Personally, I think I’m one of the least creative people you’ll ever come across. I am terrible at anything artistic or aesthetic. I am not talented when it comes to drawing or writing poetry or making up stories. I was just never drawn to these things. And throughout my entire childhood education, I remember teachers always giving us these crazy projects to do in order for us to be able to show our creativity. Well clearly, what I did every single time was I asked my sister or parents to help me with the project, and I think that many people can relate to this. I’m sure that there are many parents who feel like whenever their elementary school child is assigned a big project, it’s basically the parents and not the students who end up doing the project. Parents want their students to do well in the class and so they take on the responsibility of completing the assignment because they know their children are usually incapable of doing so themselves. I don’t know, that’s been my experience. I’m sure it doesn’t apply to everyone.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that I hate being forced to think creatively. I think that when it comes to ideas, I can be creative when I want to be. I think of interesting ideas here and there, but not when I’m being forced to do so. Also, I think that even I, a completely un-creative person, have very creative dreams. I think we all do. I feel like everyone has that dream once in a while that is extremely weird and unrealistic but it definitely is creative, sort of like many of Salvador Dali’s paintings.
So I think we all have it in us, but we just shouldn’t be forced to use it unless we want to.
One problem I do have with education is that, before college at least, we were always taught to pass standardized tests. I guess the argument for making them standardized is to be fair in making sure every single child has the same questions being asked of them and is required to meet the same criteria for their age group. However, I know that in high school, for example, whenever I took a class that was required either for a future Regents exam or for an AP, the teacher would teach to the test and once the test was over (like the APs in May) then we would either just watch movies for the rest of the time or start learning something that nobody took seriously because we knew that the most important exam was over and that anything we learned after that point was “not important.” At the end of the day, I felt extremely under prepared for the college workload because I was used to just skimming through some reading, taking a multiple choice test, and forgetting everything I read 5 minutes after it was over. I’m not advocating for more creativity in the classroom, but I’m advocating for a better incentive to learn.
I feel somewhat comfortable living with ambiguity. At the end of the day, there will always be questions I’ll never have answered, and I decided that there’s just no point worrying about something that I can’t change. Life in general is ambiguous. We never know what will happen next, and there are always new surprises in store for us. How boring would life be if we always knew what would happen next?
