I’ve noticed exactly the same thing WhyNot mentions with my own 3-yr-olds. They absolutely mimic us in their play, using our communicative devices as their own rather than innovating. I’m far more drawn into their world than they are into mine, and I’m the one demonstrating creativity here, is not at all what I expected.
For example, ds has been terrified that Swiper (from Dora) is going to come into our house to steal his toys. After all, he takes everything on the show. How do you deal with this anxiety in a 2.5-yr-old? Well, for a while there I had him convinced that Swiper doesn’t have an opposable thumb and therefore can’t turn doorknobs – but, upon closer inspection, I was proved wrong on that one.
So instead, and since it was nearly Halloween anyway, we decorated paper pumpkins and taped them to the front door, because I explained to him that Swiper is terrified of pumpkins and won’t come near our place. And by an odd coincidence, Swiper’s also terrified of the paper Christmas trees that now adorn our door.
Very good questions. Part of it of course is the more mechanical aspects (grammar,
spelling, etc.), but I can grok why minimal effort is usually what I get, even if it
wouldn’t have been my attitude. As an obnoxious gifted youngster I likely would
have striven to craft something to blow the minds of my teachers-the more out
there, the better, just to liven up the proceedings if nothing else. If you are bored
and you express your boredom by doing something in a deliberately boring way,
then you’re just perpetuating your ennui as opposed to breaking out of it. You
have freedom to write about whatever you want-what an opportunity! But
most of my students squander it.
I remember crafting some very creative stories about tho dogfights of WWII
fighter pilots in 4th-5th grade, partly because it was much better than any other
possible alternative (yes I hated the parochial school I went to).
I guess the unexamined life (or unexaminable sentence) is not worth living (writing)
IMHO (tho in other ways in my current life I don’t live up to my ideal). Why NOT
(sorry WN!) push things to the logical/absurd limit? Life’s too short.
As a kid I hated these kind of assignments. I did all sorts of creative things…I wrote poetry, I was in theater, I made up games and songs and stories for my little brother, etc. I loved creative stuff, but I didn’t need to be “on” all the time and being forced to be creative doesn’t work very well. I would turn in sub par work, knowing full well that it was crap simply because I didn’t want to do it. I think I am very creative to this very day, but you wouldn’t see me put much of that into my work. (Though to be fair, it is kind of hard to be creative with insurance.)
I remember making up creative sentences, that were usually somewhat “naughty”, or “insulting”, like the time I had to use the word oh, “fireman” in a sentence in third grade-I think I wrote, “The fireman is retarded.” I remember getting marked down and reprimanded for that.
My son got his sentences handed back to him for not following the directions, because he used multiple vocabulary words in one (complete, grammatically correct, albeit complex) sentence which did indeed demonstrate the meaning of each word. That way, he only had to write four sentences for the 20 words. I don’t remember his exact sentences, but they were something like:
Joe, the **cynical **fireman, theorized that the **multitude **of alarms rung to the station during English class was a **symptom **of the students’ boredom with writing vocabulary sentences.
I told him he was brilliant, far smarter than his teachers, and once he showed me all his work, I helped him write stupid sentences for his teacher, who then gave him credit.
As an obnoxiously giften youngster I did not give the tiniest particle of damn what my teachers thought about me or my work. With a few exceptions of course.
Again, somebody’s squandering something but I am rather bemused that you continue to believe that your students suffer from some character flaw because they put about as much effort into their work as was put into designing the assignment.
I agree with you on this, but be sure to temper such advice from time to time with a reminder that sometimes you just have to play along with those in authority to avoid creating bigger problems. Because, life just works that way.
But if you get the assignment over with as quickly as possible, then you have more time to daydream and think about things you enjoy thinking about, rather than spending that time thinking about the assignment. Also, a lot of creative and smart kids resent anything they see as “busy work”, and most people will put the minimum possible effort into any task they resent having to do.
This could not be more true in the case of my son (7) who as part of his homework is required to write in his daily journal at least 3 sentences about what he learned that day in school. Left to his own devices he’d write the same three sentences daily:
Today I learned about ___________.
It was interesting.
I had fun.
:smack:
I’m having a devil of a time trying to express to him the importance of writing down his thoughts and ideas in a more interesting and creative way but I’m up against a 7 year old’s mind that prefers to think about everything that is Star Wars and Gamecube related, almost to the exclusion of everything else. So I try to encourage him to write about that. Still, he’d rather daydream and talk about it than focus on writing in any more descriptive terms than the above three phrases.
My daughter (10), on the other hand, loves to write creatively and has since she was about my son’s age. She creates stories almost daily out of a collection of things she’s read, watched on TV, talked with friends about or overheard in a conversation while walking through a mall. Everything is fodder for story writing.
So what’s my point here? Dunno really. Except that I agree with the idea that writing for an assignment is almost always less interesting than being given free reign to pick an idea and roll with it. On the other hand, teaching kids to channel their imagination within certain bounds, like a specific assigned topic, does require them to try to be more creative within the limited scope they are given to work with. I think it also teaches them to recognize what interests them and what doesn’t. Sometimes what doesn’t interest them is creative writing.
And the OP makes an interesting point. It does seem to me that it’s adults that are the more imaginative.
If I hadn’t tempered, I’d have told him, “You’re smart the teachers are stupid, I’m going down right now to give Mrs. Smith a piece of my mind, goddammit!” Rather, I said, “You’re really smart to have figured that out. I’m sorry your teacher won’t accept it, I think that’s pretty dumb of her. But you gotta play the game sometimes to get the grade. Tell you what, I’ll help you think of some sentences that will keep her happy, but let’s show these good ones to Dad tonight, and lets the both of us send a polite note to your teacher telling her why we think she should reconsider her policy, OK?”
