Curiosity, Imagination, Creativity, and Play

1. I have two much younger sisters. One is seven, and the other is eleven. Growing up, I knew how important all of those elements were to their learning. And it started with curiosity. When my sisters were infants, they were so curious. As soon as they could crawl, they were grabbing anything they could get a hold of, looking at it, touching it, chewing on it, whatever they could do to figure out what it was. As they got older I noticed that their imaginations ran wild. I was always getting involved in some role-playing game where there were fantastical creatures and ridiculous story-lines. And it was wonderful. And I think because my parents harbored and encouraged all these qualities in my sisters, that they are doing so well in school. Children will usually already have these qualities, but it's about encouraging them to use them that makes the difference.

2. What I want to know as a future teacher, is how to harbor these qualities in my teaching methods. How to constantly be utilizing these qualities in my curriculum. I feel that learning while using curiosity, creativity, imagination, and play, it makes the learning process more interactive and in that way, students will absorb and learn the material, rather than just memorizing it, these qualities facilitate critical thinking. I want to learn how to use them in my lesson plans.

3. The first thing I learned that popped up to me is that Creativity in education is perhaps as important as literacy. If you're not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original. Children are not afraid to be wrong, but by the time they get to be adults, they are so afraid to make a mistake, that they are being educated out of their creativity. We have stigmatized mistakes, as Sir Ken Robinson said. J.K. Rowlings' Harvard commencement speech influenced me the most. I remember reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone for the first time in my fifth grade advanced reading class. I was enthralled. It was the first book I had read in school that entranced me. I would have to say that it absolutely opened my eyes to my own love of reading. After that, I was hooked. After I read that fateful book, I wanted to get my sticky fingers on as many novels as I could. I would read Goosebumps and Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia. I would even try to read my mum's Stephen King books, but they scared me a bit. After that first Harry Potter book, I used my education as an excuse to "read indiscriminately and all the time, with my eyes hanging out," as Dylan Thomas would say. Her comments on failure really touched me. We are driven by our fear of failure. And not just Harvard graduates, but everyone in college. I wanted to be a writer, just like J.K. Rolwings, but went into college as a Journalism major, assuming that it was the only way I would make a living while writing. I soon realized that I hated it. Journalism was a business, not a creative outlet. We wrote hard (and boring) facts. I was always reprimanded and marked down for my "flourishing," and I felt that my love of writing was dying alongside the 5W's and the strict three-four sentence paragraph structure. So, I switched to English, and I felt like I was reawakened. My passion reignited. I had forgotten how much I had loved to read. And to write. And to write about reading. And to read about writing. It was a magnificent feeling. And my fear of failure has fell to the wayside, because my love of reading and writing and creativity and curiosity overpowered it. And play is just as important. We learn best through it. It's interactive and collaborative. I feel like children learn best when they don't think they're learning at all.