The Creativity Crisis

          I think that the article we read ( the creativity crisis) was very interesting and contained a ton of information that I never had known before.  I never knew what the exact deffinetion of creativity was, in fact I didn't know there was a deffinetion at all.  In this article I also learned what divergent and convergent thinking was. 

          I actually wasn't surprised when I found that the creativity scores are falling because they're just like IQ scores.  Its a mix of the kids not caring enough to do good in school and all of the testing becoming much more complex.   Creativity is falling because kids are being stuffed with so much school (math and language arts) information there is hardly any time to relax and bring out all of your creative thoughts or ideas.  I found it stupid that teachers thought there was no room for creativity because it is creativity and divergent thinking that will help us suceed in life and on standardized tests.  I agree that creative tasks should be incoorparated into classes much more.

          The story about the school in Akron was very interesting as well, it showed how divergent thinking and useful projects help devlop the creativity in the person.  The school grew to one of the top three in all of Akron with 42% living in poverty and some still think that creativity will not help at all in school.  I remember doing a lot of projects like this, that force you to think instead of jumping to an answer, in elementary school, but they had stopped giving them when I got into 7th grade.  I thought they were so exciting to do because you're trying to solve a problem with your friends and everyone has different ideas, all which are amazing, but so different.  They were especially fun when it was hands on problem solving.  Instead of just writimg it down on paper you could experiement with different ideas and the classroom just became so free in what you could do.  I also got to use this type of hands on or divergent thinking learning when my 6th grade class went to a place called fairview for four days.  The whole point of the trip was hands on problem solving and puzzles.  This is where the students really got engaged in what they were doing. 

          I agree with almost everything the paper said. Schools should start teaching more divergent thinking in classes.  Without creativity we would never have had tv's or cars or the internet.  Without creativity we will never get things like food printers or the cure to cancer.