When a business releases a website or web-based company, the product has already been through alpha mode where it is unavailable to the public — for good reason. Beta is when the public can access it but with the warning that their experience may include mistakes or less-than-perfect service. I’m not even sure what comes after beta because, as a teacher, the next stage doesn’t really interest me.

I will never have the perfect classroom with a perfect “product” to pitch my students. That would bore me. At the point where I feel like I’ve crafted the perfect World Literature or journalism program, it will be time for me to hand it over to someone else and look for new challenges.

That’s just me, I guess. I know some teachers who are happy teaching the exact same lessons from one year to the next, with little to no changes. The kids change, the relationships change and that’s enough for them. That’s okay. But it’s not for me. I thrive in experimental mode, and I think the kids like it that way because it reminds them of themselves a little bit, constantly striving, sometimes failing and starting over. You have to be both confident and humble to work like this. I couldn’t have done it in my 20s or 30s. I guess that’s one good thing about the 40s, you tend to get over yourself faster.

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)

School’s been out now for two days, and after a year of what seriously feels like inventing the wheel, I feel a great need to reflect. It has been an amazingly creative time for me, but I have to admit, it’s been a big adjustment to a new school culture, with the co-workers, the kids, the administration, the policies and the routines that come with change. I’m exhausted, a little irritable during the transition to summer, but also deeply satisfied. 

I’m going to set a goal of blogging every day for a month, well, until July 12 when I leave for an ASNE Journalism Fellowship in Columbia, MO. The two weeks there are supposedly intense and will likely cut into my blogging time. 

Topics to come:

• Ning experiences (did I like it more than my kids?)
• Wiki (ditto)
• The online survey I had my students take at the end of the year (not sure I wanted to know all that)
• Sophomores (teaching them, understanding them?)
• World Lit (assignments that worked, those that didn’t, brainstorming for next year)
• Journalism (the class I’ll start in the fall, the book my kids published this year)
• Teaching (why unions need to be weakened but not destroyed in order to save our profession)
• International collaboration efforts (what I want to do next year)

Photo credit: “Blue Day Moon” by Jon Matthews

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