I glanced over the contents of the screen for about the fifth time and triple checked the provided checklist. My heart raced and my fingers trembled as I directed the mouse to the “Submit” button. Click! and just like that my hard work sailed off into cyberspace. After months contemplating college choices,listing top choices and further narrowing that list down, the process was ...simply ...over.

The college admissions process is a daunting one, and with reminders everywhere from posters in the school hallways to episodes of Gossip Girl, it also proves to be quite inescapable. While we might not all be shoo-ins for the top school as are these Upper East Side characters, we can imagine it’d be nice to have an insider’s look at the college admissions process.

I started The Admissions of Linda, with that intention, to give fellow and future college applicants my perspective on the college applications process. When I was accepted to my first choice college via early decision, the plans for my blog were suspended, indefintely until I could figure out what to do next. I brainstormed throughout my holiday break, until the idea came to me: a collaborative blog of about 5 students as they journeyed through the admissions process and entered their freshman year at their respective colleges and universities.

While my blogging skills aren’t as seasoned as they could be, I am looking forward to embarking on this journey and working on this project with willing and able fellow applicants as the year continues.

At my high school there is a lot of focus on college. It is expected that almost everyone in my class will attend some sort of four-year college, and there are visits every week from universities, trying to gain applicants. So much of what we juniors do is underlined by the fact that the work we do this year, the grades we get this year, the effort we put into this year, will be what universities look at when deciding our future. Yes, it’s a lot of pressure. But that’s not the part that gives me pause.

Activities.

What did I do this summer? For the most part, I stayed home. I started five knitting projects and almost finished three of them. I visited my local library and read a bit. I spent a weekend with my extended family in the Pocono mountains. I relaxed and had fun.

Then I compare that with an article my father showed me from the Philadelphia Inquirer. This article talked about the rising trend of exotic summer vacations for teens, often involving community service opportunities. One girl spent three weeks in Rwanda, advocating for the children of the genocide. Another teen spent her summer in Tanzania, building a house for the local schoolteacher. Someone else spent time in Costa Rica, constructing a water tower. Reading through college handouts, I can’t help but notice that the students they choose to profile have almost always saved the world in one way or another.

This is the point where I tilt my head and sigh. Because, quite frankly, I don’t want to save the world.

Here’s my point: students should be able to participate in what they are genuinely interested in, and forget about whatever looks good on an application. Passion looks good on an application. So I’ll go get some of that, and forget about a humanitarian mission to Africa, because I’m just not interested. My summer this year? I’ll conjugate some verbs, learn some fancy purls, and pick up some books from the library. Oh– and volunteer at Habitat for Humanity. Hey, what’s a junior to do?

Picture: one world from genista

This entry is cross-posted from my personal blog. Please direct your responses there.

What is creativity? I doubt many people, including teachers, could give you a good definition. In simplest terms, it is the ability to create. However, I like to use a more specific definition:

Creativity is the ability to transcend traditional ideas, rules, patterns, relationships, or the like, and to create meaningful new ideas, forms, methods, interpretations, etc.

Above: Leonardo da Vinci was a master of mixing creativity and art.

The key to creativity is the ability and act of transcending tradition. Using this definition, I think creativity is exceptionally rare in schools. Students are almost never asked to transcend tradition and think outside the box. In fact, doing so is punished. This rarity arises from a confusion about what creativity really is.

If you were to ask most teachers or administrators, you would hear a distinctly different story. Most will says their schools/classrooms stimulate and “unlock” creativityUnlocking creativity is a scary proposition in and of itself. Who locked it up in the first place?. Doing a word search on school mission statements will turn up an inordinate number of references to creativity. Someone should replace 99% of those occurrences with the word “art.”

What many school officials and teachers mean by creativity is really art. Art is all about practice and method. Art is about the perfection of technique. Art is about applying techniques rigorously in pursuit of a goal. In short, art is studied action; artificiality in behavior.

Painting yet another landscape is art, and neither is solving a mathematical equation. Both of them involve substantial practice and application of traditional rules.In many ways, art is very similar to science. Make no mistake: both can be very difficult. The level of effort it takes to perfect any art is astounding. However, this is distinct from creativity. Remember, creativity is all about transcending tradition. In many ways, creativity and art are polar opposites.

Actually, creativity and art are not so much polar opposites as two sides of the same coin.Sick of the casual metaphors yet? Creativity is used to think of new ideas and sources of ideas. Art is used to translate those ideas into presentable forms. To create a brilliant work, both creativity and art must be used.

