Category: Culture

Little-c creativity in our lives

Posted on by Suki

I recently attended a talk by psychologist Susan Daniels, who lectures and writes about creativity. Her talk was based on a book she’d read, assigned to her college students, and followed herself. (The book, which she highly recommends, is The Creativity Cure by Carrie and Alton Barron. Susan’s book is Raising Creative Kids and I reviewed it here.)

Susan’s talk was about the importance of “everyday creativity” for everyone. Although some of us are involved in creative work for pay, and others of us think of ourselves as “not creative,” we all benefit from using our hands and bodies to do what’s called “little-c creativity.” This is the sort of creativity involved in improvising a new dish while cooking, playing a song on the piano, or making up a game with our kids. It’s pretty humble stuff—not meant to impress anyone else, done for enjoyment and only sometimes with a product that we use or enjoy.

Needle felting
This is a needle-felted landscape (with stormy sky) that I did at a recent homeschool retreat. It was just a simple project in a medium I’d never tried before (and won’t do often because of my propensity for carpal tunnel syndrome!), but it was extremely rewarding for me.

Susan suggests that we can all improve our well-being by not only pursuing little-c creativity, but incorporating it into our lives with intention. In her own life, despite her busy life as a psychologist, teacher, and lecturer, she intentionally returned to painting, which she had enjoyed when she was younger. This is not a career move for her. Although her photos showed that the results of her endeavor could certainly be called successful art, she’s not suggesting that we all drop our day jobs and become professional artists.

Instead, she’s suggesting that we can improve our lives by taking on tasks that we do with our hands only for the pleasure of doing them.

Susan’s talk reminded me of a huge change that I underwent when I started homeschooling. Although I’d done many projects at home with my children when they were little, it wasn’t until we were homeschooling that I initiated and took part in art projects that fed my own creativity as well as my children’s. My daughter loves videos by Vi Hart—Vi’s mathematical approach to art really inspires her. So for a while my kids and I were making scribble drawings and binary trees. Inspired by that, I bought Geometric Graphics, a wonderful book from Key Curriculum Press about mathematically based art, and we completed many projects in that book.

We also had more time for intentional art projects such as collaging gifts, decorating household items to send to their grandmother, making videos based on what they were learning (or just sheer silliness), and lots of creative cooking. We went to workshops run by other homeschoolers and did weaving, painting, sculpting, and other handwork that we would probably never have attempted on our own.

All the while I was thinking that these activities were for the children, but it often occurred to me that I enjoyed them even more. It’s not uncommon when homeschoolers get together to do a project with a group of younger children that the children finish their projects quickly and run off to play, while the moms sit for much longer, chatting together but also applying a lot more effort to their artwork than is necessary to model creative play to children. Clearly, we all felt the joy of incorporating that little-c creativity into our lives.

It occurs to me that this is one part of my life that has changed pretty dramatically for two reasons. One is that my younger and more artistically hands-on child has gone off to school. Although we still do projects together, our output is nowhere near what it was before. The other is that my older child, never strongly attracted to the physical arts, got to the age that he largely pursues his own creative projects, which are mostly independent of me and usually done on computers.

I was ready to feel bad about this as I sat listening to Susan’s talk, but then as I thought back on my year, I realized that after an initial slump of little-c creative activity, I have since started pursuing more independent activities. (Since my work is creative I pretty much daily partake in Big-C creativity, but not in the hands-on, personally fulfilling creative projects that Susan was encouraging.) This year, with some time freed up from homeschooling, I started to play guitar after many years of letting it slide. A friend and I made a list of songs that we started to learn and sing together. After pretty much ignoring what was on our walls and displayed on shelves for years, I have gone on a frenzy of home aesthetic improvement, a little-c creative project if ever I’ve seen one.

I haven’t read The Creativity Cure yet, but based on my own experience I encourage everyone to take a look at their lives and consider whether they are pursuing a healthy amount of little-c creativity on a daily basis. In our professionalized culture, we often feel bad about being an amateur at something that other people are compensated for. Especially in pursuits that can be highly rewarded in our culture, such as popular singing, I often hear people say, “Oh, I’m no good at that so you don’t want to hear me.” Well, heck, people might not want to hear me sing or see my artwork, but I’m going to do it anyway. Susan and my homeschooling role models taught me well that little-c creativity looms large in its ability to make life enjoyable and fulfilling.

