A Conversation About Creativity (A Real One)

Son: Mom, what have we done that's creative?

Me: Um.  What?

Son:  It's for language arts. I need to write something we've done over the last six weeks that's creative.

Me:  I can't think of anything. Crap. I mean, we must've done something creative, right?

Son:  No.

Me:  Well, I don't know. Think of something. I have to work, honey. You know that.

Son:  Mom!

Me:  [putting aside my laptop, swearing I won't forget what it was I was doing before this hundredteenth interruption] Well, okay. Creative. Sure we've been creative. We've... well, we've cooked. A lot. Three meals a day.

Son: That's not creative. Besides, I haven't done it. When school closed, you said I'd have to help you with the cooking, but I think I complained too much so you gave up and stopped making me.

Me: Well, yeah. Okay. I'll get better at that.

Son:  So? What have we done that's creative?

Me: [Desperate] Write about last Saturday when we drove up to the farm to see your grandmother and grandfather and Aunt Leah and your cousins, and Leah and I decided we wanted to find that fallen-down 18th-century cemetery we'd stumbled across when we were kids, so we set off toward the wildlife area across from Killbuck Creek, just down the road from the farm, and we made you and your cousin Carli come along, so the four of us traipsed across a field of dried foxtail and briars and thorns, but we couldn't find the cemetery in the place I was certain—certain!—it would be, so we turned north, digging and high-stepping through the woods, but there was still no cemetery, and you and Carli gave up and went back to the road, where she turned a hundred cartwheels, and then you realized you'd lost your phone but we followed our steps backward and found it, by some freakin' miracle, in the briars near that fallen-down oak, and then we went back to the farm and told your grandmother we couldn't find the cemetery, and she told us we looked in the wrong place—it's closer to the road, she said, down the hill by the crossroad by the creek—and then as we were standing there, someone saw a tick on my neck, and then we realized we all had ticks, and you were creeped out, so you went into the barn to shake out your clothes while I just picked them off myself, one by one, including one literally in my bellybutton and a couple beneath my waistband, about ten total, I think, and your grandmother somehow had a pack of matches in her pocket, probably from the Camels she sneaks in the pottery studio when she thinks no one will notice, so I took them and tore off the matches and lit them burned the ticks to death, one by one, and I left their dead bodies on the bed of your grandfather's rebuilt '78 Chevy pickup, where they'll stay until he drives it somewhere, at which point the tick corpses will blow off into Holmes County somewhere.

Son:  That's not creative.

Me: It is. Write about it. If your teacher says that's not creative, I'll give you ten bucks.

Son: Swear?

We shook on it.

The other six "C Words" of COVID-19

COVID-19 has uncovered some of the solid truths about education and "school": How much we need and love the actual physical space, how much we value what happens there, how much we depend on one another for energy and momentum. These are truths we’ve long known, as educators, but now get to see the rest of the world understand, too.

Here they are.

Community: Yup. We’ve always known it matters to be part of a community—as a classroom, a school, a town, a place, a where-we-live community. We see it so clearly now in our students and their parents. They are looking around for their people. They’re finding it in different places, but it’s still there, in Hangouts and Meets and Zooms, in Homeroom and S’More and SeeSaw, in writing and reading and phone calls and waves from the classmates taking walks down the street: My friends. My class. My teacher. My school. My district. That’s me. I’m part of this thing.

Connections: In terms of power and potential, there’s no match for a teacher’s connection to students. Academic rigor isn’t our priority right now. Instead, it’s about connections we make with students. That’s it. Teachers have immersed themselves in what they do best: Being present. I have piles of evidence of this unique teacher-student magic, now done virtually: Students grinning into the screen, engaged in conversations with their teachers; Google Classroom with pages of dialogues between students themselves and between their teachers; emails; snapshots; learning new things about one another every day.


Camaraderie: This C-word could be “collegiality,” but I crossed it out because it wasn’t… well, it wasn’t enough. It has to be bigger and broader. Why? Because there is a genuine, powerful affection we have for one another— not just between educators, but also between students, parents, and community. Even students who drive us bananas during the school day are part of our network of mutual trust and affection. We miss it. We miss them. All of it and all of them.


Confidence-building: “You’ve done well.” “This is fantastic.” “I am so proud of you.” In these past weeks, I’ve heard these words said between teachers, from teacher to student, from teacher to parent to student, all around and back again. We’re rooting for each other. Whether it is stretching how to use technology, or discovering fancy and fun new ways to share learning with our students, or just managing to get through the day, we are telling one another how great we’re doing. It feels like we have a constant pep rally for the collective whole, and it feels good.


