For twenty years my junior high students published an art and literary magazine to showcase our campus artists and writers. In the process, they read hundreds of poems, short stories, essays, and plays and viewed even more drawings, prints, and paintings. They worked to match artwork to literature by topic and often had to appeal to the campus artists to create specific works to accompany a piece of literature. Next, they created thematic sections to organize the magazine according to the works they had chosen. After that, the editing process began as the pieces were revised and edited and made ready for print. Page layouts were developed to be aesthetically pleasing while meeting the strict page size guidelines. All the while the section editors were swinging deals with each other while the managing editor kept the peace and pushed to meet the deadlines set by the students themselves. In another corner of the room, the advertising group was hard at work preparing the ad campaign for selling the magazines while our resident artists put their talents to work designing the section covers and creating a magazine cover to best previous editions. It was a tedious process with lots of heated discussions and more compromise than consensus. Some days simply wore everyone out as they tried desperately to create a quality product that did justice to the artists and authors while serving the creative needs and visions of these student publishers. In those moments, my classroom was a hotbed of imagination, creativity, and innovation, complete with laughter and tears, shouts of joy and groans of heartache, and we all loved it!
Did they learn the state mandated TEKS? They had to in order to do the job. Did I teach the test? Absolutely. Only they didn't know it. They were using their reading and writing skills to do a real job for real people to make real money. The sad part of this story is that this project was limited to the identified "gifted and talented" students. Why? Well, it is the thinking of those in charge of such programs that their curriculum must be differentiated from that of the "others". My contention is that all students benefit from this kind of project and that it should not be something that is made accessible to a select few. When people are thinking, there is the possibility of creativity. Notice I said "people" and not "gifted and talented" people. Creativity exists in each of us, and that can be seen in any kindergarten class in the country.
When I watch very young children, I am amazed at their incredible capacities for creativity. They will try anything. How many kids have tied a towel around their necks and leaped from a tree, fully believing they can fly? How many of them adjusted the cape or added man-made wings or climbed a little higher to overcome the first failure at flight? Check the emergency room records, and I am sure that you will find the numbers are quite large. Of course, we don't want kids doing things that will get them killed, but a broken arm for the sake of scientific discovery might be considered a reasonable sacrifice.
I have grown to envy the kindergarten teacher because she gets these little ones before this wonderful quality is literally "tested" out of them as they enter the world of standardized education. This doesn't mean that I don't understand the need for a core curriculum that provides a common knowledge base that provides us with what J.D. Hirsch calls "cultural literacy". In order to understand each other, we must have this foundation. However, when the purpose of acquiring this knowledge is to take a multiple-choice test that proves they have the knowledge so that school districts can get a passing grade and much-needed funding, then we have a problem, and a big one.
Once again, our school districts are in a panic. As a result, many are buying a one-size-fits-all curriculum because they fear that their students won't perform well on the state exams if the development of the curriculum is left up to the professionals who actually teach the children. The developers of these programs, in an effort to belie these accusations, sprinkle the terms "rigor" and "critical thinking" and "creativity" throughout the documents to assure parents and teachers that the end goal is not to pass the test but to turn out highly educated individuals who are college- or workforce-ready. What savvy parents, teachers, employers, and professors of freshmen courses understand is that this is not the case. While the skills may be intact in a minimal way, the ability to think, reason, create, and view failure as an opportunity to move forward are often not evident in the behaviors displayed by graduating seniors.
It is my goal to write and speak and act in order to convince anyone and everyone that we must transform education to promote all students in the area of creativity and not just a select few if we plan on meeting the unique challenges the future holds. I encourage teachers of all levels to use their own creative talents to develop projects that allow students to use the knowledge they have attained to develop rather than repress their natural abilities and talents so that they will have experience in solving problems creatively. I implore administrators to trust their teachers and put them at the heart of selecting or creating curriculum and materials to meet the individual needs and passions of their students. Finally, I ask legislators and local school boards to look beyond the data and actually visit classrooms at all levels so that they can see for themselves how their decisions actually affect our teachers and students. As servants of the people and stewards of taxpayers' dollars, they have a responsibility to see for themselves how their decisions affect their most important clients.
I close this piece with a quote from John Cleese, British actor and writer:
"We all operate in two contrasting modes, which might be called open and closed. The open mode is more relaxed, more receptive, more exploratory, more democratic, more playful and more humorous. The closed mode is the tighter, more rigid, more hierarchical, more tunnel-visioned. Most people, unfortunately spend most of their time in the closed mode. Not that the closed mode cannot be helpful. If you are leaping a ravine, the moment of takeoff is a bad time for considering alternative strategies. When you charge the enemy machine-gun post, don't waste energy trying to see the funny side of it. Do it in the "closed" mode. But the moment the action is over, try to return to the "open" mode—to open your mind again to all the feedback from our action that enables us to tell whether the action has been successful, or whether further action is needed to improve on what we have done. In other words, we must return to the open mode, because in that mode we are the most aware, most receptive, most creative, and therefore at our most intelligent."
Have a creative day!
