Teachers dislike creative children

Do teachers dislike creative children in spite of their assertions to the contrary? 96% of teachers say that daily classroom time should be dedicated to creative thinking. And yet they seem biased against the very children whose thinking is most creative. At school, creative children are punished rather than rewarded, and the system seems designed to extinguish creativity. In spite of all the lip service.

The characteristics that teachers value in the classroom are those associated with the lowest levels of creativity. Teachers want students to be responsible, reliable, dependable, clear-thinking, tolerant, understanding, peaceable, good-natured, moderate, steady, practical and logical. Creativity is not moderate or logical. It is associated with characteristics such as determined, independent and individualistic, people who make up the rules as she goes along, divergent rather than conformist ways of thinking. You can read some of the research in this article.



For good reason Ken Robinson's talk, Do Schools Kill Creativity? is the most viewed talk on the TED web site as of this writing. "If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original," he says, and rightness and wrongness, as anyone who has ever received a graded paper can attest, is the very backbone of education.

The gulf between rhetoric and reality isn't really that surprising.  It's nearly impossible for a teacher, outnumbered by his charges, to help the rebels and mavericks flourish in an environment requiring more supervision than vision. The system is set up for teachers to prefer the obedient.

Confucius and Learning

"To learn and to put into practice at the right moment what one has learned–is that not joy?"
These are the opening lines of the Analects of Confucius.

Maker Faire - East Bay edition

 
We have been going to the Maker Faire, created by our friends at O'Reilly Media, since its very beginning! Caterina has even written for one of their magazines, Craft. 

 It is just as fun and fascinating as it looks! We have gotten special clay that we used for making models of cells, hula hoops for, um, homeschool sports, little bottles to wear as necklaces for which we made magical potions.  One kid was super interested in the aerodynamics of paper airplanes and entered a paper airplane competition; there were 3D printers everywhere making incredible stuff, robots, sewing, papercraft, you name it. The big one in San Mateo was a bit overwhelming to be honest, so we like the little ones. There was one in Greenbrae, in the parking lot of the strip mall there, where we met the guy who invented those fantastic maze balls, the Perplexus! He even had the original models that he had made out of wood and tubing and tape-- it was amazing.We have a lot of these.

There's something for everyone! Musical instruments, new games invented by kids, sports, cooking, doll-making. I really recommend going if you can get a ticket. It sells out every year.