Think Like a Teacher

Watch a frozen lake evolve through a late winter thaw. The brittle surface, clouded and frozen, thins irregularly and gradually as it dulls in the sun. Pools of water form on top.  The edges pull away from the shore, setting vast sheets afloat. Progress accelerates. The wind rises, pushing water over one edge of the sheet from here to the far side of the lake, wearing away the windward edge, lapping atop,  and refreezing into briefly sparkling formations. Decorated with the diamond necklace of refrozen splash, the sheet backs away downwind. It retracts from all its other sides, shrinking as it slides backward. Ten yards, thirty yards, fifty, all in an hour. The seagulls ride along. Somewhere before it reaches the rear shoreline, it may disappear entirely as the water devours it. But if the sun gives out too soon or the temperature drops, the sparkling necklace refreezes at ice’s edge,  and the sheet holds its place, immobile and unconvinced that thawing is a  good idea.

Watching students– or my fellow teachers– learn is like watching the thaw. I cannot control the sun or the wind, and I am amazed at how quickly the process passes by. I appreciate that no two thaw cycles occur the same way. I especially love watching that edge where water and ice meet, the places where understanding laps at rigidity and forms beautiful but temporary diamonds. And I never know exactly when the water will flow unimpeded. The wind, the temperature, and even rain can change the scene in just minutes. Or it can stay stuck for days.

I wonder whether ice wants to thaw or whether water relishes washing in the newness of spring until the ice concedes to join it. Either way, I really can do no more than observe the conditions and maybe poke a stick at the ice as it flows past my shoreline. Teaching is not about controlling; it is about appreciating, observing, and noticing how the learning works. And maybe once in awhile taking to the ice of misunderstanding on skates to find its edges.

As I explained my methods for keeping a (relatively) paperless office to an incredulous coworker yesterday, I started musing about the fate of paper. Paper is dying in many venues, thank goodness. I am not a rabid environmentalist, but I have always hated the space that paper requires. It weighs a lot, gets soggy, covers up workspace, and is often more trouble than it is worth. In my days as a gifted program specialist writing IEPs, I tried to calculate the number of trees it took to place a child in the gifted program but could never find precise data on sheets of 20 lb. paper per tree. It took over 100 sheets of paper — on average — before I even MET the child. In appropriate celebration, I planned a unit on Paper, including making our own recycled paper decorated with calligraphy of original student poems for parental holiday gifts one year.

Children born today are blessed that they may see the death of paper. They may never suffer the horrid aftertaste of envelope glue. They may not ever know what a postage stamp is.  They may never have to carry reams of worksheets home in backpacks already laden with textbooks. Their e-book readers will allow them to scribble in the margins and ask questions back at the text. They will never receive report “cards.” We may lose the word “triplicate” from the dictionary. Words themselves will be freed from the tyrannical permanence of ink.

What paper do I want to keep?

• The first time a child writes his name
• Valuable doodles
• Framable  and meaningful works of art
• Origami
• Scherenschnitte – or however you spell it
• paper patterns for quilt blocks

What will we lose?

• Paper valentines
• checkbooks
• paper football
• shredders
• Hallmark
• spitballs

… oh, and paper cuts.

What a tragedy.

There is a place where creativity and professional risk meet, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

Why is it that “professionals” or adults in general balk at admitting their own creative play? Why do “responsible adults”  think that creativity belongs only to  the very young or the juried, respectable, credentialed, or reviewed?  Yes, there is a place for “Artsworld” and New York Times Arts section, but none of us should be afraid to admit that we play with creative toys and concoct things that may or may not qualify for juried shows or concerts. We share and laugh at the anonymous anomalies of the amateurish and absurd on YouTube — often the products of an exhibitionist style of creative play — but few of us allow our own creative play to show,  for fear it will undermine our professional image or bore our constituents.

