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.