Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be a creative student and teacher, and how we can foster these creative outlets in a school setting. Three ideas caught my eye in the last couple weeks, which I will link below.
The first is a candid podcast from Merlin Mann’s site 43 Folders titled “Gangs, Constraints and Creative Blocks.” I like most of the ideas that he includes on his site about productivity and creativity, and I enjoyed listening to this podcast. Granted, it is geared more towards professionals in creative fields, but I think it is absolutely applicable to students in rigorous academic programs. The last part (at 7 minutes) on Creative Blocks was my favorite part. A word of caution: he sometimes uses colorful language.
What do you do with those blocks of time that you create? . . . For a lot of us if we don’t allow these blocks of time, we never really fully get into what we’re doing . . . for me a lot of the time I don’t really know that I’m writing, my brain doesn’t know that it’s time to write until my fingers start moving, until I start typing. For me, I gotta say, it will be 10 or 15 minutes into the writing process before I produce anything that’s useful at all.
Sound familiar? Keep reading for two video clips.
I highly recommend watching Sir Ken Robinson’s insightful and witty ideas about creativity and education at the TED Conference as well. He argues, “Creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and that we should treat it with the same status.”
If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original.
For another take on creativity and the idea of genius, check out the author Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk for the TED Conference. I found her ideas to be very interesting, even if you are not sure whether or not you agree with them.
