Ganley’s post in which she says:

…I am dismayed that our institutions of higher learning place such little value on creativity-centered courses except for majors in the arts. If a student has 36 courses to take over the four years of college, how many of them are creative-intensive? And yet, what could be more important than building their ability to think and act creatively?

I don’t think it is just colleges that are ignoring creativity. I see children doing senseless, mindless worksheets that don’t mean anything to them. I see my own students not encouraged to be creative or really interact with what they are learning more often than I would like to admit.

I know that I as a human being am only happy when I am creative. I used to sew and bake. Now I blog and develop courses. And I am happy.

Barbara goes on to say:

In slowing down by moving more deeply into reflection, connection and creativity , my students have gotten in touch with parts of themselves that they haven’t seen in years while coming out of themselves to examine the world around them…

Reflection is, in itself, a creative process, I think. So is connection, really. The “product” may not be tangible, but it is very real.

She says more that I need to think about and comment on. But that is for tomorrow, I hope. My thanks to Barbara for helping me think about this.

Doug over at Borderland raises an interesting question. Actually, he only relays the question from Gerald Bracey:

Is job preparation what schools should be about?

Despite all the movements to the contrary, I really believe that schools — K-12, at least — are not about preparation of people for jobs. They are about the preparation of people for life. Or at least they should be. Work is only a small part of who we are as people. And young people need the opportunity to discover who they are. If schools are focused on preparing students for 21st century jobs, when do young people get to even think about who they are and what interests them?

On the other hand, we do need to make sure that young people have an ability to think and reason and that they can read and write. I think that they need to be encouraged to develop their creativity. And to me, those are job skills.

A History Teacher has an interesting post on plagiarism and how he has changed one of his assignments to avoid it. This is exactly the kind of thing that I think should be happening. Like the cheating with iPods I wrote about earlier, it seems to me that this is what we should be doing. Rather than expecting students to complete assignments that resemble the ones we were given as students with enthusiasm and integrity and then getting upset when they use their creativity (or lack of it, in the case of a lot of plagiarism) to get around it, we should be looking for ways to make our teaching and our assignments more relevant and more creative.

Dan mentioned a particular WebQuest assignment he has changed over the years to make it more “cheat-proof”. That got me thinking about my own WebQuests. Granted, I will probably never again have an opportunity to use my Will the Real Thomas Merton Please Stand Up? assignment, but you never know. There was little in this assignment that did not lend itself to copying from the sources if my students had been so inclined. The other WebQuests I have done are about the same. But, I ask myself, what else could I have done? These assignments were for writing classes. They ask students to read, summarize, and synthesize information. If they wanted to copy from the sources, it was certainly possible.

This, for me, is the problem. I am the problem. I need to learn to think outside the box more. That is why I love reading blogs where teachers talk about what they are doing with their students. It’s why I love Clarence Fisher and Darren Kuropatwa; they share their thinking and their work and allow me to learn from them. And there is so much I need to learn!