Sometimes when the boys want to play cars, build with blocks, create train lines, or make up a game . . . I think I look at them like a deer in headlights.
My mind goes blank. My mouth feels like cotton. And I am just . . .
CLUELESS.
Clueless as to how to create. How do I pull these ideas out of nowhere? Surely if a 5 year old can do this, I can.
Right?
I’m only 17 pages into a book* about teaching your child to think and I have already realized that I’m not sure that I know how to think. We think that thinking is one thing, but it really is something else. Thinking is knowing about a lot of stuff right?
“Many highly intelligent people often take up a view on a subject and then use their intelligence to defend that view. Since they can defend the view very well they never see any need to explore the subject or listen to alternative views. This is poor thinking and is part of the ‘intelligence trap”.”
School often comprises work-sheets, textbooks, and whiteboards. You see the information and then you react to it, hence the term reactive thinking as opposed to pro-active thinking. Additionally, we go throughout school solving problems . . . being critical thinkers. This seems good but . . . .
Don’t we need new ideas?
Some people look at me and think I am so creative. I look at my painter friends, Sarah and Casey, and think that they are so creative. Give them paint and they weave colors together on canvas and voila they have created something I want to hang in my home (hint hint).
Author Edward de Bono writes,
“We have considered creative thinking to be a mystical gift that some people have and others do not have. There is nothing that can be done except to foster the creative gift in those who seem to have it.”
So . . . I’m thinking that there is some hope for me.
I can bring the magical gift back.
I’m going to work at re-learning how to think.
* I didn’t want you to think that I was writing a review. But the book that I am reading right now on my own free time is called, Teach Your Child How To Think by Edward de Bono.