In many ways, schools fail to recognize this. Art is constantly drilled in schools: when not directly transferring content, teachers often focus on teaching new skillsMost skills are really just a combination of practice and knowledge of method, similar to art.. However, very little attention is paid to the application of those skills in novel ways. Writing thousands of 5-paragraph essays will give you perfect form and will make you a very precise writer, but it will not make you a great and innovative one. Translating notes into a science fair board will, optimally, teach art to a degree. However, none of these things will teach creativity. When schools talk about their wealth of creativity, they usually mean art.

To a certain degree, I do not think creativity can be taught. The very nature of it makes creativity unteachable—you cannot teach someone to positively ignore convention, since in doing so they would simply be internalizing another rule. However, creativity can be practiced. Constantly making new ideas teaches you to see which work and which will not. Searching for pattens helps you to see patterns faster in the future. Luckily, art can be taught—and it should be taught. Without art, nobody will respect your creativity. The point is, creativity can be practiced but not taught.

Above: A great example of tilt-shift photography from Vincent Laforet.

The next time you brag about how much creativity you foster, ask yourself if you really mean art.

The answers are simple: Some of them have gone off to college, some have subtly retreated into a period of self growth, some have moved on with their lives.

The fact that teachers consistently remain where students don’t is painfully obvious. It’s natural that students move on and stop caring extrinsically about their grade in English or how to integrate blogging with their classroom. They’re able to blog and find their own life teachers for themselves.

Students come into the edublogosphere and then they leave it just as quickly.

So do students belong in the teacher eat teacher world of the edublogosphere? Can you really trust us to care for long enough?

I challenge you to show me proof. Send me links and email me with students you think are passionate leaders and doers. Students, if you’re reading this, speak up. Use this as your megaphone and tell the edublogosphere how you honestly feel.

Until then, this is an open pulpit waiting for the right voices.

Can a tragedy lead us to a condition in which the human personality is able to flower and realize itself? I believe that the nature of tragedy brings us closer to seeing the brightest aspects of the human condition; and instead of one particular “tragic flaw,” the true tragedy occurs when a character attempts to either secure his/her personal dignity, or find lost personal dignity. In searching for dignity, the character inevitably reacts passionately and defensively from the wound of indignity. This process begins the spiraling downfall that eventually leads the character to just self-evaluation and the capability to grow and learn.

When I started my blog, I had a very fuzzy notion of who I really was. I was still finding my way through the blurry masses of interests and activities, trying to find out what I really love and what I wanted to do with my life. I built my blog on the idea of exploration: expressing myself without limits and without a clear idea of what exactly I was expressing. Reading the tragedy of Oedipus recently, I discovered a few parallels in our respective journeys.

One of the major reasons for Oedipus’s fall was his lack of self-awareness. Oedipus, after being told by a drunk man that he wasn’t really his father and mother’s child, didn’t even know who his true family was. He built his identity as the king of Thebes upon a lie; not knowing his mother was his wife, his father a man who insulted him passing the road, and his false parents his true parents. Oedipus had no idea who he was. When he started gaining popularity and respect from conquering the Sphynx, his dignity rose. When he was crowned king of Thebes, his dignity rose. But the dignity was based on false notions of self, and so it was easily threatened when the truth came into question and Oedipus found out who he really was.

With my own stabbingly obvious lack of self-awareness, I write obsessively on my blog and tweet volumes on Twitter. I’ve built my online identity on something that’s transitive and changing. I don’t really think I’ll ever stop changing who I am, and that makes for a wobbly and unfounded online identity. It’s founded on something that will never stop moving, something that’s nonlinear and confusing to all but me. And from this foundation, my dignity rises and I start getting protective of this dignity. I’m more afraid to make mistakes, or conversely, I’m careless and I obfuscate myself to evade responsibility.

When Oedipus’s inflated dignity popped (which it did as soon as he found out he’d slept with his mom and killed his dad), he was left with nothing and yet everything. All of the falsities that he had based his so-called life upon were gone: he was able to look himself in the eye, so to speak, and know himself. He was finally able to hold his children and love them. He could honestly feel sadness and joy. He was able to see the world and himself clearly. Oedipus was enlightened by his tragedy.

