10 Rules for Creativity

Never underestimate a nun (in this case, Sister Corita Kent).

Immaculate Heart College Rules (art department):

1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
4. Consider everything an experiment.
5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

Courtesy of Michal Migurski

The Professional versus the Inspired Amateur

Great article by Steve Martin in February issue of The Smithsonian magazine. It occurred to me on reading it that there's a lot of overlap between stand-up comedy and teaching. Here's something surprising that he has to say about the difference between being great and being good:

The consistent work enhanced my act. I learned a lesson: it was easy to be great. Every entertainer has a night when everything is clicking. These nights are accidental and statistical: like lucky cards in poker, you can count on them occurring over time. What was hard was to be good, consistently good, night after night, no matter what the circumstances. Performing in so many varied situations made every predicament manageable, from Toronto, where I performed next to an active salad bar, to the well-paying but soul-killing Playboy Clubs, where I was almost but not quite able to go over. But as I continued to work, my material grew; I came up with odd little gags such as "How many people have never raised their hands before?"

Well, that difference between being great when inspired, when the spirit moves you, and being consistently good is precisely what it means to be a professional, isn't it? Amateurs can be great at what they do because they can be inspired but that's something that's outside your control - by definition. You have to depend on the muses to be inspired and they are...fickle. But a professional has honed his or her craft to the point where he or she is at least good pretty much all the time.

Someday, when you're really a professional, all your classes will be good and, when inspiration does strike, you'll be great.

Why Nerds are Unpopular...

...is Paul Graham's take on the relationship between high school culture and being smart. He's got a lot of insightful things to say about why high school culture in the United State (and, by extension, Canada, I think) is the way it is, specifically, why it is all too often cruel and pointless if you're not at the top of the popularity hierarchy.

Consider:

"So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American school, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smart kids can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of popular kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after."

and

"Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Nerds aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been nerds in high school.

It's important for nerds to realize, too, that school is not life. School is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it."

Survival Skills for Occasional Teachers

From your friendly neighbourhood (Ontario) teacher's federation comes Survival Skills for Occasional Teachers. I cant' speak to its quality. I haven't read it myself yet but I plan to in the next couple of weeks.

Link.

Mathematics Technology Reource

In the course of researching for an assignment in my Mathematics ABQ, I came across the following resource from the University of Illinois' Math Teacher Link site. It's an elearning resource targeting teachers interested in using technology to teach Mathematics.

There's some particularly good stuff on using and teaching Geometer's Sketchpad. They also have modules on Mathematica and Fathom.

Why is Math harder than English?

Why do most people who are not math-heads find it so hard compared to, say, English? I think that one reason is that when students are learning English or History they are, for the most part, being asked to employ skills that they have already mastered (language) and use in everyday life. When it comes to Mathematics, however, students are being asked to employ an essentially artificial skill set that they don't make regular use of in everyday life.

There's indirect evidence that this is indeed true in that one of the ways to lead students towards mastery of math skills is to encourage them to use math skills in everyday life and, for that matter, to model that use yourself.

Things I Do Wrong All the Time

Good tip from a fellow student in the Teaching and Learning in the Senior Division course we all have to do for an ABQ (Sr. Mathematics in my case).

Most students have something (or things) that they consistently get wrong (or forget to get right). Do this. Get them to note that thing in the back of their notebook or textbook. ("I always confuse there and their.") Then tell them to forget about it when initially doing the work. Afterwards, they check the back of their text or notebook and go through their work and correct it.