Creatvity and Play

My childhood experiences were many and varied. Making half my childhood memories on the southside of Saint Petersburg and the other on the Southside of Chicago provided for a diversity of experiences. Play was an important part of my life. Internet and T.V. were not allowed in my house the way they are in large doses in other homes. We were sent outside, in the heat, in the snow, sometimes in the rain. In Chicago I made sprinkler memories, walks around the block memories, block party memories, dancing in the basement memories. Having a younger brother and sister made for good games of hide-and-go-seek in my grandmother's big house in North Chicago. In Saint Petersburg, my play landscape was characterized by Easy Bake Ovens, buliding "fortresses" out of chairs, blankets and pillows in the middle of my sister's bedroom, playing in the "jungle" (the plot of banana plants in the middle of my backyard) and hanging out outside in the heat.

Play was extremely important in the formation of my early ideas of life. Playtime was time to explore the world and form my own ideas about it based on how I saw things. It was time to vent, to blow off steam, to get away from my parents and to be whoever I wanted to be at the time. "Simulation games" like Easy Bake Ovens, toy cash registers, vacuums, refrigerators and grocery stores parlayed into real-world application of crucial life skills.

Play is a necessary part of the learning/educational process. Play is most key in the earlier days, when the brain of a child is still in the early stages of its development. However, and this goes along with the points that Sir Ken Robinson made in the video, play is still important throughout the learning process and beyond. "We start to educate children progressively from the waste up, then we focus on their heads." This rings true in classrooms across America. I absolutely LOVED the story he told about the Jillian the dancer.

"It was great, I walked into a room and it was full of people like me."

I loved this quote and it illustrates how we as educators must stop ignoring the other parts of the human body. As Sir Ken Robinson pointed out we must stop "educating kids out of their creative capacities." "Education [] is shifting beneath our feet." Now a Masters degree is necessary where before a Bachelors degree would suffice, and a Doctorate for a Masters...We are going to have to start reshaping/rethinking our ideas of education and what it means/will mean in the next 10-25years.

"We are educating for a future we have little to no concept of."