The last week of my trip to San Francisco, I was alone in the house I was staying at. It was a gorgeous five-bedroom, four-bathroom house in the Marina, and I was by myself. The last three days of my trip in San Francisco, coming home from another perfect day, I’d sit on the bus and stare out the window and listen to music, knowing that tonight I’d sit alone in my basement, watching C-SPAN and packing my luggage. I felt pathetic. But I also felt strangely liberated; I was finally able to look at myself clearly, see how I’d changed, understand how I was feeling, and be okay with that. At the end of the summer, I could look back and know that put to the test of living and surviving pretty much on my own, I thrived.

Aristotle believes that “the man who has a rational, comprehensive, intellectual perspective on life can attain happiness… is ‘ideal for life’” and that “the man who sees but one side of a matter, and straightway, driven on by his uncontrolled emotions, acts in accordance with that imperfect vision, meets a fate most pitiful and terrible.” Honestly when I first read this, it spurred on some of my own uncontrolled emotions; maybe because I recognized the familiar behavior in myself, did I object to seeing my potential fate spelled out for me.

The familiarity that I felt spurred me to think of why exactly I felt such an affinity with Oedipus. The obvious similarities aren’t there: I’m not a king, and I know who my parents are. Even the reality in which we both inhabit seems to be wildly different: I don’t believe in Greek gods the way he did, and there aren’t any ominous prophecies in my future. Miller explained it best for me; Oedipus, or any tragic hero, is on a latent journey to finding out who they really are. And who better to relate this with than us students who know hardly anything about ourselves, who are learning and discovering?

In high school, we’re just beginning a lengthy process of individuation, and it’s scary and frightening and wonderful all at the same time. Oedipus was a nonentity in that he had no past, no sense of self, and no true personality or foundation. He was a blank slate that the town filled in for him, which gave him a sense of dignity. Teenagers are blank as well, filled in with silly methods of self-assurances that give us seeming dignity. It’s not until we take the first step forward to evaluating ourselves justly do we see life with a rational, comprehensive, intellectual perspective.

Arthur Miller said that tragedy isn’t pessimistic, and I believe he was right. Looking at the tragedies, we see that it’s possible to live through the agonizing pain of finding out who we really are. True dignity won’t exist until we find out who we really are, and embrace that completely (like Oedipus). The confidence in the rock-hard foundation of our self dignity gives us the eyes to see the world clearly and be truly fit for life and learning.

You cannot ignore this. You cannot ignore us. The revolution has begun and we have tasted the power.

In contrast to the consumer generations before us, my generation is growing up a generation of producers. We are the YouTube/LiveJournal/Facebook generation. Mass media which has long been a one-to-many institution, allowing only the big and wealthy to transmit their messages, is turning into the many-to-many world of the internet and cheep consumer devices.

Whether it is posting videos taken on cell phones to youtube or photos taken on pocket-sized cameras to facebook. our generation expects to be able to broadcast their messages. We expect to be able to create and to share.

And, it is this expectation that makes our generation different. We are no longer content to be consumers of information. That is, we are no longer content to consume an education. To connect with today’s students, you must not only teach them, but encourage them to teach back.

It requires a flat classroom, one where students are first class citizens and are engaged in the activity of learning, not simply an audience.

Project-based learning, one-to-one programs, insert education buzzword of the month here, aren’t enough. The change has to be deeper.

Failure to innovate around this new structure will cause education to take an increasingly marginalized role in the lives of our students.

But, I don’t need to explain this to you, you already know it. So, what’s the wait?

Godspeed.

 Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can praise them, disagree with them, quote them, disbelieve them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward. Maybe they have to be crazy. How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels? We make tools for these kinds of people. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Some of you may recognise that as the famous Apple ‘Think Different’ text, others may not, but I guess whether you’ve read it before or have read it for the first time there, we can pretty much all agree that it’s an inspiring piece of text. The thing that surprised me was that when reading through it I realised that all you need to do is change one tiny piece of the text to change the whole context of it.

“We make tools for educate these kinds of people”

In my mind, that’s now one hell of a motto for a better education system.

Let’s face it; the current education system just doesn’t know how to handle these kinds of people. “The round pegs in the square holes,” as Apple refers to them. The system doesn’t understand creativity. It robs all students of their creative consciousness and replaces it with structure, structure, and more structure, only to prepare them for a 9-to-5 job, Monday to Friday, every week of every year for the rest of their lives. Art, Music, Drama… you name it, the current system has a course for it. But that course doesn’t do any form of justice to the many greats that have over hundreds of years created amazing works and done incredible things, demonstrating how beautiful these arts can be. Students aren’t told to let passion drive them forward, or let their inspiration flow and their imagination stop at nothing. They are told to follow the rules, and do whatever it takes to get a ‘pass.’ Where would we be if Bach was told his Brandenburg concertos ‘didn’t quite meet the required standard’? What would have happened if Van Gogh was told his paintings just ‘didn’t make sense’?

