Notes from West Egg

Last summer a book that inspired me to take more chances in my teaching was Dan Pink’s  “A Whole New Mind: Why Right Brainers Will Rule the World.” Great book about the current transition in American society from an information age to a conceptional age, from left- to right-brain thinking.

This summer I read “Ignore Everybody: And 39 Other Keys to Creativity” by Hugh MacLeod. MacLeod is a cartoonist and advertising guy. His blog is extremely popular and his work is hilarious and often poignant. There are a lot of takeaways in this book for those of us who have “lost our crayons” as MacLeod might say, that is, for the adults who have either tried to make a living through their creative impulses (and failed) or those who considered such endeavors to be childish and haven’t indulged in them since before high school. People working in the business world will likely take away different advice than those in education, but as a teacher and writer I found myself both challenged and inspired by the overall message.

Here are a few excerpts that struck me personally as being important:

“Your wee voice doesn’t want you to sell something. Your wee voice wants you to make something. It’s the creative act that matters.” (This reminds me of the difference in the classroom between focusing on the learning rather than the result — on student writing, for example, rather than on the finished product — and on the teaching rather than the test score). 

“If you try to make something for a hypothetical market, you will fail. If you make something special and honest and powerful and true, you will succeed.” (Having worked over the years at writing novels, short stories, and screenplays, I believe him. Every time I start to think ‘what would [fill in the blank] want to read/buy/produce, I find my creativity shrink into a little packet of ‘can’t.’ The market is an idea killer. So what is an idea killer for my students? Grades? Points? Bubble tests? It would be interesting to try to find the correct correlation here. And then what to do about it?)

“By scuppering all hope of worldly and social betterment from the creative act, you are finally left with only one question to answer: do you make this damn thing exist or not?” (First of all, I have to like a man that uses the word “scuppering” in any context. I’ve never read the word but I know instantly what it means. Weird. Second, this is a powerful idea. So many times I find myself weighed down by what I want the results of my creativity to accomplish. I want my writing to make me famous, rich, popular and I want it to improve the lives of people who read it and better the world. Phew. I never realized how much weight that puts on my poor little creative impulse. Strip those weights away and the creative act becomes simple and clear: to be or not to be.)

Obviously, good teaching is not exactly the same as good writing or drawing, etc… There has to be some emphasis on results; process must be balanced with product to ensure students are progressing. But this book reminds me of the inherent value that exists in the creative act, and it reopened a desire in me that I’ve felt since my earliest days as a young child to make things. It brought back memories of long afternoons playing with molding clay, writing stories, drawing illustrations, weaving lanyards and macrame plant holders, playing pretend, creating, writing and starring in my sixth grade play… I did these things for fun, back before I started to take myself too seriously. Reading this book reminded me what creativity is and is not. 

I think my students want to make things, too.

(photo credit: “Creative Hands” by dalydose on Flickr)

One blog I’m following with much interest this week is at this one. It’s a blog being written by a group of 35 high school journalism teachers taking part in an ASNE fellowship in Arizona. I have it on my reader and am really enjoying the news coming out of the conference each day because I will be heading for a 12-day ASNE conference in Columbia, Missouri, in mid-July. The blog is giving me a great perspective on the kinds of training, lectures and activities to expect.

It is interesting to learn that some of the teachers are reluctant bloggers, while others seem quite comfortable. I think those with journalism backgrounds take to blogging more easily, which makes sense. They are used to producing “news” and sharing information.

When I was a reporter, I was given a weekly column (at age 23!) which I wrote for the next ten years. I could write about anything that interested me, and so it was basically blogging but in print. It was prestigious at the time because only a handful of journalists in the newsroom were selected to write a column, and I was certainly the youngest and also the only female.

Now, writing a column for the newspaper has less prestige because the internet has opened the door wide to everyone who wants to speak out. There’s still the matter of finding an audience, of course, and a newspaper helps provide that, but some of the most popular blogs (and profitable ones) are produced by independent writers who came up with a good idea and worked it well. Their publicity grew and they are now media companies in their own right.

The wonder of the internet is that you can write in a tiny niche space and sometimes find a sustainable audience that is unbounded by geography and time. Sometimes when I run across a great blog post, I spend hours going back through the years-old posts on the site before adding the address to my Google reader. You couldn’t do that with a great newspaper column 10 years ago. Blogs live forever.

[Photo credit: "Blogs" by dalequetepego on Flickr]

I am so incredibly grateful to be living in the 21st century! I’m an information junkie through and through, and with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks it seems like I can find anything I want to find. This makes me as happy as the day I learned, at four years old, that I could check out as many books from the library as I could carry. (Really, I remember the librarian saying that to me and I remember the stack I shuffled out to the car, the corners of the picture books poking the insides of my elbows, the way the books smelled when I got them back to my room). It was unbelievable and glorious, and now as an adult living in the age of high-speed internet, MacBooks, free content and open source software, it’s even better. 

Of the experiments I incorporated into my teaching in the last year — the nings, the wikis, the google forms, joomla and edublog, apture, animoto, zamzar, zoho, teachertube, etc… — 90 percent of them were triggered from tidbits on a blog (the school, a technology-centered high school, already had a wiki). I have learned so much this past year and it has energized by life and my teaching by opening up possibilities for creative experimentation and play that did not exist when I used the old 20th century tools of teaching: the overhead, the whiteboard, the VCR. 

I am still amazed at the generosity of bloggers. You can see the list of blogs I read on the right of this page; I check them daily (okay, several times a day, by logging into my Google Reader to see what’s new). It seems impossibly kind that bloggers will take the time to provide advice — and links! — on tools, to share notes from conferences, to relay concerns about the state of their minds/hearts/jobs/education/the world… all at no cost to me. Do they know they are impacting a classroom in Ventura, California? No. Do they understand that 170 sophomores spent a year building a Ning community because of them? No. Do they get it that a teacher who thought so many times about bailing on the profession has been reenergized? I hope so!

[Photo Credit: "Information Superhighway" by nickwheeleroz]

I will have to explain thoughtfully to my husband why I chose to spend six hours working in my classroom today, on this, the fourth day of summer vacation. Some teachers get it; others don’t. The staff parking lot at school had at least a half dozen teacher vehicles in it, so I’m not the only one taking advantage of the left-over energy and dissonance of this just-finished year to plan for next year. I know that all too soon I will have slipped fully into summer mode and thoughts of the classroom will settle and fade, as they should. But this week is a time to see the year ahead from its widest perspective, make some adjustments in planning, tighten up the integration between my subject area and World History and send some projects off to publications so they are waiting for me in August. I’m still in work mode, and the unmopped wood floor and god-awful stove are not calling to me in the right way yet. Without the pressure of students — without real names and faces to sidetrack my vision, for that matter — planning curriculum takes on a gauzy, idealistic quality that I happen to love. At the beginning of summer, everything is possible for fall.