Creative — and troublesome — students

Teachers don’t like creative students, who tend to be stubborn, critical non-conformists, writes Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution. He cites  Creativity: Asset or Burden in the Classroom? (pdf), a 1995 review of the research.

. . . although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what creative students are actually like.  (FYI, the research design would have been stronger if the researchers had actually tested the students for creativity.)  As a result, schooling has a negative effect on creativity.

Creative students are hard to handle in a classroom with 20 to 30 kids, Tabarrok writes. They tend to be rule breakers with little regard for social conventions.

Would you really want a little Picasso in your class? asks Jonah Lehrer.

How about a baby Gertrude Stein? Or a teenage Eminem? The point is that the classroom isn’t designed for impulsive expression – that’s called talking out of turn. Instead, it’s all about obeying group dynamics and exerting focused attention. Those are important life skills, of course, but decades of psychological research suggest that such skills have little to do with creativity.

Tabarrok hopes creative kids will thrive — without disrupting others — through personalized learning, such as the Khan Academy.

STEM to STEAM?

Arts advocates want to get on the science-math bandwagon, turning STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) to STEAM, reports Ed Week.

For instance, the Philadelphia Arts in Education Partnership, with support from a $1.1 million Education Department grant, is working with city schools to help elementary students better understand abstract concepts in science and mathematics, such as fractions and geometric shapes, through art-making projects.

Harvey Seifter, director of the Art of Science Learning, organizes STEAM conferences, arguing that studying art teaches creativity.

John Maeda, the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, “invokes STEAM as a pathway to enhance U.S. economic competitiveness, citing as an example the late Apple co-founder, Steve Jobs, a leading force behind the iPod, iPhone, and other electronic devices,” Ed Week writes.

Sure, the arts are important. And integrating subjects often makes sense. But I worry that students will spend less time learning science and math and more time on the “crayola curriculum.”

 

Let kids play — even if it’s not ‘educational’

Children need time to play, even if it’s not educational, argues Alfie Kohn on The Answer Sheet. Play isn’t “children’s work.” It’s just play. And it’s good.

“Play” is being “sneakily redefined,” Kohn writes.

 “Most of the activities set up in ‘choice time’ or ‘center time’ [in early-childhood classrooms] and described as play by some teachers, are in fact teacher-directed and involve little or no free play, imagination, or creativity,” as the Alliance for Childhood’s Ed Miller put it.[2]

. . . The point of play is that it has no point. I didn’t know whether to laugh or shudder when I read this sentence in a national magazine: “Kids need careful adult guidance and instruction before they are able to play in a productive way.” But I will admit that I, too, sometimes catch myself trying to justify play in terms of its usefulness.

It’s a mistake to defend play time by arguing that “play teaches academic skills, advances language development, promotes perspective taking, conflict resolution, the capacity for planning, and so on,” Kohn writes. Play is fun. Get out of the way and let kids do it.

I’m usually not a Kohn fan, but I think he’s got a point here.

 

Everybody writes a novel

San Jose sixth graders are writing their own novels for National Novel Writing Month, reports the San Jose Mercury News.  They favor “knights, talking dogs, ninjas and children embarking on quests to save their families — or the world.”

. . . Albert Joo is chronicling the adventures of a necromancer, a kind of wizard, told from the viewpoints of a knight, a vampire and a vampire hunter. That may seem complicated, but 11-year-old Albert said, “It’s honestly a pretty basic story.”

. . . While participation in NaNoWriMo has no prerequisites, J.F. Smith students come prepared. All classes at the Evergreen district school emphasize writing. Sixth-graders start the school year writing a personal narrative and learn about including sensory details and scenery. They progress to fiction, but it has to be based on a real problem — like an annoying younger sibling — so they can write in detail. Later they’ll write a speech.

Last month they started planning their novels, ranging from 6,000 to 35,000 words. That’s 24 to 140 pages — short for a novel, long for them, (teacher Linda) Ulleseit said. She has them depict their outlines as a roller coaster, sort of an inverted U, detailing plot, characters and goals.

It’s easy to get ideas,” 11-year-old Sahith Narala said, “but it’s hard to put it into words.”

Ulleseit plans to submit her class’s work to the self-publishing site CreateSpace to print an anthology. Royalties of 56 cents per book — she anticipates sales to “moms and dads and grandmas” — will go back into the classroom budget.

 

 

Seeking wise, creative students

Colleges admit students with strong analytical skills, but may reject creative, wise and community-minded students who’d also do well, argues psychologist Robert Sternberg.  After trying his ideas as a dean at Tufts, which attracts very well-qualified students, Sternberg became provost at Oklahoma State, which takes 70 to 75 percent of applicants.  The university is testing new essay prompts to identify applicants with hard-to-measure qualities, reports Inside Higher Ed.

Oklahoma State accepts students with a 1090 SAT (without the writing test) or a 3.0 grade point average and top-third-of-the-class ranking. Students with lower grades and scores can get in by doing well on an essay question, which might ask about their goals or special interests.

The university is asking current freshmen to answer questions Sternberg developed. Several will be chosen for next year’s applications.  For example:

“Music spans time and culture. Explain how the lyrics of one of your favorite songs define you or your cultural experience.”