There is a place where arts and the personal meet, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the pinnacle of “Artworld,” is embracing creative accessibility with its Connections project. Met staffers select “Connections” from the Met collection and share their own interactions and narrations about the works in videos on wildly varied themes, even “Date Night.” More importantly, the Met invites anyone to create their own Connections project. Art becomes personal, and producing a Connection to share it is both creative and public. Even from the high plateau of the Met as an institution of the Arts (capital A),  this project invites creative thinking and “play” from people outside the Artworld. I wonder whether a professional from education or any other field outside the Arts would risk it. Probably not, unless it somehow fits their credentials.

There is a place where personal creativity and learning meet, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

David Warlick, quinteesential education consultant and speaker, admits he has spent hours on airplanes making music with a creative iPad app, but he apologizes for talking about it on his blog. Teachers balk at admitting their own creative attempts, too. When was the last time you allowed a student or fellow teacher to see what you tried to make as part of creative “play” with Prezi or Photoshop or GlogsterEDU? More importantly, how can we ask children and the young adults of the next generation to respect their own creative endeavors when we don’t even take our own creative play seriously enough to let anyone see it? Let’s move beyond YouTube-silly to admitting we actually try making something creative. No one said it had to be “good.” Let them see you play.

There is a place where creativity meets importance, and technology has brought that place to our fingertips.

The China trip continues to be of high interest to my friends and colleagues, and the six weeks since our return have given me greater perspective. I am no politician or policy maker. I am a teacher. So I am going to stick to teaching and leave the more delicate issues of U.S.-Chinese relations, human rights violations, and Nobel laureates to the pundits (who likely will spin faster than the top I haggled down to 10 yuan at the Pearl market in Beijing).

One of the topics that came up in discussions with educational technology leaders in China was creativity. The Director of the Shanghai Distance Education Group (SDEG) commented frankly in his opening remarks to our group of American educators (roughly translated here from my notes):

“The Chinese model [of education] is: Everything students do is for exams. We want students to learn beyond textbooks. I feel the U.S. education model is very different from ours, especially in creativity. We need to learn from the U.S.”

I will resist the temptation here to launch into discussion on high stakes testing(!) and look at the even greater challenge posed here. As an astute colleague asked me— on hearing of the director’s statement above, “Well, if you were going to teach the Chinese how to teach creativity, how would you do that? It’s not part of their culture.”

On my grouchier days, I wonder whether creativity is part of our culture, either. These are the days when I read about yet another bean-counting way people are trying to overanalyze, categorize, or prepackage the things that make life enjoyable: things like learning for the creative joy of it. I question how the Chinese can implement creativity in their usual systemic way, since they do not celebrate the joy of learning for the sake of the good feeling it gives. But I wonder whether we do either anymore. I think we have two places: The World and My World.

In The World, we look at long term trends of what the global economy will demand in the next 20 years. We break it up into little pieces and make sure we measure them. We tell everyone that these are the answers to success. We pass legislation, write media articles about them, and make parents feel guilty if their kids are not progressing toward these goals.

In My World (“My” meaning the world that each of us has individually), I have time for solitary wonder. I don’t even report in on Facebook or Twitter unless I feel like it. I can play with a toy (often a web tool or some silly thing my laptop can do or a montage I can make from photos and sounds). I can forget what time it is. I can savor the joy and keep it secret. Later, when the joy has made me feel less grouchy,  I can discover that one of my friends was experimenting with the same toy and found a whole other way to create with it. In My World, it’s OK not to have a goal in mind. We can wander a bit and simply feel the joy.

I suspect that the gentleman at SDEG actually believed that we in the U.S. have packaged creativity for The World and that China simply needs to copy it through their system of deployed change. What he doesn’t realize is that creativity lives in the My World(s) of Americans, not necessarily in our schools. I will keep working on that, but today– while I am feeling grouchy– I will seek some time alone with some toys and wait for some friends to stop by later.

What brings the joy of creativity to Your World? Do you share it?