Book Review: Legendary Learning: The Famous Homeschoolers’ Guide to Self-Directed Excellence

Posted on by Suki

Legendary Learning: The Famous Homeschoolers’ Guide to Self-Directed Excellence
Jamie McMillin
Rivers and Years Publishing, 2012

Great summer reading for homeschooling parents!

Last August, I attended the first ever (that I know about!) online homeschooling conference through The Learning Revolution Project. One of the talks I attended was by homeschooler and author Jamie McMillin, who had researched the lives of famous homeschoolers. I requested a copy of her book and recently unearthed it on my desk. Oh yeah, I said I’d review that book. Ah, the life of an overly busy writer/mother/homeschooler.

legendarylearningI am glad, however, that I finally got around to reading this wonderful book. McMillin shows fine writing skills, impressive research, and insightful analysis of how we homeschoolers can learn by example.

One of the first questions she addresses is one very important to me: why does she choose “famous” homeschoolers rather than people who exhibited other kinds of success? Her justification is probably the best one could offer: we don’t know much about other homeschoolers. McMillin’s homeschoolers—Pearl Buck, Louis Armstrong, Thomas Edison, Frederick Douglass, Andrew Carnegie…—were the subjects of multiple biographies and left detailed paper trails for us to consider. So although she does focus on famous people rather than on the decidedly more real tapestry of people who simply led successful and productive lives, she does a great job framing how she chose her subjects and what she believes we can learn from them.

The book is arranged thematically, with chapters addressing various aspects of life and learning illuminated by examples of famous homeschoolers. McMillin also intersperses small glimpses of her own homeschooling life, a welcome connection to the modern world without making the book too personal. She then offers her own analysis of what successful homeschoolers do well, and how it translates both to day-to-day homeschooling decisions as well as the future success of the homeschooled child.

The subjects McMillin addresses range widely, with colorful and evocative chapter titles to introduce them: That Divine Spark, Wild Intelligence, Go Ahead—Be a Rebel, Passion into Possibility, Attitude is Everything, Clear Grit. For each subject, McMillin first analyzes the concept and how it played out in at least one famous homeschooler’s life. Then she considers how the principles analyzed could relate to homeschooling and offers us real-life examples. She ends each chapter with a bullet list of “take-aways” from the preceding discussion.

I’m not at the point in my homeschooling life where I am looking for nuts & bolts advice, though I am guessing readers in that stage will find this book useful in many ways. What I really love about the book, however, is how it shows that although the modern homeschooling movement is relatively new, and the methods we are employing can sometimes seem radical and lacking in foundation, really our quest is not a new one. McMillin’s famous homeschoolers all achieved success not because they followed the rules that most modern Americans take for granted—stay in school, follow the rules, get good grades, be a high achiever. They achieved success because they followed their passions, didn’t listen to naysayers, were diligent, and knew that they had something to offer the world.

As McMillin’s book makes very clear, that sounds a lot like the contemporary homeschooling movement. And after I read this book, I felt all the more equipped to advocate for our unusual educational choice.

This post is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Blog Hop—click here to read other great blogs about summer reading.

This month, we focus on Summer Reading. Summer gives many of us extra opportunities for reading… the fiction we love but don’t usually have time for, the non-fiction that we wish we had time to study during the year, or the boundless free time to read on the beach, at the cabin, or on the boat… or in your own living room. Don’t miss the special reading (and Lego!) nook, or the struggle some kids have with reading. Summer Reading is more than just a school reading list.

The Snopes childhood

Posted on by Suki

The other day I was telling my son about the Loch Ness Monster. He’s fifteen and had perhaps heard of the thing somewhere, but it’s hardly a fixture in his childhood as it was in mine. Of course, there are various reasons for this: what is interesting to kids and popular culture changes over time so perhaps Nessie will come around again.

But the biggest reason, I think, is how childhood has changed in this time of the (Dis)Information Super Highway.

Loch Ness Monster
Nessie was a fixture in my 70s childhood.