It doesn’t stop at the arts. The suppression of creativity is seen in all fields of learning within the current system, giving no room for our real geniuses to shine. And why? Because the system has an obsession with testing, and at the end of the day you can’t test real genius, because you just can’t grade it. Who really has the right to say that a piece of music is an A or B or whatever else? Why should someone sitting in a fancy government office be able to sit there and write the rules that decide whether this piece of writing would make the grade or not? Why can’t the people deciding our futures for us be content with having some classes that have no exams? Classes that are solely there to help stimulate the different skills we all possess, without having to put us under the constant pressure of being bombarded with test after test and grade after grade. Do they see this as ‘non-educational’?

Think of the wealth of talent that is being and has been squandered due to this system. How many people would have become the next great composer if they had been given just that little bit more leeway? How many people would have had the courage to write their own novel, because they wouldn’t have been told they ‘weren’t good enough’? How many people failed to ever recognise their own potential because they were too busy striving for the best grades possible? Only so they could get a ‘good’ job in an office, with a ‘good’ salary.

Don’t get me wrong, we need the people in offices to do the things that keep our public services running and our economy going, but we also need the people who create, invent, and change things. We need the people who “sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written,” because Apple is right; they push the human race forward, and have done for as long as the human race has been around. But they can’t continue to do so if we don’t help them realise they are capable of doing so. They can’t invent the cure for cancer, or compose a great symphony, or write a magnificent piece of literature if our education system tells them exactly how everything should be, and what they should learn, and what they are aiming to do with their lives. Give them the opportunity. Let them decide.

We make the mistake of thinking that the people that do well in school are the ‘smart’ ones, but that isn’t always the case. These people may just be good at retaining information and reciting it back under pressure, or may just be good at problem solving. Our schools teach these kinds of people well, because they know how to deal with them. All you need to do with these people is throw facts and figures at them and tell them they need to know them to pass, and get become qualified to get a good job... which is not even proper learning. There is no regard there for our creative ones, or even the ‘smart’ ones who can probably do so much more given the opportunity. There is no other option, no fork in the road, not even a way to have the best of both worlds. Just one path for everyone to follow, with the same goal in mind—to fit in, and become another round peg in a round hole.

Let me make myself clear right now that this is not a dig at teachers, who do a superb job. What it is, however, is a cry out to the people in suits who decide what we learn and how we learn it to change their philosophy. To realise that some people can achieve more, and that the people who will eventually find the cure for cancer, or create the next breakthrough piece of technology, or discover new planets and galaxies are in our schools. These children/students or whatever you want to call them are waiting on these people to realise and do something to help them on their way to greatness. To give them the opportunity to shine, and achieve things that both us and them can’t even imagine yet.

It really is time for our education system to start ‘Thinking Differently.’

The Bass Player

Photo 1 by nilson

Photo 2 by tim7423

Recently, Arthus treated us to the importance of nothing. He wrote:

My favorite thing of all is to do nothing at all. I do nothing all the time: I walk nowhere, I think about nothing, I work on nothing.
...
Doing nothing is the same as doing anything that strikes your fancy, or not. Doing nothing is getting a crazy idea, then forgetting it.

I compare Arthus’s “doing nothing” with the time that I spend thinking and tinkering. Such time is of critical importance to any creative individual; it is when we find new directions for our ideas and explore the breadth of the intellectual realm. The world would be a very boring place if we never allowed ourselves to wander in new directions.

However, one must wander somewhere. I believe that our lives are nothing more than the sum of the actions that we take. If we only wander through the intellectual void that is doing nothing, nothing is all we will be. Life isn’t about meandering through our thoughts, it is about grabbing a thought by the horns and running with it.

I believe that a fully lived life is without boredom. You should always be doing something: pursuing some new idea, trying or learning something new, working towards some end, building something, never losing momentum.

Every experience we have provides us with new information that we use to make sense of the world around us, expanding our schemata. This understanding of the world, the one that comes from experience, is what separates the knowledgeable from the wise.

Our thoughts are nothing without the actions that make the best of them. Arthus may have started his blog while doing nothing, but he had to do something to make it a success. We must move from thinking to doing. Only nothing has been accomplished by thoughts alone.

