Creativity At Its Best Or Worst?

I must admit that my years of being educated and educating never once have I heard such a brillant point of view on schools usefulness in the creativity department! Sir Ken Robinson has spectacularly brought out for us the notion that the system we have been manipulating and pruning for more than two hundred years since the Industrial Revoultion, the same system we claim is the only true, guaranteed, systemic means out of poverty, is in fact the same one that is destorying and rejecting the creative capabilites of today's and tomorrow's children. Can it be true that the ingenuity of many children are being "squandered ruthlessly" by the creators, protectors, and servers of our education system?

After watching this video I gave some thought to the children I've had as part of my classes over the past three years, and even before then as a student myself, a peer. We've all had them in our class - the guy who never is willing to freely engage in class discussion, the girl who mkaes excuses for why her work is not compelte, the one you think is just too lazy to put forth the effort required to pass on the grading rubric. Am I a boring teacher? I hope not. Are they just not interested in learning and being successful? I think not, well most anyways. But in all honesty I think we've all had could-be's, should-have beens in our class. Granted our math classes weren't the nail in the coffin to elimiate and defer a child's true potential from their passions and goals, but we are part to blame - unconscious of it as we are.

Robinson's words must make us realize the power and ability we as teachers have to evoke change, instill dreams, and provide hope. We should tread lightly with our most vulnerable clients, not isolate them further from the norm, but rather integrate them and their potentials into something that become meaningful. Be realistic, too. Take the time to show the doors that open when education, integerated with determination are put into play. All too often we point to the university educated as our most successful, to those with more letters after their name than Kellogg's has Corn Flakes to provide exemplars for our young. Why is that? Because we've been taught this way and we're simply "paying it forward." We, as teachers, as graduate students are examples of a mind-set which pays homage to B.A.'s and M.Eng.'s , rightly by society, wrongly by the Sir.

So let's use our math classrooms and schools as more than just a place to turn algebra tiles over, more than just a place to cruch numbers through algorithms, and even more than just places to make spectacular discoveries through discovery and calculation. Let's reach into our student's and talk with them through formal and informal instruction about their goals, their expecations of us as their teachers, and themselves. Are we ready for that? How creative can we be?