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)

Well, that may be going too far, but he’s certainly someone whose premise I hope and pray is right! According to his excellent book A Whole New Mind, the U.S. economy is transitioning from the Age of Information to what he calls the Conceptual Age, an era that will be kind to creators and empathizers. It’s an age that will reward imagination, joyfulness, social dexterity and humor. Cultural creatives comprise one-quarter of U.S. adults; they are right-brain dominant and are good at:

• seeing the big picture
• synthesizing information
• feeling empathy and sympathy by taking the viewpoint of the person speaking
• embracing an ethic of caring

My people! 

The Information Age rewarded reasonably priced and functional products; it required people strong in logic, calculation and sequential thinking. But now that the “left brains have made us rich,” says Pink, these qualities and people are no longer enough. With so many cheap products flooding the marketplace thanks to overseas labor, consumers have an abundance of choices (for example, cell phones) and are starting to crave items that are more aesthetically, emotionally or spiritually pleasing (as in the iPhone). And jobs that depend on routine skills are disappearing overseas, as well.

What cannot be outsourced or mechanized are those six very human, creative qualities above. And these are what we should incorporate into our teaching. As an English teacher these aptitudes make me very happy! The study of literature can easily incorporate the six areas. We can ask students to tell what makes a story emotionally engaging, what makes a poem beautiful, what gives a whimsical quality to that scene in a play: this is design. What about empathy? How better to understand character interplay, conflicts and motivations than to ask students to empathize with the characters, to map out their relationships and explain why they care (or don’t care) for each other. How about updating the characters of “Antigone” with their own Facebook or MySpace pages? What music would Creon listen to today? What would his mood be? What famous quotation would Haemon highlight? What gods would make his top friends? I will definitely be using my Ning page for this activity.

In fact, now that I think about it, the six aptitudes defined by Pink are probably what led me to major in English in the first place. Finding meaning in literature is one of my favorite things in the world, and applying that meaning to my own life IS my favorite thing in the world. 

How refreshing this is after eight years of drilling down into stories and poems and non-fiction with all those left-brain dominant standards, such as this one:

 ”3.2 – Evaluate the structural elements of the plot (e.g., subplots, parallel episodes, climax), the plot’s development, and the way in which conflicts are (or are not) addressed and resolved.”

I believe in the standards, believe they are necessary so that there is an overall scope and sequence to our students’ progression through the grades. I love organization and logical progress. So I will not be tossing the standards by the wayside. Rather, what I will try to do is balance them with creative, meaning-making opportunities. It’s not enough to evaluate structural elements since apparently we could outsource such tasks to our student friends in India or China!

Our students should also be asked to take those elements and create something new, unique or playful. For instance, with the 8th grade standard above, they could identify the parallel episodes and then — I’m totally making this up right now — try to discover “perpendicular episodes” (i.e. the parts of the plot that are most disparate, jarring or contrasting to each other) or they could take an episode in the plot that has no parallel and insert one of their own making, then evaluate how it adds or detracts from the meaning of the piece.

The possibilities are rich, or, as Pink says, ”meaning is the new money!” 

Over the past few months I’ve been browsing blogs, clicking on links and gathering information about how I want to incorporate technology into my teaching this year. It’s been a fascinating survey, and I particularly enjoy the enthusiasm and sincerity with which my teaching colleagues “out there” and the technology experts write about the newest developments.

At times I thought my head would explode from the overload, but I kept coming back for more because I began to see the vague outlines of some ideas building (rather like a tag cloud… big 18-point yes to Ning, but a tenuous 9-point maybe to Animoto, etc…). I learned how to create a del.icio.us page and just kept posting websites on it to go back to. It felt like a particularly great buffet, and I enjoyed overloading my plate. 

Once school got out in mid-June and I’d moved my stuff over to my new classroom at the high school, I came home and made a to-do list. The technology tasks included:

1. Create a website that will be the permanent home to the course overview, rules, contact information for parents and “about me” profile. Thanks to iWeb on my MacBook, this was very easy and fun.
2. Build my part of the school wiki, which will be where I post weekly homework and where students post essays, video and where I will link to resources. The school started the wiki last February and most of my incoming 10th graders will be familiar with it. Building my part of it was more difficult than the web page, and does not feel intuitive. I’m going to be a team player and get on board with the wiki; I think from a student vantage it would be useful for them to go to one place rather than 6-7 teacher websites.
3. Create a Ning social network for my students. This will be the place to informally discuss ideas, watch videos, brainstorm, socialize outside of class and get creative. The Ning was easier to learn than the wiki, and I’m pretty happy with it so far. I have two videos on it and many ideas that I want to try with students.
4. Build a blog. This is it, and I’m happy with it so far, but have found the functions of edublogs.org to be the most difficult to learn. I think it’s just me.

There were many other non-tech items on the list, including reading Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Donna Foote’s Relentless Pursuit. One of the items came before everything else, and that was to pause long enough from my research to attempt to write out my philosophy. I felt the need to focus on the bottom line for my work, the big picture stuff, before building an infrastructure or deciding what to experiment with. This bottom line would guide me and help me to say yes to some aspects of Web 2.0 and no thanks to others. The purpose I came up with looks like a circle, with four tasks each pointing to the next. Students will:

• Develop enthusiasm for literature
• Read important works and understand why they’re important
• Write clearly and will style
• Communicate effectively through logic, argument and emotion