Creativity and the Common Core

This month on Interesting Nonfiction for Kids the topic has been the Common Core Curriculum.The posts have been varied and informative – an invaluable resource for educators.

Everyone has been talking about the Common Core, from my eight-grade son’s Language Arts teacher to Arne Duncan to Matt Damon. When I mentioned to my husband that for this month I had to write something about the Common Core, he had no clue to what I was talking about, though that term was thrown to us the entire Back-To-School night.

President Obama said in a July 2009 speech,
“You get to decide what comes next. You get to choose where change will take us, because the future does not belong to those who gather armies on a field of battle or bury missiles in the ground; the future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create. That is the source of power in this century. And given all that has happened in your two decades on Earth, just imagine what you can create in the years to come.”
The much-quoted portion of that speech is the line, “the future belongs to young people with an education and the imagination to create.” The government through Common Core is trying to address the “young people with an education” issue, but we seem to be missing half of that equation – imagination to create.

For your Friday entertainment, I’ll leave you with this wonderful TED talk by Sir Kenneth Robinson. He says all I would like to write about creativity, schools and our students, but about 1,000% better. Whether you have already seen this or not, it’s always aspirational and timely. Our challenge is to now implement creativity in the classroom.
The ideas of our students are the future.