So many toys at the local E-Mart (a Korean Wal-mart I guess, although a little upscale) are labelled as encouraging IQ, EQ and even CQ. I hardly know what the latter two are.
Alright, Wikipedia tells me that EQ is Emotional Quotient and CQ is Cultural Quotient. Wow, those toys have some hard work ahead of them!
The examples I have today are all books, but I am sure I have seen other toys with similar labels. I can understand the claim with Lego, for example, but others seem a little hincky.
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It's a little late. When putting this through my head, it seemed logical and clear. Now; not so much. I will clean this up later. I have been trying to clear up in my mind the difference between creating or making something and creativity or imagination. At the same time, I have been considering the intimidation factor of the 'white canvas'. If you follow rules exactly and those rules are rigorous, you are simply repeating someone else's creative effort. If there are no rules at all, it is hard to create anything at all. I am not Christian, but in trying to imagine Great God Almighty just before starting his six days of creation, I wonder what I would do. I also wonder why, with no one to share the creation.
I intend to follow some recipes closely and others loosely. In both cases, I will have created something and learned something.
For the past few weeks I have been thinking about learning about creativity and blogging about what I learn and how I apply it. I am sure that I will soon write a more complete post about my goals for this blog, but this is in interesting note to how creativity is applied.
I had thought about it for some time, but seeing this post, with creativity in the title, drove me to taking this first step. It is not enough to be creative, I must also act and 'do' creative.
A study in the scientific journal Brain and Cognition suggests that increasing the "crosstalk" between the brain's left and right hemispheres can increase creativity. Researchers from the Richard Stockton College of New Jersey ran an experiment on 62 people to gauge creative thinking. After a first try at the task, some of the participants were told to shift their eyes horizontally back and forth for 30 seconds, an exercise that boosts the communication between the hemispheres.
The Boing boing post linked to BPS Digest, which explained more:
The key finding is that on their second creativity attempt, strong-handers who'd performed the horizontal eye movements subsequently showed a significant improvement in their creativity, in terms of being more original (i.e. suggesting ideas not proposed by others) and coming up with more categories of use. Staring straight ahead, by contrast, had no effect on creativity.
Another finding was that, overall, the mixed-handed participants performed better on the creativity task than the strong-handers, thus providing further evidence for a link between inter-hemispheric interaction, which mixed-handers have more of, and creativity. But it also turned out that mixed-handers didn't benefit from the horizontal eye movement task. It's as if they already have an optimum amount of hemispheric cross-talk so that the eye movements make no difference. This meant that after the strong-handers had performed the horizontal eye movements, their performance matched that of the mixed-handed participants.
I consider myself strongly left-handed, but I also feel that lefties, in trying to understand what righties want us to do, are typically not as strongly-handed as righties are.
Can one live blog a recorded video? Here are my notes:
I like the annotations on the video progress line - hover the mouse over it and you get chapters.
The future is very uncertain - yet education is meant to prepare students for the future.
Kids have talent - we squander those talents
Told the nativity story play joke:
three pre-school children enter the manger and say:
"I bring you gold."
"I bring you Myrrh."
"Frank sent this."
Children are willing to take risks.
"If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original."
We're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make.
Picasso once said "All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up."
Imagine Shakespeare when he was seven. Imagine his English class.
hierarchy of school classes around the world.
Math and Languages
Humanities
Arts
hierarchy of art:
-art and music
-drama and dance.
There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics.
As education progresses, we start to teach them [children] from the waist up and then we focus on their heads - and slightly to one side.
The purpose of education in the world is to produce university professors.
Robinson's definition of creativity: The process of having original ideas that have value. It more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
Intelligence:
diverse
dynamic
distinct
The story of Gillian Lynne: Lynne was a woman who distracted classmates and never sat still. She was taken to a psychologist with her mother. The psychologist turned on the radio and took her mother from the room. They watched her leap to her feet and dance. The psychologist said, "Your daughter isn't sick. She's a dancer. Take her to dance school." She eventually created 'Cats', the hit musical.
Robinson points out that many modern doctors would have simply given the girl some drugs and made her sit.
I want to take this moment to thank Mr Veitch, my grade six teacher, who spent extra time with me, finding out how I learned and tailoring some lesson content and test formats to the way I learned and thought.
Our education system has mined our minds in the way we strip mine the Earth, for a particular commodity.
Robinson discusses Al Gore's fears for the environment then returns to his first point. We cannot know what the future holds and "Our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future."
This talk made clear the problems of modern education and that it should be changed. It did not offer plans or suggestions other than to 'educate the whole being'. I understand that TED Talks are for 'big think' and not the nitty gritty, but I hope I can find concrete suggestions somewhere.
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Fellow K-Blogger Chris Backe describes studying toward the goal of succeeding at the University Entrance Exam as destroying creativity as well:
It's almost heart-breaking as a teacher to work in this system. It's not because I don't want to see them lose years of their life to a test, but because the system both discourages creativity and encourages the rote memorization / regurgitation that such a test requires. There's no creativity needed to circle 'B', and too much creativity may even be seen as a bad thing on such writing tests as the nonsul. Seriously - what's the point in taking a 'creative writing' class, music lessons, figure skating lessons, dance lessons, or any other artistic venture when the 'only' things you have to know for university are your native language, English, math, and perhaps a few other minor things?
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Expect more TED Talks although I need to catch up on watching them before I post.
I'm starting this post with a picture of the family drawn by my son. A big part of this blog is about me learning how to encourage my son's creativity. My son is on the left, I am in the middle (with the yellow face) and Mom is on the right (apparently she is carrying bread or cakes on her head).
On the first year ESL textbook I use, students are expected to listen to a conversation and fill in the blanks. It takes too much time for me so I made it homework for my students to fill in the blanks. The answers are on the next page but upside-down. Most students turn the book back a forth to read and remember a few words, fill them in, then flip the book again. This student sped things up by carefully ripping the answers out and holding them right side up next to the conversation.
I plan to comment further on this article from the Chosun Ilbo, but don't have time right now. Below is the full text - remember to cut it into smaller pieces. UPDATED Nov 28: I finally got back to this post and cut the text down somewhat - don't want any copyright violations here! I also added a little commentary.
Choi Sook-hee's status in the Korean publishing industry is perhaps unique in that she is able to both draw and write. Her books are characterized by warm, subtle pictures and simple stories with a profound message, making them popular not only among children, the main target audience, but also among adults.
...
Animals appear frequently in Choi's books. Cats, ants, hedgehogs, ostriches and the 12 animals from Asian mythology appear on every page. To Choi, they represent different sizes, shapes, dietary habits and characteristics, and thus the individuality of each person. "You could say it's a human-centered view, but I do believe humans are creatures that have the different qualities of all the other animals in one body," she says. ...
It takes her over a year to finish one of her deceptively simple books. At each stage, from brainstorming to writing, sketching, proofreading and illustrating, Choi puts the emphasis on looking at the world from children's point of view. She often reads books on child psychology and development to get rid of her adult way of thinking.
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I don't actually have many comments. Her books seem interesting and I like that she is involved in all parts of the process.
IN his TED talk, Ken Robinson defines creativity as: Robinson's definition of creativity: The process of having original ideas that have value. It more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
"creative" refers to novel products of value, as in "The airplane was a creative invention." "Creative" also refers to the person who produces the work, as in, ?Picasso was creative." "Creativity," then refers both to the capacity to produce such works, as in "How can we foster our employees' creativity?" and to the activity of generating such products, as in "Creativity requires hard work." (page 4)
All who study creativity agree that for something to be creative, it is not enough for it to be novel: it must have value, or be appropriate to the cognitive demands of the situation."
I played Dungeons and Dragons as a teenager. I might want to get back into it if I had the time. It seems to require a lot of creativity. Case in point.
I can make a crane but it seems to be a girl's activity in Korea. I shouldn't let that stop me. Perhaps there will be a few paper critters here to ride the airplanes I make.
Oh, origami -the Japanese and English word- is 종이 접기 (Jong-i Jeob-gi) in Korean.
Choi Sook-hee