Creativity

By all accounts I was a failure of the public education system in Chicago. My class rank was something like 152 out of 154 and I had to attend 4 years of summer school despite starting high school 2 years earlier than most. It wasn't really for a lack of ability. I eventually did quite well in college and the juxtaposition of my dismal grades with my test scores were always a source of contention with my teachers. Obviously there were several factors that contributed to this later on in my high school career but the reality was I had given up on school a long time prior.

I actually remember when everything went down hill. It was the second grade... stay with me here..




Anyway, it was the second grade and our mathematics class was entirely comprised of this system of doing calculations on your fingers. Finger math. I absolutely refused to do finger math. On one hand, it was slow and not very helpful and on the other I refused to rely on some system that seemed arbitrarily selected and taught. Or rather, I just thought it was a bullshit system and I failed to see why I had to learn it if I could do it better and faster on my own. Because of this principled stand I received a b in this course. I was devastated, but moreso I was confused. I was able to achieve the goal of the course, math. Why did it matter if I didn't go through the same system that the teacher was peddling?

I was essentially ruined for school. It made no sense to me and I think this illustrates the general problem I have with the public education system in America. That being that it focuses on all the wrong things and doesn't take the time to really figure out what its supposed to be doing and finding a way to make it happen. I think there's no coincidence that what works on the North side doesn't work on the south. Yet, almost all of our policy solutions for education revolve around finding the right organizational model of policy initiative to improve test results. Which brings me to the reason why I'm writing this. I just read a fascinating article in newsweek about the role of creativity in education and I never really considered the role that something like creativity can play in something like this. I'll have to talk to a few people about this and see what they think about it. Until then:

http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html