http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Don’t skip that, it’s integral to the post!
A few months ago, staying at my mom’s house overnight, I found a box full of journals from my childhood. Kindergarten right up to grades 3 or 4. Every other day or so, we had to write. At the beginning, I couldn’t. Everything was misspelled and the sentences were 4 words at best. So, I drew. I drew people and houses and animals and clouds and the pages were filled with notes from my teachers like ‘this is beautiful!’ and ‘your pictures are so lovely, Katie!’. Flash-forward a few years and they get progressively less encouraging. ‘Maybe you should work on your journal more’ and ‘this picture is nice, but you should try to write.’ My response was to come up with simple rhyming poems or stories about Sailor Moon. Again, I got ‘great story, but why don’t you write about your weekend?’
I can’t tell now if she was annoyed or just incredulous.
In the fourth grade, they pulled me out of public school, stuck me on Ritalin and sent me to an institute for the gifted. They were big on that in Ontario at the time; the program has since been demolished, as has the school. But in the fourth grade, I was in a new world. Somehow convinced that I had preternatural intelligence which was inhibited by my inability to sit still or stop drawing, the doctors of the nineties drugged me into a creativity-free stupor. Suddenly, I was brilliant at math. Unclouded by the need to procrastinate by dancing, drawing, writing, or reading poetry, I calculate for hours. One of the few white lower-middle-class students in a school dominated by Asians and well-to-do whiz kids, I zipped ahead. The only thing holding me back was a newfound resentment. I didn’t understand it then, but my imagination had been put on mute. All I had were numbers and grammar and facts.
It’s a story that spans twenty years so far, but the struggle is as disconcerting as ever. In high school I was completely incapable of fitting in, so my mom’s bank-approved psychiatrist prescribed me a sister to Ritalin which would surely give me the edge I needed and keep me from bouncing off the walls. It worked. Within two months, I was three weeks ahead in my math class. I would stay up at night just reading textbooks and researching the life cycle of cicadas. I had my genius back.
I couldn’t draw a stick figure to save my life.
Take the red pill, spend your life waiting tables to support makeup and photography and writing. Take the blue pill, go to university and medicate yourself into freakish intellect.
Topics for Discussion:
Please discuss.
Don’t skip that, it’s integral to the post!
A few months ago, staying at my mom’s house overnight, I found a box full of journals from my childhood. Kindergarten right up to grades 3 or 4. Every other day or so, we had to write. At the beginning, I couldn’t. Everything was misspelled and the sentences were 4 words at best. So, I drew. I drew people and houses and animals and clouds and the pages were filled with notes from my teachers like ‘this is beautiful!’ and ‘your pictures are so lovely, Katie!’. Flash-forward a few years and they get progressively less encouraging. ‘Maybe you should work on your journal more’ and ‘this picture is nice, but you should try to write.’ My response was to come up with simple rhyming poems or stories about Sailor Moon. Again, I got ‘great story, but why don’t you write about your weekend?’
I can’t tell now if she was annoyed or just incredulous.
In the fourth grade, they pulled me out of public school, stuck me on Ritalin and sent me to an institute for the gifted. They were big on that in Ontario at the time; the program has since been demolished, as has the school. But in the fourth grade, I was in a new world. Somehow convinced that I had preternatural intelligence which was inhibited by my inability to sit still or stop drawing, the doctors of the nineties drugged me into a creativity-free stupor. Suddenly, I was brilliant at math. Unclouded by the need to procrastinate by dancing, drawing, writing, or reading poetry, I calculate for hours. One of the few white lower-middle-class students in a school dominated by Asians and well-to-do whiz kids, I zipped ahead. The only thing holding me back was a newfound resentment. I didn’t understand it then, but my imagination had been put on mute. All I had were numbers and grammar and facts.
It’s a story that spans twenty years so far, but the struggle is as disconcerting as ever. In high school I was completely incapable of fitting in, so my mom’s bank-approved psychiatrist prescribed me a sister to Ritalin which would surely give me the edge I needed and keep me from bouncing off the walls. It worked. Within two months, I was three weeks ahead in my math class. I would stay up at night just reading textbooks and researching the life cycle of cicadas. I had my genius back.
I couldn’t draw a stick figure to save my life.
Take the red pill, spend your life waiting tables to support makeup and photography and writing. Take the blue pill, go to university and medicate yourself into freakish intellect.
Topics for Discussion:
- Do schools kill creativity?
- Is medication a necessity for education?
- Do education systems need to become experimental to become more creative?
- How can education embrace creativity?
Please discuss.
