Oops....

The 3 day weekend messed with my mind and I totally forgot to post my blog last night! But I had been reading through the posts about creativity in schools and I noticed a lot of people talking about Odyssey of the Mind. I never participated in that particular competition, however I was a part of the Future Problem Solving team which was very similar. You got a hypothetical problem set in the future. Your solutions seemed endless because in the future you could make up an invention or imagine the world was like the Jetsons and hovercrafts were the new way of transportation. Being a "gifted" student, I felt like creativity was the base of my education. Every Thursday in elementary school the gifted kids were excused from their normal classroom and went to a portable to basically let our minds and imagination take over. We went to Nickelodeon studios in Orlando one day and learned about film and television and then were asked to create a pilot episode of our own tv show. One project was to build a bridge with toothpicks and we had a budget and a checkbook, and every time you needed to buy building materials you had to write a check and keep your books balanced. After each time completed their bridge, we tested to see how much weight each one would hold before buckling. It was really fun and yet it also helped kids learn how to keep a checkbook so it was practical as well. Yet as much as elementary school helped, I then learned about how creativity can be hindered in middle school and high school. So much of our lessons are based around standardized tests and bubble sheets. And when I finally found a great class, it was always the first to get dropped after the budget cuts. I had an amazing theatre teacher in 7th grade and when she left, they would give the job to the newest teacher on staff. The lowest man on the totem pole got stuck teaching drama so the program went downhill because most teachers had no experience to teach it. Then in high school I found an amazing photography teacher and after he retired they scrapped the program and gave away all of the darkroom supplies. The students who really wanted to continue with photography fought to get it back but when we succeeded it wasn't the same class that we wanted. We ended up with a new teacher with a completely different focus. We had lost all of our supplies and materials so we changed from film to digital and we only had 2 computers to do our digital editing in a class of 20 kids. It was awful. Luckily my high school had a class called "gifted studies" for the gifted students and it was a throwback to those portable days in elementary school. We did fun creative games and learned how to think in different ways. So I agree that schools are definitely heading in a direction that hinders creativity but luckily some people are fighting to keep the classes that really help students stretch their mind. We just need more of those people in the world.