By Eric le Roy
Content 18 + My Mexican-American friend Irma Carballo is a dual language (Spanish and English) educator (teacher and coach) at elementary schools in a small district on the Tex-Mex border near the Gulf of Mexico. We meet online twice a week at 6am my time and 10pm the previous day her time. In other words, my Wednesday morning is her Tuesday night.
This morning we discussed creativity and how teachers can encourage it. In my usual pissed-off way, I said that ‘creativity’ is something educators do a lot of chattering about (if you want to really get down with it, just go to TedTalks and start scrolling, using ‘student creativity’ – or something similar – as your key), but in fact don’t do much to stimulate a workable process with real goals in mind. Nor is this always the fault of teachers, many of whom are either young and open-minded or old and open-minded (the quality doesn’t have to fade with age, as many seem to believe). They do their best.
So do a lot of police officers and politicians when they are just getting started. They want to change the way things are done, and they set out with uncorrupted visions. A few run the gauntlet and keep the faith. The majority just become ‘systemized’ the same as children-immigrants to the US soon become ‘Americanized’. When this happens in schools, teachers start going through the motions – just trying to survive the day and head home to air out the mental laundry of the classroom before tackling the slagheap of homework they have to mark.
Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? The fact is, teaching is exciting if done the right way and offered to hungry minds. Now don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying I have the answers, but I do know what works for me and therefore what I intend to keep on doing.
But first I want to return to Irma Carballo and her interesting point in today’s meeting. She said that teachers model the minds of their students, and by this she didn’t mean to act as ‘role models’, which is one of the stock phrases Americans always use when they talk about what adults ought to do and be. No, what I took her to be suggesting is that the human brain is in some ways like a hunk of clay which can be shaped in a lot of different ways according to the goal of the hands (metaphor for ‘thoughts’, ideas, agendas, ideologies, etc) that are molding them.
I was impressed, and, as is, I hope, a strength in me, I started thinking by association to my history classes. (In addition to expository writing, I teach World History to Chinese students.) The course always starts with the Fertile Crescent: Babylon, Sumer, Assyria, and so on. Before long we get to the part where they begin to figure out how to make written documents. The Egyptians used hieroglyphics – carving something into a hard surface, impossible to change once engraved or inscribed – while the Sumerians came up with a form of writing we now refer to as cuneiform (the Sumerians themselves must have had a different name for it), which meant using damp clay to write on, which then left them two options: bake the tablet into final, everlasting form, or dump a pitcher of water over the clay document, knead it back and forth like pizza dough, and simply start again. I think this was a better idea than the Egyptian way, but then again it was the Egyptians who invented papyrus. In China, I guess they were making similar progress, but only they were aware of it.
So I decided that ‘modeling’ the brain was like making a tablet – temporary or permanent – using clay and cuneiform. When I try to blend this idea in with my own views on ‘creativity’, I come to some conclusions that represent an indictment of not only the school system but the whole enchilada of modern corporate life, of which academia is a member in good standing no matter how subversive it tries to trick us into believing.
Creativity. Creativity. What do we mean by it? What do teachers and administrators mean by it and how do students from elementary on up into their teens interpret the message? To me it’s like being invited somewhere and told to help yourself, but everything you pick up to eat the host grabs and weighs on a set of scales to see how many ‘grams’ it is. In other words, ‘creativity’ is encouraged as long as it's not too creative and thus subversive and threatening. Nor do I mean – and let’s get this straight – totally unchained, unrestrained forays into the making of mud pies and the slinging of shit-laced brownies around the room, and telling every lazy blockhead that their crap is Wonderful and Interesting and CREATIVE.
That’s the mistake that – mostly liberal – teachers make. They think that creativity is the rejection of longstanding principles of discipline and hard work. Every decent, honest artist (excluding of course the ‘modern art’ frauds that give art a bad name) understands that (1) the polished product (if not carried too far thus draining it of its original energy) is better than the rough draft or first application of paint, etc. ; (2) ‘truth’ is in the carefully chosen details that ‘show’ rather than ‘tell’ or, worse, ‘explain’ the artist’s intentions; (3) the active voice (instead of the passive) and the concrete example are better than a lot of abstraction and abstruse blah-blah-blah; (4) simplicity is not ‘simple’; and (5) the ultimate goal is to communicate, not obfuscate.
