Creativity c6

I found Audrey and Georganna's presentation on Creativity to be especially interesting.  The part that I remember most clearly, and the one I thought had the greatest application to my teaching, is the distinction between convergent and divergent thinking.  According to a study that I heard about from Ken Robinson, a noted expert on education, 98% of kindergarteners are geniuses in divergent thinking.  This makes perfect sense because even a very simple, mundane object to an adult can provide hours of fun for a small child.  They tested the children as they got older and with each passing year their divergent thinking scores decreased.  Part of this may have simply been the process of growing up but the convergent thinking that is so heavily emphasized in schools is certainly a culprit as well.  After years and years of being told there is only one right answer no wonder divergent thinking, and as a result creativity in general, tend to fade with age. 

All this is especially troubling for me as a math teacher.  Math above all other subjects, at least it is commonly believed, has only one right answer.  While this might be true with regard to the more elementary aspects of math, the real-life math that helps us understand and manipulate the world around us isn't a multiple choice test.  It is a world filled with billions of problems and possibilities and a human race in desperate need of creative mathematicians, physicists and philosophers to solve them. The question remains, how can we teach technical subjects like math without destroying divergent thinking?

The best I have figured out is to put students in real world situations as often as possible in order to take what they have learned in the classroom and apply it in real life.  It is important that these situations not be contrived or gimmicky, but rather situations that students may actually face and ones where maybe even the teacher is not in full  possession of the solution. 

Creativity is not exclusive to art or music. It is an essential need for us a species and it is our job as educators to facilitate it whenever possible.