The Loch Ness Monster was big for kids of my generation not just because it was a funny hoax and funny hoaxes are fun. (If you don’t agree with that, just visit Youtube and start watching.)

Nessie was also big because in the 70s, you had to be seriously dedicated to perpetuate a worldwide hoax. Even crop circles weren’t popularized until the late 70s, and I remember hearing about them in the Midwest only in the early 80s. The people who perpetuated the Loch Ness Monster hoax had to put in real energy and do it with purpose. They had to take photographs at the real site, then physically alter those photos to show the monster. Then they had to show those photos to many, many people, not just their drinking buddies at the local pub. They had to dupe people who were professional skeptics—newspaper editors most of all.

These days, the hoax is a part of our daily lives. Whenever someone posts something fishy on Facebook or forwards it to me in email, I hardly have to think before typing SNOPES.COM into my browser. If the Snopes people ever decide to get a sense of humor (and ditch their sense of ethics) I’m in big trouble!

Hoax me!

Today I fell for a hoax without hesitation. I saw this headline on Facebook:

Computer simulating 13-year-old boy 
becomes first to pass Turing test

To the wife and mother of computer dudes, this is big news (google “turing test” if you don’t know what that is). I clicked, skimmed, and forwarded.

Too bad it was a hoax perpetuated by a known hoaxster who is well-known in the technical world, but apparently not by the very well-educated and (I hope) sufficiently skeptical editors of The New York Times, Washington Post, NBC, Yahoo, ZDNet, Ars Technica… the list is so depressing I won’t go on. Sheesh, even the Santa Cruz Sentinel, our local bastion of fine journalism, didn’t fall for it. But the New York Times? Well, OK, they’re not always the most technically savvy publication, but well-known technology blogs?

So here’s my question:

Are our children growing up in a world in which the line between reality and fiction is no longer clear, in which, in fact, there may be no line?

Are they growing up a world in which reality can be manufactured—-google “truthiness“—-and dismissed just as easily? If so, how will this affect them as they grow older and need to make more and more serious decisions in their lives?

I just finished the last Hunger Games book, which, I agree with others who have said so, didn’t quite live up to the promise that the series had made. However, I really appreciate one of the themes in the series, one that I think really resonates with young readers growing up in this confusing world. Over and over, Katniss sees that what seems real turns out to be manufactured, and what she assumes is manufactured turns out to be real. She lives in a world where the earth under her feet shifts at the will of the government, and her distrust of reality and everyone in it is the most unsettling and meaningful part of the series.

We’re not that far gone yet, and in fact I doubt it’s “the government” that we should fear here. But we are slipping into that world. It’s so easy to be pulled into online hoaxes… how long until they slip into our real world?

For my part, a bit worried, I queried my son by email as to whether he thought that his parents were just an Internet hoax. His answer was somewhat comforting:

"I'm pretty sure you're real..."

…but what’s up with that final ellipsis? Perhaps he has his doubts… And if he does, what’s to say that the question can ever be answered conclusively?

So I have to admit, I’m not planning on asking my 11-year-old the same question anytime soon. I fear what her answer might be…

…

Learning through play

Posted on by Suki

Kid #1

When our son was ready to enter kindergarten, we had to do some soul-searching to choose between the various local options for education. We narrowed our choices down to three:

  1. The public elementary school, which started very early in the morning (I had a baby at the time) and which was in the midst of No Child Left Behind efforts to pump up test scores.
  2. A local Montessori, which many parents love but somehow rubbed me the wrong way with its no-parents-allowed rules and quiet, orderly classrooms.
  3. What I referred to as our local “granola” or “hippie” school, where the kids played hard and got very, very dirty.

My husband and I figured that the dirtiness of the kids at the end of the day was probably a good indicator for kindergarten, so we signed him up. At his school, he got to work with clay every week. He got to ride a zipline from a two-story play structure. He was so thrilled at being allowed to climb a tall redwood on the property that the school actually had to make a rule (something they seldom did) because he was giving the adults heart palpitations when they looked up and saw a small boy so high in the air.

En garde!
My daughter and friends “working hard” at being homeschoolers.

