Do Schools Kill Creativity? Sir Ken Robinson

Sir Ken Robinson’s talk, entitled “Do Schools Kill Creativity?” was not only entertaining, it was mesmerizing. He speaks exactly how I think, what I call “A.D.D. ing out” Our students really need more adversaries like him. Every time we turn around, we hear about some form of creativity being yanked from our public schools, primarily the art and music programs. Locally we are hearing that children have to pay money to participate in after school sports, which could definitely create a negative down spiral. Those who can’t afford may end up spending that time and energy doing things they shouldn’t.

Ken reminds us how important it is to not be frightened of being wrong, how vital it is to take chances, “if you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.” We would live in a different world if people like the Wright brothers had been afraid to be wrong. Our fasted mode of transportation might be trains!

The claim of his talk was that, we are really hurting the future by making academics the focus of education, while creativity is either dead last or extinct in the school systems. This doesn’t apply exclusively to children who have ADHD, this applies to all students. Every student needs balance in their curriculum, to not only exercise their brains, but to also have an outlet for stress and expression. This is similar to the idea of taking small breaks at an office job and doing stretches. This helps you to stay alert and present.

I felt that he was dead on when he speaks of educating for a time that we can’t predict. “If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue…..what the world will look like in five years’ time. And yet we’re meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability…. is extraordinary.” Basically, Ken is asking, how can we know what education experiences children really need, who are going to live in a world we can’t even foresee?

I completely agree with Ken’s opinions, because of the experience my daughter Susan has had. She started out in a Montessori school in Hawaii, where creativity leads. She was the model student and excelled until we had to switch to a public school system here in Bellingham. Even though she maintained her A status, her best work was anything she could put her creative spin on. Her work was used as examples by the teachers who marveled at how far she pushed the art portion of the assignments. When she got into high school, she started to tumble down the slippery slope. She exited high school mid junior year and got her GED. She is now a full time graphic design student @ WCC and loves school. It wasn’t that she couldn’t do the math or English, it was that there wasn’t any balance for her. Sitting idle through four 90 minute classes a day, with minimal stimuli didn’t work for her. She is completely involved and valued in her art classes.

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower Premise Analysis

Aaron, Amanda, Brittany, Victor
May 14, 2010

Professor X makes a large amount of assumptions and premises throughout the course of the essay. A few of the most notable are the following: First off, Professor X claims that for many of his students, college was not a goal they spent years preparing for, and also adds that those he teaches don’t come up in the debates about adolescent overachievers and cutthroat college admissions and further on added that they take course like English 101 or English 102 because they were coerced to do so, and not simply out of enjoyment. This necessarily isn’t a premise but could be purely factual if he or she had verified or pre-determined the information by giving a student questionnaire or survey about their enthusiasm, commitment, and whether or not they chose the class, not out of necessity, but purely pleasure.

Another questionable presumption made by Professor X is when he states that, “We think of college professors as being profoundly indifferent to the grades they hand out.” “Professors can fail these young people with emotional impunity because many such failures are the students’ own fault: too much time spent texting, too little time with the textbooks.” Again, unless Professor X actually had continuous, scrupulous correspondence with other academic professors’ thoughts, feelings, and emotions, and as well understands the underlying causes respective of this issue, he or she is only trying to predicate their supposed ideas that could be completely untrue as far as we concerned.

Amber
Martin
Kai
Joey

In the Basement of the Ivory Tower

One of his premises is that some of the students are there to go further on their work environment. They are going to night school because they have day jobs. Municipal employers require college level certification to advance in the work force. He talks about teaching young men who have to acquire a certain number of credits before they can get a job, such as police officers. He implies that students go to college not because they feel the need to get a higher education, but simply because they want to be able to get jobs that require a certain amount of college education. Some students go back to school to get better jobs but they only work to do well because they wanted to get their tuition reimbursed. Also, some people only go back to school to better themselves and to prove to themselves that they can actually do it. But as it turns out some people go back and fail. He gives an example of how he graded Ms. L. He states, “I thought of slipping her the old gentle women’s C-minus, but I couldn’t do it. I would be eroding the standards of the school for which I worked.” Also, he assumes that most of his students are only going back to college simply because they want to be able to feel secure for the future. The students don’t want to be financially insecure, thus they feel going back to school and getting a diploma will act as a safety net for them in the future. In a nut shell, he believes his students go to school for economical reasons.