“If you were able to open a local charity of your choice, what type of charity would it be, how would you draw people to your cause, and whom would it benefit?”

“Today’s movies often feature superheroes and the supernatural. If you could have one superpower, what would it be, and how would you use it? Who would be your archenemy, and what would be his or her superpower?”

“Roughly 99 percent” of admitted applicants have qualified on some combination of grades and test scores, Sternberg says. “Who believes, really, that ACTs and high school grades are going to predict who will become the positive active citizens and leaders of tomorrow?”

I do.  The combination of high school grades and test scores predicts who’ll complete a college degree, which predicts active citizenship, such as voting and volunteering.

A good writer can express creativity and devotion to community service — maybe even wisdom — by writing about goals and interests. Just because the question is boring doesn’t mean the answer has to be. A bad writer won’t do any better because he knows a lot about comic superheroes. I suspect few C+ students with mediocre ACT or SAT scores can write a good essay on any topic.

But it’s an experiment. Maybe Oklahoma State will find hidden gems in its applicant pool by tweaking the essay prompts.

100% wrong

F in Exams: The Very Best Totally Wrong Test Answers celebrates the “creative side of failure.”

Stupid

Diesel’s BE STUPID campaign is stupid, writes James Lileks on The Bleat.

According to the ad campaign, “stupidity is really what the square world calls creativity, risk-taking, imagination, and a refusal to live by the timorous precepts that constrain people who don’t wear Diesel.”


“And stupid consequently suffered a brain injury, resulting in even more betterer stupider that required tube feeding,” Lileks responds.

Take that, SMART! You don’t even TRY to put your head in a mailbox. Ha ha stupid SMART with your understanding of volume and vertebrae stress.

What’s stupid? Paying $285 for jeans, Lileks answers.

In praise of failure

For an inventor, “failures are just problems that have yet to be solved,” writes John Dyson in Wired. It took 5,127 prototypes and 15 years to get his vacuum right.

Dyson’s new engineering foundation encourages “hands-on creative thinking through design and engineering,” rather than prescriptive learning, he writes.  He wants kids to tackle problems, make mistakes and keep going.

Measuring academic drift

College students should learn more than analytical thinking, writes psychologist Robert Sternberg in response to the Academically Adrift study showing many students don’t progress in two or even four years in college on the Collegiate Learning Assessment. But would an assessment of “creative thinking, practical thinking (the ability to apply knowledge) or wise and ethical thinking” show better results?

It’s the Confucianism, stupid

What can the U.S. learn from China’s Winning Schools? Asians make education a priority, writes New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, who’s lived in Asia.

While Shanghai students are world beaters, the city has China’s best schools. Rural schools are not nearly as good — but they’re improving.

In my Chinese-American wife’s ancestral village — a poor community in southern China — the peasant children are a grade ahead in math compared with my children at an excellent public school in the New York area. That seems broadly true of math around the country.

Chinese principals get extra training for ineffective teachers or push them into other jobs. “Bad teachers can always be made gym teachers,” a principal in Xian tells Kristof.

The Chinese aren’t satisified with their schools, Kristof writes.

Many Chinese complain scathingly that their system kills independent thought and creativity, and they envy the American system for nurturing self-reliance — and for trying to make learning exciting and not just a chore.

In Xian, I visited Gaoxin Yizhong, perhaps the city’s best high school, and the students and teachers spoke wistfully of the American emphasis on clubs, arts and independent thought. “We need to encourage more creativity,” explained Hua Guohong, a chemistry teacher. “We should learn from American schools.”

One friend in Guangdong Province says he will send his children to the United States to study because the local schools are a “creativity-killer.” Another sent his son to an international school to escape what he likens to “programs for trained seals.” Private schools are sprouting everywhere, and many boast of a focus on creativity.

For all their faults, Chinese schools benefit greatly from the Confucian reverence for education, Kristof writes. Teachers are respected. The class brain is admired, not the jock or the class clown.

Higher education is China’s weakness, he writes. But a self-critical, education-valuing culture can identify and fix its problems.

From Whitney Tilson via Matthew Ladner, here’s a chart of  PISA “combined literacy” scores for 15-year-olds in various subgroups. (FRL means “free and reduced lunch” eligibility, i.e., a school’s poverty rate.) Asian-American students do slightly better than Korean students; U.S. whites score a bit lower.

Non-Hispanic whites in the U.S. match scores for Canada, New Zealand and Australia, points out Robert Samuelson. The very low scores for Hispanics and blacks pull the national average down. “Persistent achievement gaps demonstrate the limits of schools to compensate for problems outside the classroom — broken homes, street violence, indifference to education — that discourage learning and inhibit teaching,” he writes in the Washington Post.

In high-level math performance, which correlates with economic growth, U.S. children of white and college-educated parents are lagging, writes Eric Hanushek, who thinks Samuelson is way too optimistic.

Sixteen countries actually produce twice the proportion of advanced math students that we do.  And there are more highly talented math students in the whole population of 18 countries than in U.S. families with a college educated parent.

The U.S. is an innovative society capable of attracting very bright people from around the world, Hanushek writes. But relying on the brain drain is not a sound long-term strategy.