Though the next year we enrolled him in a public charter because the private school tuition was too much for us, I felt like I’d given him a gift that we couldn’t put a price on. While the public schools were hell-bent on pushing academics earlier and earlier, cutting out art, music, and PE in their zeal to “improve testing outcomes,” we made a commitment to following the research, which is very, very clear:

  • Kindergarteners do not need academics to become good students later.
  • Success in life, or even just school, does not depend on 6-year-olds being able to sit still at desks and color in worksheets.
  • Putting unnecessarily high expectations on children does not make them develop faster.
  • When the choice for an activity for 6-year-olds is between nature and worksheets, nature should always win.

Kid #2

Once our daughter was kindergarten age, we had a whole new host of concerns. She was clearly not going to be able to hack it in a public school classroom, so we ended up homeschooling. And once I started homeschooling, I found out that I wasn’t the only person in the county (as it seemed up until then) who had read the research and knew that academics weren’t important for kindergarteners. Homeschoolers were out there playing in the dirt all the time, and they were showing good results. Kids who had played in the dirt and did no academics at all until they were in their double digits were doing just fine—some of them were getting into our top universities.

Why don’t we play?

So why do we persist in trying to shove academics earlier and earlier when the research is so clear? I think part of it is our Puritan leanings—as a culture, we are uncomfortable with our children “playing” rather than “working.” (I once ran into a neighbor packing her 3-year-old into the car in the wee hours of the morning. The mom cheerfully announced, “I’m going to work at my office, and she is going to her work at preschool.” Really?)

Another reason is that our educational establishment has become obsessed with testable outcomes, and you don’t necessarily get testable outcomes by sending kids out to play in the dirt. When you do worksheets, you can show that little Johnny’s ability to color the apple red and the banana yellow improved through the year. No matter that no typical kid needs to be taught these things. Do we really believe that Johnny would be coloring his apples purple as an adult because he wasn’t taught this in kindergarten? (In fact, the avant garde in me says, what the heck is wrong with purple apples anyway?)

Finally, modern families have found themselves living lives that hardly resemble the lives of families 30 years ago. For a variety of reasons—social, political, economical—parents spend less and less time with their kids. They still love their kids as much as ever, and want to know that their kids are doing well. But when they pick up their kid from kindergarten and all he brings home is dirt in his shoes, that doesn’t feel as satisfying as when they get that stack of worksheets that show that Johnny is indeed “learning” and “working” at school. As families detach themselves from the daily lives of kids, it’s easier for them to believe that “working” is “learning,” though the two have only a glancing relationship at best. So parents themselves often feed into a school’s “work” culture and demand to see more evidence of their children’s achievements.

Parents of children who have been deemed “gifted” may fall victim to these pressures doubly—we often feel compelled to use our kids’ output as some sort of proof that they deserve the label. Although some gifted kids do love doing academic work at an early age, most approach their “work” just as other kids do: through play. Parents of many highly advanced math students say that they had no reason for repetitive worksheets—their kids played math because they loved it.

The proof is in the dirty fingernails

There’s always the issue of how we “prove” that all play and no work is good for young children. There’s lots of better evidence out there (see links below), but I can add that my children, a sample size of two, are doing just fine. My son never had a single day of reading instruction at school, and now he can read anything he wants to, including college level textbooks that he’s using as a high schooler. My daughter played her way through kindergarten, first, second, and third grade, with a tiny bit of “academics” thrown in starting in fourth grade. She’s now in public school sixth grade, doing well and with test scores to “prove” it.

But for a larger sample, just look around at any group of adults over 40. Did any of us have academic instruction in kindergarten? Probably a few. Most of us went to play-based kindergartens where academics was limited to singing the alphabet song. But here we are, inventing amazing handheld devices, making groundbreaking films, running thriving small businesses, working as dental hygienists and truck drivers and police officers…and, most importantly, raising our children.

In our overscheduled world, making time for free play can sometimes seem more difficult than making it to tae kwon do class three times a week. But although all the opportunities we modern parents offer our children are great, we can’t lose sight of the undeniable fact that having nothing to do is good for kids.

As my mother used to say when a child complained of boredom, “Go outside and get out of my hair!”

A few resources to learn more about learning through play:

 

This month, Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page shares our Blog Hop on Gifted @Play.  Bloggers from all corners of the gifted community–parents, teachers and counselors, from the U.S., Europe, Australia and New Zealand–join us to share their perspectives on play: outdoors, indoors, creative, active, child, teen and adult.

