George David Clark’s recent post, “The Patience Problem,” and my own classroom experiences got me thinking about not just the energy crisis in the classroom at this time of year but, more specifically, the creativity crisis. As Clark says, students are loaded down more and more with work and other responsibilities. As a consequence, their creativity is stifled.
I recently watched a YouTube video of John Cleese talking about creativity. In it, he says space and time, among other things, are crucial elements for people to come up with original ideas. People who intend to be creative need to create an “oasis” by “setting boundaries of space and time,” he says. It has to be a quiet space with enough time to let the worries of life, which will inevitably overtake quiet thinking, slip away after a while. He also says that the most creative people stick with problems or questions longer and usually don’t take the easiest or first solution they can think of.
To read the original article: The Creativity Problem - On Hiring - The Chronicle of Higher Education
