The Heart of the Matter

Creativity in the Classroom Comes from How You Live Your Life
Lou Spaventa

"Ed"
Louis Simpson

Ed was in love with a cocktail waitress,
but Ed's family, and his friends,
didn't approve. So he broke it off.

He married a respectable woman
who played the piano. She played well enough
to have been a professional.

Ed's wife left him…
Years later, at a family gathering
Ed got drunk and made a fool of himself.

He said, "I should have married Doreen."
"Well,' they said, "why didn't you?"

Why didn't you? Is that the question you'll ask yourself when you put the lesson plans in a forever scrap book or use your last box of chalk? As I move into the fullness of my teaching career, a career that began in ignorance and good intentions some thirty-five years ago, I find this is the question that most preoccupies me. I am sometimes a writer of textbooks, in that way I am a company man. I create texts for others to use when they are too green to have confidence in their own ideas, too new to the language to know what to do, too much part of a lock-step program with mandated texts from intake to graduation to do otherwise, or, dare I write it, too inert and disinterested to create for themselves. Why didn't I, indeed? So I did. I determined at some point that I would teach, not solely from what I had learned, but from what I imagined as well.

It began in 1975 really. I was teaching at Sogang University in Seoul, Korea. I saw the need for a freshman English language textbook. I was an inveterate collector of song lyrics, poems, short stories, aphorisms, newspaper articles, anecdotes - any interesting language that I came across. So, I put them all in a book entitled East Meets West. I conceived of the freshman year as if it were a full cycle of life, perhaps subconsciously inspired by the Korean conception of one life cycle being completed at age sixty, and a second one started thereafter. The chapter topics were childhood, school days, university life, love and marriage, on being a parent, working, recreation, endings, and reflections on life. I poured what I knew of life into this English language textbook.
In the introduction, I wrote, "This book is meant to be of interest to and helpful to the entering freshmen at Sogang University…The first principle for using the text is the willingness of the teacher to open lines of communication between himself or herself and the students of Sogang University…If (the book) should ever interfere with that process, it should be dropped." Youthful idealism and honesty all rolled into one book. I could never write those words in a commercial publication today. Can you imagine a representative from one of the current publishing conglomerates agreeing to my exhortation to do away with the textbook if it gets in the way of student-teacher communication? Nope. I can't.
Yet, most of us do teach with texts that others have created for our use, imagining our classes as if they were theirs, our students' needs and desires as if they were theirs.

So we go from lesson to lesson using the product of someone else's imagination, though I might say, there appear to be fewer traces of an original voice in texts today. Some by-the-numbers thriller novels are now advertised in this way: John Smith's Situation Dangerous, written by Jane Doe. In other words, you'll get a book as John Smith usually writes one (according to a tried and true formula), but it will be written by an aspiring pulp writer who can imitate the "master." This is more what textbooks have become. By contrast, in Kernel Lessons, the voice of Robert O'Neill was part of the joy one found in rereading the tale of "The Fugitive" simplified for ESL students. O'Neill took his American memories off to Europe, filtered them through the experience of teaching there, and created something in which his voice could be heard. The individual shown from the pages of the text. It was a book written by someone one could imagine, and I must say, in the event of meeting the author, he proved to be a someone exactly the author of that book and no one else.

Many people feel that they themselves are not creative. They admire creativity in others, but would never claim it for themselves. I tried a little experiment at a conference last month. I had participants create a chart of their daily activities, and next to each activity, I asked them to write down what typically went through their minds when they did that activity. From there, the invitation was to focus on one activity and write about it. I suggested that this could be the gist of a classroom lesson for each person (They were all teachers).
Creativity in my exercise with these teachers was rather mundane. It translated into identifying oneself in the act of being oneself. In this way, each of us is always and only creative in ourselves.

What do we really know of our interior lives? Very little I would hazard as a guess. In the old psychological training activity called the "Johari Window," people are asked to look at a "window" of the self broken up into quadrants: 1. what is known by the person about him/herself and is also known by others - open area, open self, free area, free self, or 'the arena'; 2. what is unknown by the person about him/herself but which others know - blind area, blind self, or 'blindspot'; 3. what the person knows about him/herself that others do not know - hidden area, hidden self, avoided area, avoided self or 'façade'; and 4. what is unknown by the person about him/herself and is also unknown by others - unknown area or unknown self.

Just looking at the window as a heuristic device, isn't it apparent that there is a tremendous amount of content to be explored within any individual and by that individual with others? I am not suggesting that a classroom become a therapy group, but I am suggesting that a lot of the human warp and woof of life is left out of the discussion of course content. Creativity is always at our fingertips if we look to ourselves.

At any rate, we all want to marry the cocktail waitress, to listen to that inner voice that guides us, but sometimes is drowned out by our assimilation of social mores that threaten us with opprobrium. The sorry thing is that we actually think it is our own voice speaking to us. Not so.

Rather than prattle on about creativity, I invite the reader to consider the thoughts of some pretty creative individuals, pick one that resonates, and think and write about it. Maybe the beginnings of a lesson will take shape. Maybe it will lead somewhere else.

1. Margaret Mead "Always remember that you are absolutely unique. Just like everyone else."
2. Shunryu Suzuki "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few."
3. Karl Wallenda "Being on the tightrope is living, everything else is waiting."
4. Albert Einstein "Imagination is more important than knowledge."
5. George Lois "Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything."

Finally, I'd like to leave the reader with an e.e. cummings poem, which like many of his poems, is at least partly closed to me (See Johari window again). But the last two lines just echo over and over again internally.

You Shall Above All Things
E. E. Cummings

you shall above all things be glad and young,
For if you're young, whatever life you wear

It will become you; and if you are glad
whatever's living will yourself become.
Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:
I can entirely her only love

whose any mystery makes every man's
flesh put space on; and his mind take off time

that you should ever think, may god forbid
and(in his mercy)your true lover spare:
for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave
called progress, and negation's dead undoom.

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance