Devin Seifer
Upon entering my classroom, you will see a large sign that dominates the front wall and proclaims, “PENCILS AND MINDS SHARPENED HERE!” The sign is made from pencil shavings dyed in various colors and pressed into a thick layer of glue. Twenty years ago, I began collecting the pencil shavings from the electric sharpeners in my classroom. I had no idea what exactly I would do with this mathematical jetsam, but I knew there was an art project in there somewhere. The idea finally came from a dim memory of some first-grade Mother’s Day card made from glue and sparkles, and an almost equally ancient elementary science lab involving food coloring. When was the last time you were creative? I don’t mean the last time you made a unique series of menu choices on an app, or when you searched for an idea on the internet. When was the last time you encountered a problem that you had no idea how to solve…and then you solved it anyway? Where did the
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THE PEGASUS SCHOOL
solution come from? How did it feel? Creativity is really hard to define and even harder to teach. To put your mind at ease, you should know that in researching this article, I carefully analyzed all 1.2 billion hits from a Google search for “creativity definition.” In many ways, our technological society is less geared for promoting creativity in children than it used to be. With almost instant and effortless access to information and the ideas of others, students rarely have the opportunity to spend minutes, hours or even days pondering a problem. In addition, many students have much of their “non-school” time taken up by video games, social media and adult-structured activities. Without much opportunity for free-play, where is the time for just thinking? It has, therefore, become more important than ever for teachers to encourage students to think for themselves, take intellectual risks, and make creative and productive mistakes in the search for understanding. My definition of creativity comes in two parts: the “what” and the “how.” The “what” is that creativity is the ability to shuffle, bend, stretch, and recombine all the things that you know in an effort to solve a problem in a new way. The “how” is going to take a bit longer to explain. I believe that there are three brain mechanisms at work in creativity. The first is a massive, chaotic sea of information consisting of facts, beliefs, ideas, and experiences. This sea is constantly churning, warping and re-linking everything that you know into new combinations and arrangements. The vast majority of these new combinations are unworkable, unhelpful, or just plain ridiculous. The second brain mechanism is a subconscious link to a conscious effort at problem-solving. Possible problems could range from “How am I going to decorate the living room?” to “How can I get along better with a friend?” to “How can I design an experiment to disprove the existence of dark matter?”