Reasoning Back to Premises

“In the Basement of the Ivory Tower”
Group #5 Premise
Cai, Christian, Hannah, and Ellie


We gather that what Professor X is saying is that basically students are, for the most part, uninterested in the education that is required for vocational training. Also those students are being placed incorrectly in classes and therefore are being far too challenged to perform well. It is not that the students aren’t trying to perform well, but rather that they are confused about what is required of them. We believe that he could be arguing that college may not be for everyone. This may be due in part to the structure of the classes. In biology, for example, you are evaluated on a “what is right and wrong” standard such as multiple answer questions. On the other hand an English class must grade you a bit differently because we all write uniquely and someone must be the judge of our prose. This is a pressure for teachers because they must qualify the value of your writing and this can be a burden for them. Students are required to take English courses 101 as well as 102, and not always because they want to. In fact you could be attending college in order to become a police officer, but you still have to take these required courses. Many students are so pressured in college that they simply boil over. Professor X writes, “The colleges and the students and I are bobbing up and down in a great wave of societal forces—social optimism on a large scale, the sense of college as both a universal right and a need, financial necessity on the part of the colleges and the students alike, the desire to maintain high academic standards while admitting marginal students—that have coalesced into a mini-tsunami of difficulty.” Basically what Professor X is saying is that we are surrounded by difficulties pressured by societal optimism. These pressures do not allow us to properly achieve our goals for our lives in the future. Professor X assumes that most people are in school because they are tied to it economically. If they did not have to strive to get ahead in this world and in our society they would much rather spend their time, and their money doing something else. But since our society does not allow us the freedom to do as we desire we must go on with our day to day lives of educating ourselves in order to be a step ahead of the ones that are walking behind us.

In the Basement of the Ivory tower

From the Basement of the Ivory Tower, Professor X
Sheila, Kelly & Chris
“ Our textbook boils effectively writing down to a few steps. It devotes pages and pages to the composition of a compare-and-contrast with lots of examples and tips and checklists.” How do you grade a writing assignment? Then it was graded by punctuation, grammar, sentence structure. Now it is graded on thought and how you addressed the assignment. Now you need to use your own thought and not just summarize the subject.
Premise that everyone had read several books that should have been read in high school, but actually the only one everyone knew of was Wizard of Oz. They know the jist of the story. “The intellectually ambitious scarecrow proudly mangles the Pyhtagorean theorem and is awarded a questionable diploma in a dreamland for removed from reality.”

Professor X Premises

Professor X assumes that college students in community colleges doesn’t have good grades and doesn’t have extracurricular actives on their transcripts and that many students don’t turn in their assignments because they are busy texting. He believes that his students aren’t interested in the topic or class and are only there because they need the class to graduate or as a prerequisite. When referring to biology teachers, he believes that it easier for them to grade papers because they only give out multiple choice tests, where as for English teachers, its harder to grade papers. Professor X assumes his audience is going to has read all of the books that he refers to such as Malcolm X, Steinbach, and the Invisible Man. He also assumes that older people take night classes because they work all day and have hectic lives during the day and night classes might be the only time to take night classes. He assumes that people in night classes are only there for economic reasons and that they are there because they screwed up in life.

Andrea
Chandra
David
Pinky

Lest we Think the Revolution is a Revolution Imgages of Tecnology and Nature of Change

In Selfe’s essay,” Lest we think that Revolution is Revolution” from pages 309 – 322 she discusses the role of woman in society and how they are portrayed. The roles of women reflect the historical background for women. For example, women are used for their beauty to sell things instead of being the one that actually created them. In paragraph two on page 15 she states that, “ Finally, the 1990’s retro series offers Americans the role of seductress – also traditionally defined role for women, and one that has retained enormous strength even in cyberspace where change is expected to affect so many areas of our lives.” To me this quote means that women are the only ones used by sexual means to sell items. They are the ones wearing a black dress and jewels to show beauty to attract an audience and have people remember the product, when really what they are wearing has nothing to do with what they are selling. Along with the women being portrayed so are the men. The men are seen more as a business man and a worker with their suits and ties looking professional. Occasionally men will be viewed sexually as a mechanic, nerd, biker or professional. In most cases men are viewed as the money making CEO of a major company. With men being portrayed as the business man it infers that men are more successful than women are in the work place. On page 321 first paragraph it states that,” It is far easier and more comfortable simply to re-construct for ourselves those traditional narratives that tell the same old gender stories over and over again, and that re-create the status quo every more clearly in their re-telling.” From my point of view this means that people who are in charge of advertisements take the easy way out and put the women in their advertisements as the sexual object or like in the past where they are portrayed as housewives that clean and cook.