Creativity and Connections

 

I have met thoughtful, interesting people through blogging. I consider them to be my friends. Now I find connections with them through Facebook and Pinterest. 

The soaring birds from the keys of a piano indicate creativity and maybe even ascending ecstasy and this was posted by Philomena Ewing, whom I first met at Blue Eyed Ennis.

This connected with an interesting article that artist Sybil Archibald posted on Facebook about creativity. I met her through her blog where she states that "making art is my spiritual path."

I also posted the article "The Creativity Crisis" by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman on Facebook where Quaker Dave, one of the first bloggers I ever met when I started blogging in 2006, posted it and said he was going to share it with his fellow teachers. High praise!

I've never felt I was "creative" but didn't know how to become so. Now that I am taking piano lessons, I understand that my brain has to be exposed to and grown in new connections for growth to occur. It seems like there has to be some foundation of structure, though I think some artists emerge out of "nowhere." Mistakenly, I thought that one was BORN with creativity or not, which meant that I was NOT. Plus, I isolated creativity to the arts and not other areas.

It is wonderful learning new things and ways of being!

Here is glimpse of "The Creativity Crisis:"

"Overwhelmed by curriculum standards, American teachers warn there’s no room in the day for a creativity class. Kids are fortunate if they get an art class once or twice a week. But to scientists, this is a non sequitur, borne out of what University of Georgia’s Mark Runco calls “art bias.” The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded. When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

"Researchers say creativity should be taken out of the art room and put into homeroom. The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process. Scholars argue that current curriculum standards can still be met, if taught in a different way."

The article is worth reading, so go to "The Creativity Crisis."