School kills your child’s creativity

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I remembered one time when my daughter, Mariel, asked my help on Math. Dividing numbers doesn’t make sense to her more particularly when trying to understand the series of steps to derive at the right answer. Math isn’t one of my strongest suits either and as I can recall I had great difficulty doing division myself as a kid. To help my daughter, I devised a modified yet a simpler method of doing short and even long divisions. We both tested my new method against the conventional method and both did have the same answer every time. Of course, I had to make her understand the concept of division first before we went on to proceed with the new methodology. My daughter was so ecstatic knowing there is a better and creative way of doing Division. No doubt, she was all ready and excited to take the Math exam the following day.

The following day, as I picked the kids from school, I see my daughter’s stern look from far away as I approach her. She doesn’t seem to be all that happy at all and, you guess it right, she failed the Math test.  “Why did you fail? Did you miss out something?” I asked. “I got all the answers right but the teacher wouldn’t accept how I DERIVED them!” as she replied with anger and disappointment.

PERSONAL THOUGHTS:

As a computer programmer, I learned that there are multitudes of ways to come up with a single objective. As they always say: “There are many ways to skin a cat”. Life is also like that, we face countless options to achieve our goals and we take only those options (be it the shorter way or longer) that make sense to us. If things don’t make sense, we then devise creative ways to make it so. Because of this (creativity), humans discover or invent new wonders that make our lives a little easier.

In schools (particularly where my daughter is currently studying), attention to creative processes should be the utmost priority instead on focusing too much of highly structured teaching methodologies and procedures. Creative thinking can only be achieved through openness in unstructured environment.

About the author

Daniel Dumaraos is primarily a technologist, a lab scientist and a businessman who loves to write as his favorite past time. He blogs primarily on topics that centers around Business Leadership, Personal Finance and Parenting. Visit his blog at http://www.dumaraos.com.

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Tags: education, learning, school

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