Learning to Create

One of the rules of good parenting seems to be to allow oneself to be interrupted.  I am not, of course, talking about permitting older children to blatantly interpose their questions and comments into the middle of adult conversations; rather, I am thinking of those moments in the day when one is in the middle of some household task—washing, weeding, folding, cleaning, cooking—and is asked to “Build somefing” or “Draw somefing.”  Sometimes it may be good for a child to learn to wait; but sometimes it is good to be a child with the child.

I recently realized, though, that while these requests are frequently vague invitations to companionship (make “somfing”), I rarely succumb to producing an offering of my own brain.  I do not, in other words, offer to draw a train, a car, or an airplane, or indeed any specific thing.  Rather, I say, “Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it.”

I suppose the impulse was born of the tired creativity of a creative writer who needs some part of life to be mere direction-following.  It was certainly not intended to be a way of ensuring that the budding young artiste gets exactly what he or she wants.  But I realized recently that it had an unintended side effect.  Oftentimes, after hearing the magic words (“Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it”), Young Monet will stand and contemplate for as long as a minute.  What does he want?  Then, usually, eventually he comes up with it, and it is drawn, to be further embellished with strokes from his own marker or chalk.

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It struck me the other day that this is The Problem with higher education.  (I know it is as riddled with The Problems as a Swiss cheese with holes, but hear me out.)  For two years I taught Freshman composition at a moderately-sized university attended by above-average students.  My job was to teach them how to write.  Their job at the university, as far as they were concerned, was to get a diploma so they could get a job.  Usually after a day or so I had managed to convince the doubtful that learning to write was an important part of their twofold goal, so they were at least willing to try to succeed in my class.

Most of them didn’t.  I was not an exceptionally difficult instructor.  Nor am I willing to blame our materials, for though there were certain base level requirements that instructors were supposed to follow, we had a fair amount of leeway to tailor the class to our ideas of what would work.  Nothing did.  Oh, we all had splendid successes with a student here or there, and frequently small successes with the majority of our students.  But they could hardly be said, upon leaving the one-semester course, to be writers, let alone good writers.

Without a doubt, the single greatest issue was their inability to come up with stuff.  They simply had no ideas.  No matter how creative the prompt or assignment given to them, and no matter how interested they were in it, it failed to spark material of their own.  (The sole exception in my experience was a paper I gave instructing the students to write about some change in their childhood, such as moving, and explain the causes for it.  Well over a third of my students went with “moving,” and the cause was “divorce.”  Those papers could tell a sad story all of their own.)

Nor was the students’ inability to come up with ideas merely a benign problem.  All sorts of things are blamed for plagiarism: lack of time, lack of understanding of what constitutes academic dishonesty, lack of moral fiber.  In my experience—and, I think, that of most of the instructors I knew, including instructors in other subjects—the greatest cause is the student’s inability to have an idea of his own.  Lack of time may sometimes be the immediate cause, but even when that is the pressure-builder, it is usually not because the student cannot physically write the paper fast enough to turn something in, but because he cannot conceive of himself creating ideas fast enough.

Creating ideas is hard.  Tell me what you want, and I’ll draw it.

…

…

…

“A mowble home.”

“A mobile home?”

“OK.”

So we draw a mobile home.

Of course, Young Monet only knows about those from books or parents anyway: it is not as if he is creating the concept of “mobile home” de novo.  But he is creating an idea in the moment of what he wants to draw right now, by searching through his memories and deciding what should be produced from this blue chalk on this patch of concrete this morning … All creativity is combining what we already know.  The magic lies in the combinations.

But to learn to make those combinations, to tap what we know so as to make something quasi de novo, is a long and difficult process.  And I can only guess that most students, at least the students I saw as college Freshman, aren’t being put through the process often enough or early enough or consistently enough.

Maybe the fault is not enough free play, and too much structured learning.  Maybe it’s helicopter parents and teachers.  Maybe it’s video games and social media.  Maybe it’s an all-of-the-above cocktail.  Regardless, the solution seems clear.

Let the kids (at least partly) figure it out.  Let them be a little bored.  Don’t abandon them to their picture-less fate, of course (not if you want them to grow up human, anyway).  But do let them figure out how to fill the somefing-hole in their brains.  If they aren’t learning how to do it at two, how on earth will they learn to do it at twenty?