Creative: Am I the one?

“Creativity” – I googled this term and found these 7 possible ways through which we can make our children creative.

• Make Children Question Things. ...
• Provide Opportunities to Express Their Intelligence. ...
• Teach Them Multiple Ways to Solve Every Problem.
• Trigger Their Curiosity.
• Engage Them With Activity Boxes.
• Encourage Children to Read for Pleasure.
• Give Them Free Time & Space.

And it’s a challenge in front of the entire education community to adopt the above methods excellently and make our kids the new age – Picasso, Einstein or Shakespeare. We have enough thoughts. Let’s look at it retrospectively.

Fear kills creativity

The real reason why we don’t’ move creatively ahead always is fear. People are afraid that they don’t have the talent, or they’ll be rejected, judged, insulted, criticised or ignored. They have tumbling piles of fear. 

• Abundance starts with appreciation and a feeling of being accepted by the community. Including appreciation and acceptance in our methodologies can tap the hidden potential in our children.

The Art of making mistakes

We keep instilling this very idea in the minds of our children that they have to be right, and by the time they become adults, they lose their capacity of committing mistakes. They become frightened of being wrong. We stigmatize mistakes. By this, we are educating people out of their capacities.

• Allow mistakes to happen in a classroom – Children are not frightened of being wrong. They are not frightened of making mistakes. 

In the words of Picasso -All children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up.

I believe passionately that we don’t grow into creativity; we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out of it. Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. 

Story: A small incident from a grade 2 drawing class gave me a clear picture of confidence taking the shape of creativity.

A girl was drawing something in a class, and the teacher asked – What are you drawing?

The girl said I am drawing a picture of god. 

The teacher asked, but nobody knows what god looks like.

The girl answered - “They will in a minute.”

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes and grow.

Nibbrati Rathore is an educator at the Gyanshree School, Noida

She is a Life Members and volunteer on the National Training Team of Learning Forward India.

You can join Learning Forward, find out more at 

www.SchoolEducation.com.

Failures are the stepping stones to success - Nikita Rajpurohit

Always remember the obstacles which you face or the failures are the stepping stones to success. It is from those mistakes which makes us a better person and strive hard to our dream destination. Our mistakes teach us what went wrong and how to correct it. Each and every human has come across a phase in their life which they thought was their hardest part of their life. However, this particular phase taught them to become bigger and better. Time and experience have proved to be the best teachers they can be. Every wrong or bad decision we take has a life lesson that we learn. Time is a way of telling how far you have come. Experience is a way of telling how strong you have become. We need to learn from the mistakes that we make. In this wake, we make a stronger version of ourselves that later becomes indestructible. Only from a proper experience phase of your life, you learn how to judge anything and everything in an unbiased manner. A fraction of us has to fall a couple of times on the same stone before they learn that particular lesson. Knowledge is wisdom. Knowledge is everything. The knowledge you have helps you to make a good or bad judgement of the current situations.

Einstein once mentioned, “Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.” We can completely agree with this great mathematician’s statement. It is the new experience and new exposures that teach you new things. With every new fall, you learn something new. If you are not ready to let yourself fall, then you cannot teach yourself anything new. If you do not do that, you will continue to have bad experiences and it becomes a loop from which you can never get out. This leads to denial, losing self-confidence and blaming others for your experiences. You enter into that stage of your life where you focus only on the negative impacts happening to you. Learning from your mistakes is not easy. Nobody said it was simple. But once you do, you can trust yourself. You believe that you have the power to do anything.

You grow internally and externally when you realize your mistakes. You learn how to prevent the same mistakes from happening again. Some of our mistakes can bring us down and prove to be very dangerous. It may run us into a trap that seems to eat you up. Regardless of the mistake you made, you have to carefully observe and analyze the situation and take the necessary steps. We all are humans. We make mistakes. But it is these mistakes that teach us. So keep learning from your mistakes.

Nikita Rajpurohit <nra@fabindiaschools.in> The Fabindia School