Don’t miss last month’s inaugural Blog Hop, The “G” Word.  If you’d like to join our next Blog Hop, contact us at[email protected].  Special thanks to Pamela Ryan for our Blog Hop graphics!

Separating individuals from the crowd

Posted on by Suki

Before we had children, my husband and I thought that the G-word (“gifted”) was funny at best, elitist and misguided at worst.

Then we had kids.

Anyone who has a developmentally disabled child knows that their child is different, sometimes from the day that child is born. Other people know, it, too. While the parents learn to reset their expectations and raise the child they got with love and compassion, the people around them get a quick education in valuing individual human lives. Every decent person learns to accept, at the least, and hopefully cherish the child for his or her own self. Though parents sometimes grumble about other parents wanting “special privileges” for their developmentally disabled children, in general we all abide by the rule of not criticizing the parents for the child they got.

Not so when it comes to gifted children, however.

Parents of gifted kids hear all manner of nasty things, including (but not limited to):

  • Your kid isn’t that smart
  • You’re just saying that to pump up your own ego
  • You’re just pushing him – let him have a “normal” childhood
  • You’re an elitist
  • You think your kid is better than mine

There is very little understanding out in the wider community of families that those of us with kids like this just got the kids we got. It’s not our fault, nor can we take credit for it. And just as parents of developmentally disabled kids got a package that they need to accept whole and raise as best they can, parents of gifted kids have to accept and raise their children to the best of their ability.

I’m not going to debate the ill-chosen word “gifted” here – given that I refer to it as if it’s a swear word, I suspect you know what I think of it. (And if you don’t, read about it here and here.)

What I do want to point out is that no matter what word you use, when you have a child who is different from the norm, you need to raise the child you got to the best of your ability. And sometimes that means that you do, in fact, ask for “special privileges” for your child.

No one argues that kids with athletic ability should not be allowed to play on more competitive teams in order to maximize their learning of their sport.

No one argues that talented musicians should be stuck in orchestras with beginners until they hit the age of 18.

Yet many people argue that kids who have mastered a subject at school should be educated exactly the same as the other children. Not only do people argue this with a straight face, but they tell parents who are looking for an appropriate education for their children that there is something wrong with trying to provide an appropriate education.

Research shows that the United States, never a very comfortable place to be a “smart kid,” is slipping behind in educating our top students. Though in some ways students as a whole are performing better, our top students’ scores are stagnant or falling. I believe this is a direct result of our cultural distaste for separating students based on “intelligence.” As budgets were cut during the recession, gifted programs were the first to feel the ax.

The parents of children with advanced academic abilities are loathe to speak up when their children’s needs aren’t served because of the backlash they feel from other parents as well as teachers and administrators. When money is tight, the argument goes, why should your kids get “special” treatment? So gifted education suffers, few teachers are trained in how to differentiate for their brightest students in the classroom, and families choose from one of the short list of options: homeschool, pay for a private school, or just grit their teeth and bear it. The latter option is the most common, given that most families can’t homeschool and private schools are not necessarily more likely to serve their children’s needs.

I don’t believe that changing the word we use for these students will change attitudes (though I do advocate for changing the word – scroll down in this pdf to find my article). I believe that what we need is a fundamental change in the way our culture looks at intellectual ability. I believe we need to embrace it the way we embrace other qualities in our children. To do this doesn’t require us to believe that gifted children are better in any way – all children are precious, each as an individual human. All that’s required is that we accept that humans come in a range of colors, sizes, personalities, and abilities, and that we need to meet each child where he or she is in order to serve the child’s needs.

Until we make this shift in our culture, I fear that nothing fundamental can be done to insure that we are serving the needs – academic, social, and emotional – of high ability learners. You can’t help someone go the right direction if you refuse to pick them out of the crowd and show them the way.

The g-wordThis blog is part of the Hoagies’ Gifted Education Page inaugural Blog Hop on The “G” Word (“Gifted”). To read more blogs in this hop, visit this Blog Hop at www.hoagiesgifted.org/blog_hop_the_g_word.htm

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