Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking | The Creativity Post

Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking The Creativity Post

I enjoyed reading this article, especially being a high school visual arts teacher. Every year I am faced with the fact that a majority of my students are in my class against their will. They have no desire to learn how to draw or paint, but are required to take the class in order to graduate. Personally, I incorporate the twelve things listed into my own creativity lifestyle. But as a teacher, I know I fall victim of preventing some these lessons to be taught. For instance, Number 9 There is no such thing as failure. In my beginning class, there is such a thing as failure, but it is because they are learning the foundations to drawing and painting. They need to "learn the rules, before they can break them." In my intermediate and advanced drawing class, I try to push their creativity, but most students want to always stick to their very first idea and never go beyond it. And when I push them to come up with other ideas, they usually get extremely frustrated, pout, and stop working. It is an interesting thing to observe. I have seen an increase in students who want the easy way out or are only willing to do the bare minimum because any more is too hard. I always share with my students my own creative process, projects, and ideas in hopes that they can see how hard work can pay off to create something incredible. Also, I want them to see my mistakes and what I observed from those mistakes to make improvements the round. I think any of the twelve things are achievable in a classroom setting, except for the very first one: You are creative.  Majority of my students don't believe they have the capability to be creative, which is such a shame.  They all have so much potential, but are unwilling to give it an actual try.  Finding ways to exercise their creativity has become my personal challenge every school year.  I'm not sure how well I succeed because it is very difficult to change how one view's themselves.

But my problem today was creativity overload, which resulted in creative block.  I had signed up to participate in the sketchbook project (http://www.arthousecoop.com/projects/sketchbookproject) last October, but failed to truly spend much time on it.  The sketchbook needs to be postmarked on January 31, which gives me six more days to complete it. Yesterday and today has been my mad scramble to fill it.  My theme is "In 10 minutes."  My original idea was to create an illustrated life guidebook of various things one could do in 10 minutes to promote self-happiness.  I had drawn 3 pages seriously with this intent, but the sketchbook had become forgotten amongst the various things in my life.  So, my new theme has become "finish in 10 minutes."  Some pages are an absolute mess, while others have been a pleasant surprise.  But this has had an effect on my creative thinking.  My head feels flooded.  I might have to allow a mental/creative day off sometime soon.

Here are a few scans of my favorite pages: