Joe Mills

The Importance of DIY

Clive Thompson has a great short article about the importance of the DIY culture in the latest issue of Wired. I’m a very big proponent of this kind of (unfortunately, counter-intuitive) thinking, so I always feel the need to repeat myself. Clive says it best:

But as we migrated to an information economy, (mechanical skills) began to seem as quaint as, well, mechanical clocks. America’s bright future, we were assured, wasn’t industrial. It was in the hands of “symbolic analysts” — folks who sat at desks and thought for a living. In the ’90s, the rise of the Internet sent this post-mechanical age into a sort of giddy overdrive. Remember Nicholas Negroponte urging everyone to “move bits, not atoms”?

But when we stop working with our hands, we cease to understand how the world really works.

You see this on a personal level. If you can’t get under the hood of the gadgets you buy, you’re far more liable to believe the marketing hype of the corporations that sell them. When things break, you toss them and buy new ones; you accept your role as a mere consumer. “I think it makes you more passive as an individual,” says Matthew Crawford, a former motorcycle repair-shop owner (and postdoctoral fellow in cultural studies) who’s writing a book on the demise of mechanical aptitude in America.

It might even screw up our brains. Neuroscientists have shown that working with your hands exercises different parts of your cerebrum than sitting and cogitating. Ever wonder why Detroit isn’t producing 100-mpg cars? One reason might be that the engineers there spend all their time tinkering with CAD software — developing design concepts in a purely virtual sense. They aren’t ripping open cars to see what’s possible, the way those amateur ultra-mileage Prius hackers do (some of whom, by the way, have modded their hybrids to get 100 mpg).

I’m not always the best at this type of thing, but I’m trying. In this day and age of fast and convenient and NOW!, learning these types of skills will seem counter-intuitive and time-consuming, but they are important. Not only does it save money and can help to conserve resources, but it exercises our most important commodity…our brains. Cooking meals, fixing things, making things, and getting your hands dirty can be one of the more gratifying things a human can do. While passive entertainment might satisfy you in the short term, it can never take the place of learning to do-it-yourself.

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Brain Fitness

I’m always into anything that talks about brain fitness. In this day and age where it is so easy to just sit in front of the television and do mindless activities, I think brain fitness is SORELY overlooked by most Americans. I know I want my brain to stay as sharp as possible for as long as possible. I’m a big purveyor of the Flow theory brought forth by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which basically states that most people are at the happiest when they are completely immersed in an activity that requires their brain to be working at its peak. We can get so used to letting our brains idly go through life, but I think that is the wrong way to go through life. Yes, we all get tired and need to rest, but that does not mean we need to deprive our brains from the “fitness” it needs. So, with that in mind, here are some tips from Pick the Brain:

What can we do to maintain our brain? Focus on four pillars of brain health: ensure frequent physical exercise, eat a balanced diet, learn effective stress management techniques, and get a constant flow of brain exercise. Stress management is important since stress has been shown to actually kill neurons and reduce the rate of creation of new ones. Brain exercises range from low-tech (i.e. meditation, mastering new complex skills…) to high-tech (i.e. using the growing number of brain games)

Back to my brain fitness…

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Learning Like Kids

This is always one of my favorite topics and sometimes I feel like I beat into the ground, but I guess know it is so important the health of my brain that I’m almost reminding myself. Wil Richardson writes a great technology education blog that recently outlined a trip he had made to a middle school classroom. During the visit, he was showing the students a lot of online applications, and he could see the minds of these boys moving in full speed as he showed them all these things that were available to them. He continues:

And not that the brains of the teachers who I had a chance to speak with weren’t cranking as well, but it was interesting (at a minimum) how differently the body language and reactions were. Much more measured and thoughtful. No wiggling in the seats, for the most part. Not that I expected that, but the difference was brought home by one of my hosts when we went to dinner before an evening presentation to parents. (It was a long day.) At one point, as he was talking about his classroom teaching, he said “I always think like a kid; I want to learn like a kid.” Yeah. Me too. On some level, this is all play, isn’t it? But it’s directed, collaborative, connected play that has learning as a payoff (much of the time at least.) I love the “throw it against the wall and see what sticks” approach that many kids have about technology (and tree branches and skateboards and whatever else they might be pushing the limits of.) And I wish it were easier for adults to take that approach. Not be so thoughtful. Not think so much, just play.

Keeping that curiosity and exploratory nature of children is so hard to hold on to as adults, but it is necessary. Adults are scared to death of making a mistake that anything new is to be feared. Kids do not have that same problem and that is why they make the perfect students. Whatever you are trying to learn has to be approached in a child-like manner, “Hey, it might not work right away and I might not understand it right way and I might not like it, but I’m not going to learn anything without trying it out first.” Easy to say…hard to practice…

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Born with Creativity

My mother always told me that I was born with the talent to be creative and to be an artist. I’ve often heard people say that they are “not creative” and they “can’t draw” or that they “can’t do artwork”. I’ve always believed that to be untrue. And, I do not believe that because I teach art. I would believe it regardless.  This is one of those topics you could argue about until your head explodes, but I think it is wrong to dismiss that creativity and the ability to draw is “God-given”.

I came across the argument recently on Drawn. It sites two blogs with opposing view points. Brady Russell argues that it is God-given while Von Allen vehemently disagrees. There are many sides to this issue, but I’m going to tackle the one closes to my heart which is the beginning’s of an artist. I remember as a child that I was never the best artist in class. I just loved to draw. I loved to draw in perspective. And, I liked the mental stimulation it provided for me. I still remember drawing faces over and over and over again until I got them right. I was focused because I loved being an artist. I almost didn’t go into the arts out of high school, but I did have a foundation that I could work from, so following a fine arts path in college was something I could most certainly attain.

I think about the young me a lot when I teach because there are so many levels to being a good artist. Yes, it is easy to point out the child who can draw well, but there is the child that can match colors well, the child that shows a great attention to craftsmanship, the consummate artist with the stereotypical personality to match, the pattern-maker, and the student with the strong imagination. While I believe every child can learn to draw or be an artist or be a creative person, the ability to be creative is so often lumped together with being a good artist that most students will feel that they can never be creative.

I don’t want you to think I’m jumping too far off topic, but if a child’s ability to be an artist or be creative is not cultivated at a young age, they will never follow that path. And with the extreme attention put on reading, writing, and math, every child is not going to get that chance. It might be just too much for some kids…which, to be honest, is sad. I try my best, but at the end of the day, I can only do so much as a teacher. They need to build their own confidence and have the courage to draw and be creative. Too often, those abilities get shot down before they have a chance to blossom. To further illustrate my point, I’ll pull this quote from the Allen post:

Artists, especially artists that come to their craft at a very young age, often have more opportunity than others. Often times this opportunity is financial (there is a world of difference between the upbringing that an artist like Alex Ross had in comparison to someone growing up in, say, bombed out Lebanon). Having the financial wherewithal to pursue art is a major factor in the ability to get better and develop one’s artistic skills. It’s difficult to grow as an artist when one is simply struggling to survive. Other times, the opportunity is more abstract. Some kids have the self-esteem to get over the tough times as they learn their particular craft and others don’t. In addition, I believe strongly that some children get the right type of support at the right time to give them enough confidence to keep going. That support could come from a parent or a teacher or someone else. It could even come from within themselves with their own inherent stubbornness. Regardless, something keeps them going and they get over their inherent “terribleness” to become fantastic artists in whatever medium they choose. This is even true when it comes to sport and athletics. When you factor these two points together (the financial opportunity to learn a craft combined with the self-esteem issues to get over the bad days), it becomes very clear that artistic opportunity is not egalitarian.

In short, I believe an artist is not “born with it”. I guess that is easy to say as an artist and a teacher of art, but if I didn’t believe it, I wouldn’t be doing it or teaching it.

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Keeping Your Brain Young

I’m always interested in how to keep your brain young and fresh. I think some of us get so conditioned to be relaxed and resting after a long day or a long week that we forget that as we get older, we aren’t going to be as sharp as we were when we are younger. Is it hopeless? I have always thought that the best thing for our brains and our bodies is to stay active. And when I say active, I mean our brain stays active. I guess there is always time to veg out in front of the television, but I certainly don’t want to make it a habit. That is why I love seeing posts like this from PickTheBrain that continue to champion the continued use of our brain. Here is just a little snippet:

There is a long standing belief that when the brain is young, it learns quickly and by the time we’re in our twenties, it becomes ‘set in it’s ways’. It was also believed that you cannot replace brain cells that are lost. Research has shown this is no longer true. Brain cells can and do regenerate in certain areas of your brain up until your last breath is taken. I know the brain is amazing, but how does it regenerate itself?

It’s simple really – our thoughts (which are non-physical) can and do impact the physical structure of our brains. Let me repeat that: Our thoughts impact and change the physical structure of our brains.

They should be shouting this from the highest mountain…

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Becoming Adult

I love this quote from Becoming Adult…a book that one of my favorite author’s, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, worked on:

We mainly train them (children) to be consumers – of abstract information, entertainment, and mostly useless products – with too little regard for concrete, active engagement with the environment. What is needed is an opportunity for youth to experience the joys and responsibilities of making things happen, without being permanently drawn into monotonous work.

I think I post things like this a lot, but the more it is ignored…the more I believe it.

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Killing Creativity

I said I was going to talk about this so hear we go. I recently came across this article by Will Richardson about how schools are killing the creativity of kids. Basically, he talks about how schools

A study released yesterday of about 350 districts across the country showed that 44% of them were reducing time on art, music, health and physical education. Instead, we’re getting more and more focused on reading and math where the standardized test scores really matter, a 31% decrease overall in subjects that aren’t tested.

This is not a surprise. The arts are seen as “extra” or a “special” and not as a core part of the curriculum in most schools. With the emphasis on reading, writing, and math on standardized tests, it is not a surprise that most teachers and schools focus on that. It is quantifiable data. Politicians like it. Parents like it. Businesses like it. People understand the difference between a 95% and a 75%. This is the main reason why creativity and the arts are not emphasized. You can’t measure it. You don’t know if it is good by looking at it or listening to it. It requires a part of your brain that can’t put things into neat little categories to say, “Yes, the arts and being creative is a good thing”. Unfortunately, people don’t like to hear that. It is vague and unquantifiable.

So, why is creativity good. Richardson also points to an excellent speech given by Sir Ken Robinson that is well worth spending 15 minutes to watch. I’ll be paraphrasing him in the next couple lines but he argues that creativity is as important as literacy, but creativity requires that you make mistakes. It is not as black and white as math or reading. The great thing about students is that they are willing to take a chance and not be frightened by making mistake, but our school systems have put stigmatized mistakes. (I think making mistakes is one of the few ways we all learn.) Kids have become afraid. In turn, if they are not prepared to be wrong, then they will not come up with something original. It is that simple. Through education, kids grow out of creativity because it is looked down upon since it has no wrong and right answer. Robinson goes on to say that many highly talented and creative people think they are not, because it was not valued in school. That is truly sad.

I hope some day the schools wake up, but we need to get ourselves out of this standardized test rut and focus on creativity. We are going to need creative thinkers in the coming years and decades, but if we contine to focus on wrong and right, we are going to have a bunch of children automatons who just continue to do what the people before them did instead of thinking of news ways to do things. That is how we move ahead as a culture. We move ahead because someone came up with a new way of doing something or thinking about a problem in a different way. It doesn’t happen because you fill out the right bubbles on a test booklet.

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Tell Me a Story

I recently finished a book called Tell Me a Story by Roger Schank. The main focus of the book is that telling stories is tied to intelligence. In a nutshell, it states that the ability to take an event, synthesize it, and retell it to a listener so he understands it and can relate to it, is the mark of intelligence.

While I think this is a very important point, I wanted to select a portion of the book that deals with a different issue that I have always felt to be extremely important in the world of intelligence and learning. First, the passage:

Learning to explain phenomena such that one continues to be fascinated by the failure of one’s explanations creates a continuing cycle of thinking that is the crux of intelligence. It isn’t that one person knows more than another, then. In a sense, it is important to know less than the next person, or at least to be certain less, thus enabling more curiosity and less explaining away because one has again encountered a well-known phenomenon. The less you know the more you can find out about, and finding out for oneself is what intelligence is all about.

The reason I feel that this is important is that it is completely opposite of how most people think. I would bet that the most people think that the more you know, the smarter you are. It seems rationale. I have always felt, though, that not knowing everything is a great feeling. Being curious and wanting to find more about a subject is how you learn as a child, but as most people get older, they feel confident in what they know and don’t feel the need to be curious. Not a good idea. Becoming a curious human being is a hard thing to learn because we are nation so caught up in being correct 100% of the time that curiosity is seen as a novelty. It’s really too bad…

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Quote of Genius

I’m reading this strangely fascinating book right now called The Dynamics of Creation by Anthony Storr. Actually, it is sort of hit or miss in discussing why people are creative. When it hits, though, it has some great points to make. Anyway, the main reason I mentioning the book was this quote Storr uses from historian Bernard Berenson. He quoted him as saying that he once defined genius as

the capacity for productive reaction against one’s training.

Basically, I just liked the quote and I think it has many applications to the creative mind. Plus, it makes me see some of my students in a different light.

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Blueprint Game

Image courtesy of Tea Games

I’m slowly starting to come around to the idea that video games can help students learn. I’m waiting to read How Computer Games Help Children Learn and What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. And, I think of the possibilities of games and learning when I see the Blueprint Game. The premise is simple. You have to move around the obstacles, ramps, and other assists to make the black ball hit the target. It seems simple enough, but it requires a lot of logic and thinking to make it work correctly. It can be almost maddeningly tough because it looks so simple. Now, when I think of video games and learning, I can see the possibilities.

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