So in the end, a truly creative work of art, architecture, or construction of bridges, buildings and airplanes is a harmony of “inspiration and perspiration” as, I think, Thomas Edison is supposed to have said (although what I was told that it was only 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration – and this version I will settle for).
But so much for my theories on art. Let’s talk about the true intentions of the educators spawned by The System. In schools, increasingly, they are told to forget about stimulating the minds of their students and teaching them to think critically (which is what living meaningly is really about); instead, their mission is Exam Preparation. Forget the nonsense about making their classes interesting (History is a prime example and so is Literature, when it is actually taught these days); nope, the idea is to cram as much information into the callow skulls of the diminutive scholars as humanly possible and then get them to regurgitate it on the next Big Exam so that there will be room for the new shovelful of academic manure Starting on Monday. “So Listen Up, Everybody!”
I teach Russians and Chinese, and I can tell you that their so-called academic lives are nothing but exams, exams, and more exams. The Chinese are the worst of all – and the Very Very Worst are Chinese parents. These slave drivers remind me of what happens to youthful tennis prodigies when Mom and Dad see the U.S. Open championship as the only acceptable outcome for their 8-year-old Wunderkind and ride them into the ground in pursuit of it, often making them hate tennis in the process. The amazing thing is how completely the Chinese kids buy into it, rarely complaining. It’s lock-step; the communist collective culture expects no less.
Success is usually achieved but at a cost. And for me the cost is not the anxiety and exhaustion they must feel – although there is a surplus of that – but the view I have that, whatever they are receiving, it is not really an education. Rather they become like some sort of human database. I could give the example of someone (let’s stick with Chinese here) who, by dint of hours upon hours of practice, learns to play Chopin or Rachmaninoff flawlessly in terms of technique, but when you listen you do not hear Chopin or Rachmaninoff; what you hear are piano keys playing the notes of a music composition. The noise is correct; the soul is missing.
Ok, maybe that’s partially cultural, and when they play Chinese music they capture its essence, but I could also make the same point with regard to the literature their parents demand they read – I’m talking about stuff way over their heads, but the parents insist. They want to be able to say that their child ‘read’ this or that book, whether they actually understood any of it or not. Silly nonsense like the setting of time and place count for nothing. Why try to understand Jim Crow racism of the 1930s in the American South or Huck Finn’s world of riverboats and runaway slaves along the Missouri River – or Shakespeare’s actual life and times – when the idea is just to plow through the text so you can say you did it. “Where are the cliffnotes?” What does ChatGPT have to say about this?” Who needs to read all this fucking bullshit; Where are the Answers????
You would think it gets better once you reach graduate school if indeed that is the prescribed destination. In fact it gets worse. I’ve been through the mill, so I am qualified to put in my two cents worth. Feel free to disagree.
OK, I write books. Basically they are essay-narratives full of stories that pertain to the life I have lived. And it has been a tumultuous life. I’m ashamed of some of it, but I never forgot to pick up a few good stories, lived personally or related by others. I write not because I necessarily want to but because I have to. It is my nature, my mission, my way of talking to ‘God’, and my way of making an agreement with Death based on what I have met and known in Life.
I love what I do, and a good piece of poetry can still bring me to tears at a time of life when very little else can. When I show this stuff to my students – I mean when I ‘share’ a work of literature or even a painting with my ‘proteges’, I hope to convey to them an appreciation both for the craftsmanship and the soul in the art. I can talk about technique all day, but I want them to see beyond that.
