It’s a blog! On creativity and stuff! Yeah!

I figured that i’d go into this and just write….so apologies if I waffle but after our first lesson I figured that a good first step is to just enjoy the activity of writing and not worry so much about whether i’m going to blow people’s heads off with some amazing piece or anything like that!

I’ve somehow already watched the Ken Robinson thing sometime before but i still found it really interesting and entertaining! I thought it was cool especially what he mentioned about story of the dancer lady in school; how nowadays many people might be tempted to give people medication and tell them to calm down, which really struck me as i’ve experienced this happening a lot to people in my classes in school! Obviously some kids might be have some problems but it’s more the lack of effort in utlising their natural tendencies which i thought was interesting. How often in the natural world are animals – infants especially – to be expected to sit down and stay still and silent for hours on end? I don’t think there will ever be many diagnosed cases of ADD for children who happen to live in the wild anyway!

I got really interested in this after spending time with some kids when i was a camp counselor in my gap year. This one kid especially had an outrageous imagination and would come up with the craziest stories on the spot. It bothered me how in a few years when he’s a teenager that kinda talent is likely to be neglected! I remember once we were waiting for his mum at the end of the day and i’d ask him what she looked like and he’d be like ‘oh she’s half human, half ghost, and half alligator’! Needless to say i thought this kid was quality.

I found a really good article a while ago about how competitive and cliquey secondary school (High school in the American article) tends to be, which i’m going to try and find again, where the guy discusses how all this flourishing creativity in children tends to die out in his opinion when kids start worrying more about how popular they are and wanting to follow all the trends so that they don’t get picked on by others…which did happen a lot in secondary school. He talks a lot about his own experiences of this kind of attitude by children in schools and what he suggests to tackle the problem. Looking back i think i worried waaaay too much about what people though in school, and i really think that my creative side has really been ignored! I’ve noticed I’m kinda linking creativity here with individuality, but surely you can’t be creative without to some extent being able to think for yourself!?

I found myself really uncomfortable doing the writing experiment thing, although much less so by the last task which shows some kind of progress! It’s worrying how i thought about it so much though; trying to think about how stupid my writing will be instead of just enjoying the writing process! I suppose i’ve made a lot of progress in this time alone though as i’m havign fun spilling all this into writing and haven’t worried about how good it is so far!

I dunno what to write about now so i think i’ll pack in! I’ll post up that article i mentioned if i am able to find it, and any others i find which i think are cool!

Laters