Conversation: This has emerged as an undeniable: We need to talk to one another. All the online assignments in the world don’t make up for talking something through. We need the uplift of human voices and a place to put our rhythm of thought. We need words to bring our ideas and discovery into the light.


Care: “Take care of one another.” We’ve known this; we’ve said this. And now? Well, now we really know it and we really mean it when we say it. Being human, and working to educate the world’s youngest humans, means we, teachers and educators, know, in our souls and in our guts, how to care for others. Now, though, it feels more real and tangible and touchable. Instead of breezing through a standard series of “How are you?” “I’m fine. You?” “Fine.” “Thanks,” we’re slowing down and listening to the answers. Indeed, that’s how we should always take care of one another.



I feel human connection more acutely now that I can no longer do it on auto-pilot. I miss what we’ve lost, but I feel reaffirmed and revalidated in what I know to be true about teaching and learning. I look forward to the future with a new, unexpected excitement, because I know we will teach better, stronger, and with more focus on the things that really matter.

Writing on the Bell Curve

“You’re a fine writer,” Professor Slote told me. “But there’s a student in the class who is better. He gets the ‘A’.” He lifted his shoulders dismissively. “That’s how it works in my class. One ‘A,’ one ‘F.’ Everyone else falls somewhere in between.”

I started to cry, a reaction I regret to this day. I'm still mad that I cried. I couldn't have stopped, though; the tears were of frustration and fury, born from fifteen weeks of hard work, early morning hours spent in a cold basement computer lab, revisions and edits beyond count, all to to fit my words to this man’s schema of good writing.

“I’m not sure why you’re crying,” he said, genuinely flummoxed. “It’s a Bell Curve. Have you ever heard of the Bell Curve?” He pulled a piece of paper from the printer beside his desk and drew a gigantic, upside-down bell. “Here is the best writer in the class,” he said, starting below the hill. “He’s what we call the ‘cognitive elite’.” Then, making a slash on the beginning of the curve’s ascent, he said, with a flourish, “And this is you.”

I couldn’t think of a thing to say, except, miserably, “I really wanted to get straight ‘A’s this semester.”

“Not my problem,” he shrugged. “Listen, kiddo. It’s just the way the world works. It’s a hard, hard place to be. Part of my job is to get you ready for it.”

This story bubbled up recently with a group of my college pals. We were reminiscing about freshman-year requirements at our liberal arts college. Every freshman had to take an introductory humanities, science, art, and writing class, intended to be foundational classes to prepare, inspire, and lead us toward a major fitting our skills and interests.

I hated those classes because they were supposed to be standardized, equal, and fair— and they were anything but. Receiving a ‘B’ in an introductory writing class was massively bothersome to me; I mean, I was planning to major in English, for cryin’ out loud. I had friends who were barely functioning as students—skipping class or, worse, showing up reeking of binge drinking; turning in papers scratched out in the TV lounge over a game of euchre; open, guffawing mocking of the intro classes and how easy they were. Those students, though, were given clear, easy marks of 100% for their papers. I thought it was deeply unfair. They thought it was hilarious. “Bad luck,” they said, not sorry.

The problem with standardized classes, of course, is teachers aren’t standardized. They carry wildly different philosophies, strategies for instruction, and—we all know this, intimately—deeply conflicting approaches to grading. Professor Slote’s approach wasn’t conflicted in him, mind you; he saw it as a very simple mathematical equation, and there was exactly zero wiggle room.

But the teacher isn’t the only problem with standardized classes. Students aren’t standardized any more than teachers and instructors and professors are. Every single one is different. It can be argued, I suppose, that humans fit on a Bell Curve—if you look at all six billion of us as a lump, and if you’re up for a raucous debate about the dehumanizing nature of using such a curve— but learners don’t.

It’s not that we should be afraid of generosity with ‘A’s; in many ways, that’s problematic just as is an unwavering commitment to a Bell Curve. And we certainly shouldn’t give an ‘A’ just because a kid asks for one. But grades require a bit more thinking than a lot of the things we do.

My freshman year goal for perfect grades was, indeed, problematic. Professor Slote was right about that. Any goal in which “less than perfect” is a failure is doomed in many ways. But it took a lot of time and perspective for me to understand why. Professor Slote’s approach was to poo-poo the goal and tell me the world was hard. Far better—so much better—would have been for him to sit down and talk about it with me and, perhaps, do a little thinking and reflecting of his own.