KILLING CREATIVITY, ADHD, SOUL SALSA, BILLY GRAHAM

WHILE AT THE "Y" TODAY, I viewed "How Schools Kill Creativity".  About 3 minutes into the video there is a story about a teacher giving her students a drawing assignment. She asked one kid what she was going to draw. The kid said "I'm going to draw a picture of God".  But the teacher said, "No one knows what God looks like".  The kid responded, "They will in a minute!"  This story set the tone for a really interesting presentation.  If you have 20 minutes, click HERE to view this TED Talk.  If you don't have time you may want to think about these comments that were shared by Sir Ken Robinson:

• If you’re not prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with anything original.

• Creativity is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status.

• I believe this passionately: that we don’t grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. 

ALBERT EINSTEIN said “Everybody is a genius, but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.”  I thought about this while talking to a friend today, who told me that they were concerned their daughter may have ADHD.  They talked to her teacher and the teacher said not to worry - since she has about 10 kids in her class with the same disorder. Really?  Could it be that their kid is simply different than some of the other kids?  I don't pretend to know but it was interesting that I found another TED talk today, this one called "The Myth of Average". The speaker (a high school dropout turned Harvard faculty) talked about how a simple new way of thinking helps nurture individual potential. He said if we design classrooms for the average student, no one wins.  And some really special kids lose. Click HERE to view this video. 

SOUL SALSA by Leonard Sweet is a the top of my reading pile these days.  In chapter 5 he emphasized the importance of being a lifelong learner.  He referred to his friend Jansen, who read everything he could get his hands on, sometimes more than once.  "He aerated his mind with the complete works of St. Augustine at least ten times.  Jansen died my favorite death.  He died after contracting a disease from the dust of old books."

When describing seniors, Sweet describes milestones in memory loss; "first you forget names, then you forget faces, then you forget to pull your zipper up, then you forget to pull your zipper down" 

In the chapter "Make A Moment" Sweet says, I want to age like Billy Graham has aged.  With every passing year he has gotten better, more forgiving, more loving, more global, more grand.  In an interview late in the 1990's a Parkinson-afflicted Graham demonstrated how optimal our state of spiritual functioning can be when our bodies are at their least optimal.  Graham said, "I believe the overwhelming message is the grace and the love and the mercy of God, and that's what I emphasize a lot more than I did in the earlier years.  I think the Lord just gradually changed me as I studied the scriptures.  I began to see how much of the emphasis is on God's love and mercy and grace.  I'm not going to heaven because I'm good. (That was the Pharisee's mistake).  I'm not going to heaven because I preached to a lot of people (That is a mistake a lot of preachers make).  I'm going to heaven because of God's grace and mercy in Christ at the cross.  And that's a free gift from God to me."