When I started graduate school a long time ago, I wanted and expected the same things from my august professors and their anticipated profundities. I don’t mean that we were supposed to read an excerpt from Hamlet or ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” or Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and start break dancing or writhing around in the aisle like saints in a pentecostal church. But I guess I mean that we should have spent more time thinking about the beauty of the work and discussing its implications on a more inspired level, both imagined and experiential.
What I got instead were professors who seemed duty-bound to turn what we were doing into as much of a Physical Science regime as possible. We analyzed the stuff as in a biology lab dissecting one frog after the other. It was all Barthes and Derrida. ‘Deconstructing the text for endless misreadings based on the ‘invagination’ (YES!) of language.” Like that. I have never been so goddamned bored in my whole fucking life.
It was enough to make you Hate literature. But the worst was still to come. That arrived in the form of the ‘academic’ essays we had to write. Creativity? Bollocks to that, we did that back in elementary school, remember? The Creativity Game. “Don’t you recall finger painting in art class? Yodeling with words to make poems?” – cried the Professors of Immensities.
In academic writing the passive voice is preferred, an endless stack of ‘secondary sources’ absolutely mandatory, no phrasal verbs, personal pronouns, anecdotes, ungainly unacademic metaphors, no authorial personality, nothing the least bit experimental or ‘whimsical – no, just the arch, dry, no-nonsense and definitely scientific dissection of work that, I swear, seemed beautiful once Before it was inundated with professorial questions about alliteration, anaphora, enjambment, caesura, trochaic rhymes, dactyls and anapests and spondees. After imbibing all that, I needed to guzzle something stronger.
I have a Chinese student who goes to university in England. She is in the School of Education, and some of you might imagine what that amounts to: A lot of twenty page articles written by academics for fellow academics and published in strictly academic journals because nobody else would read any of it aside from, you guessed it, academics – or students who have no choice. Most of these stilted marathons, the ‘text’ interrupted only by various charts and graphs, are making hard work of rather simple points. Another consistent element among these tenure seeking professors is that whatever the current problems in the University, you can bet that ‘colonialism’ and the limitless (racist and sexist) transgressions of white men are at the root of it. And this is what the professors, now mostly women and people of color, aim to put a stop to.
I play the game because I’ve been through it before and know what to do and also for my student’s well being, but you know what they said about Flaubert? In Madame Bovary he had to show the ultimate sensitivity towards bourgeois characters he actually hated, and his solution was to write stuff he couldn’t publish in which Emma and Company came to ends so savage that the Brothers Grimm would have been titillated. Then, thus medicated, he could return to the task in relative calm and leave his true thoughts in the drawer.
I am not saying that it’s always like that. It would be stupid and unfair to do so. In fact, back in the days before the internet, we all used to have to go up to the ‘stacks’ to find our material, and I would grab about four or five books on the subject at hand and skim through them. I had a practiced technique: I would open the book in several different places near the beginning, middle, and end, and skim through a page or two. If I found the book unreadable, back on the shelf it would go. It usually took me four or five tries before I found someone who knew every bit as much as the others but who could actually write in such a way as to not turn me into a mumbling maniac. THAT person would be the main-most contributor to my essay, and the rest would just be filtered in, a quote here, a paraphrase there, to make the bibliography respectable and seem like I’d read the whole pile.
So, to wrap this up, I take to heart what Irma Carballo said about ‘modeling’ our students’ brains. From finger painting to 5000 word academic essays, the idea of being ‘creative’ is championed when in reality the harness and halter have been fitted to us, made of elastic so it can expand as we expand, allowing for more data to be crammed in.
Thus programmed, the chore (lifelong as it turns out) is to play the game, excel on the exam, and look serious. Look the part of the solemn yet sensitive (of course) professor once you get there, if you do. Publish so as not to ‘perish’.
Maybe try your luck at writing a poem yourself, and when you hit the wall and realize you can’t do it because you never really tried – or long ago agreed with those whose mission was to blunt what they pretended to espouse – put away your scribbling and go back to your 20-pager about the endless intricacies of sonnets and villanelles and alexandrine couplets. That’s all they ever expected of you anyway.
