Oh how I wish I had the time to write more fiction. As I’ve grown older I have been able to see my writing transform into something amazing, learning grammatically correct phrases and proper chronology as I’ve gone along. I’ve had many opportunities to be flexible with my writing through the years, most recently being a creative writing class I took last semester (special shout out to Professor Holder for encouraging me to keep writing). Yet, throughout high school we received limited chances to be creative in our writing abilities, or any creative abilities, really.
Now I know, we all have curriculum material we have to cover and there’s only so much time in a school year, but why can’t we incorporate more creativity in our writing? In fact, why not across the board? Why can’t we be more creative in assessing our students with projects pertaining to their special strengths, such as an art sculpture of an animal cell in science, maintaining finances in math accounting or perhaps making a mixtape to the Civil War era using music we have out there today? Have students be a personal trainer for a made up person in gym class and let the explain their fitness plans for that person or create a vacation trip to a foreign country in a foreign language class.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there are teachers out there that are already trying to incorporate creativity into their classrooms rather than using tests as large assessments. But, in my own opinion, there are either not enough assignments like that throughout the year or there are simply not enough teachers using this method of assessment. We all know that tests raise stress levels dramatically, so why would we want to do that to our students? Why not assign a project of the student’s choice at the start of the new unit, have specific areas that you want each student to take away from the unit (which could easily and that way they have a longer amount of time working on their assessments and they can create something that they are proud of.
I have a few specific instances from high school that I can remember having a choice in the way a project would come out and each project was fun for me and my classmates. It was a lot of fun to not only think of how we were going to make our projects and actually build them up into what we envisioned, but it was enjoyable to share our projects together as a class.
One assignment comes into my head first when I think about which classes had me doing creative assignments, and that’s my U.S. History II class in junior year of high school. Most of our assessments in that class all year were tests, and to be honest I don’t remember much of what were on those tests. But, there was one assignment towards the end of the year where we would be doing a creative writing assignment for the unit we were on, which if I remember correctly was the 1950's - early 1960's time period. We could pick any event that we wanted to from this time period to write about and build a story from a historical event that took place, but we had to be in that time frame. I decided to focus on the space race, even though that went into the late 1960's. Because of this, I chose a specific event from the space race and settled on when the United States first put a monkey out into space. I loved writing my story, and I remember naming my story “Space and Banana Pellets,” a title to which my teacher took a special liking to.
That same year in English we were reading The Great Gatsby and as an assessment we were told that we had to come up with our own project that could be absolutely anything we wanted it to be (so long as we covered certain points of the novel). At first we were confused on exactly what she was looking for and how she wanted us to do our projects, practically begging her to give us an example of a project so we could see what her expectations were, but she wouldn’t allow it and she had us come up with our own way of summarizing Gatsby. For this assignment, after days of being clueless how I would make my project, I started the string some pearls onto some fishing line and made a pearl necklace, out of blue and white different sized pearls. One of my hobbies is to make my own jewelry, so I might as well make it so that it would be something I would wear after this project was over (which I have done and I still have it today).
Originally this article was going to focus on creative writing specifically and how creative writing can be the pathway to escaping our everyday lives. But as I sat here and thought about how much creative writing we did in K-12, it kind of hit me that we didn’t do much creativity in any of our classes at all, almost as if we weren’t allowed. Labs and tests and papers can be so monotonous and we all get so sick of doing them as I’m sure teachers get so sick of reading the same essay 150 or more times over and over again.
