My creative students
Creativity and imagination is not my thing. I have never written a creative story in my life — willingly, that is (I shake my fist at Bob Jones’ journal prompts) — and I never took a creative writing class in college. I did take Art 102 at CBC for some reason and barely scraped through it. I enjoyed it, but I had no original ideas or creativity to draw from, and assignments required you to have creativity in order to apply what we learned in an original project.
During my homeschooling years I heard a lot about my friends’ creative school projects — clay maps of Egypt, hand-sewn costumes, paintings, stories, skits, etc. — and it never appealed to me. It seemed, from what I heard, that this was the sort of things most co-ops spent most of their time doing, and so I was never disappointed that we never enrolled in any. However, I did gain the impression that most children liked such things.
Then, suddenly and unexpectedly, I became a teacher. I taught 2 years of literature to 7th-9th grade homeschool students with a college-type class model — lecture, discussion, papers, and tests. The third year, half my students were new and younger (6th & 7th grade); so I thought maybe I needed to lighten up the mood of my class a little bit. How could I do this? Ah…perhaps I could let them do something creative relating to the class content. After all, literature is creative, and so letting the students play a bit with the material would be a good thing. However, with our limited class time, I really didn’t have any to spare for teacher-led or teacher-supervised art-time in class — and that I did not mind. So, it became another homework assignment, replacing a paragraph. That year I also wrote a post defending this practice using Gregory’s principles of teaching after Matt derided the assignments as a waste of students’ time. Perhaps I shall have to repost it — it was on the old site.
So, twice a year I give my students the opportunity to draw a picture, write a creative story, or dramatically present a speech — I make much more specific assignments, of course — and that’s as creative as my creative assignments get. Until this year.
As I sat writing out what things my students would be allowed to draw pictures of, I had a revelation. We were just finishing Dante’s Inferno, and what if someone wanted to make a 3-D model of Hell? Images of clay-baked maps of Egypt (actually my mom did make Geoff and I do that one) hovered in the back of my mind, but in the forefront was the thought, “I have no idea what a 3-D model might look like, but if someone wanted to give it a shot and it had the rivers, the circles, and the form of Dante’s Hell, that might be interesting.”
In my class I have a student after my own cold-hard-fact, uncreative heart — or at least, so she claims. I think her project belays her words. She took me up on the 3-D model assignment. She made a cake. Yes, a cake. “One hell of a cake,” in her mother’s words. Probably “the cake from — no, no, of — Hell” in her own words. It had a 14-inch diameter and was 2 layers, made of 3 cake mixes (vanilla, actually, which is my favorite kind; but I promise that had nothing to do with her excellent grade!). Such a feat could not go unrecorded:
The fruit roll-up is the gate to the City of Dis; no one who could make such a thing can complain of a lack of creativity!
Another student made a 3-D model with foam, construction paper, toothpicks, and pipe cleaners:
And, of course, most of my students illustrated a scene from Inferno. Here is an excellent example:
<img src=”http://pelennorfields.com/mystie/wp-content/hunter.jpg” align=right title=”Satan, himself”" />
Needless to say, I was very pleased with the results of this assignment. :)
You are a great teacher!