So, with all due respect to Arthus’s philosophy of doing nothing, I would challenge you instead to do everything that you can, to live your life fully and never let a moment go to waste. Never be bored, never wonder what to do, just do something. Go write a book, learn how to paint, act in a play, install Linux, write a blog, start a company, study religious texts, learn a new language, volunteer with a new group, connect with an old friend.

If you are not exhausted, you should be asking yourself: what else can I be doing?

It should be the same in our schools: are we giving students the opportunity to do everything in life that they can?

1. Photo by author, on Flickr

My favorite thing of all is to do nothing at all. I do nothing all the time: I walk nowhere, I think about nothing, I work on nothing. No, I have not turned into a nihilist. I simply chose to live my life for the unexpected, not the expected.

In set theory and other branches of math, nothing is often very similar or equal to everything. That’s the sort of nothing I like to do. Doing nothing is the same as doing anything that strikes your fancy, or not. Doing nothing is getting a crazy idea, then forgetting it. Ne rien faire est en train de parler en français pour aucune raison. Doing nothing is writing letters to yourself in the future. Doing nothing is pulling a random book off the shelf and reading 3½ paragraphs on page 27. Most of all, doing nothing is listening to all things you can’t hear:

“I like that too,” said Christopher Robin, “but what I like doing best is Nothing.”

“How do you do Nothing?” asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.

“Well, it’s when people call out at you just as you’re going off to do it ‘What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?’ and you say ‘Oh, nothing,’ and then you go and do it.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh.

“This is a nothing sort of thing that we’re doing now.”

“Oh, I see,” said Pooh again.

“It means just going along, listening to all the things you can’t hear, and not bothering.”

“Oh!” said Pooh.

White is all colors and no color. Nothing is complicated and simple. “I’m doing nothing” is what you say when you really don’t want to say what you’re doing. Or, it’s what you say when you don’t know what you’re doing. Nothing is the easiest thing to do and the hardest thing to teach.

The web is great for doing nothing. Rainy days and dirt roads likewise. The greatest things happen when we’re doing nothing. I started my blog when I was doing nothing.

In our fast-paced society, we do a bit too much of everything. As the long days of summer approach, now is the best time to do nothing. Forget about exams (speaking of which, my favorite way to study is to do nothing) and college and graduation and do nothing. Maybe lazy people are just really, really smart.

We should all do a little more of nothing.

1. Photo #1, or lack thereof, by author
2. Photo #2, or lack thereof, by author

I just recently heard about edupunk, the term that’s seemingly sweeping the edublogosphere and causing all these old people to grab their dusty Sex Pistols t-shirts and bust out the black eyeliner.

From what I can gather using Wikipedia and Bavatuesdays (the blog where the term originated), edupunk is basically the DIY culture applied to education. It’s taking a concept and making it reality. I suppose it’s a call for action.

Wikipedia gives these examples as edupunk: “Legos, Edusim, chalk, Hypercard, Moodle, use of the Bliki (blog and wiki mashups), students’ art work on the outside wall of the classroom, and students teaching their teachers how to use technology.”

The only thing that I see missing in these discussions of “edupunk” are students. Sure, in theory students are supposed to be given more power, but where are the student voices in the actual discussions of edupunk? This Jim Groom, smart and interesting man though he is, is an adult, a teacher, and (I’m sorry) not actually punk or DIY. Coining this new term and making it seem cool because it uses the word “punk” doesn’t change the fact that a teacher made it up, teachers are discussing it right now, and a teacher will be implementing the theory.

I realize that the application of the term isn’t exactly focused on the real punk community, it’s obviously about education. But I’d like to make it clear that the punk and DIY cultures are the domains of the younger generation now. The students will be the leaders in whatever underground change there may be.

Don’t you teachers remember when you were young? Hippies? Protesters? Implementers of change? Controllers of the cool, anti-establishment, nonconformist underground culture? Can you imagine what it might feel like if a bunch of older people, outside of your culture, used your name for something completely different? And didn’t include you in the discussions of it?

Plus, it’s not like any of the things listed haven’t been happening. Most of us on Students 2.0 have been helping our teachers with technology for our entire high school careers, Youthnet has potential to be a DIY student run educational forum, Space is a mostly student run online lit mag, Intrepid Classroom is a great example of online DIY education, and not to mention Clay Burell’s Personal Learning Network classroom. Packaging us up into one little label isn’t right.

“Edupunk” teachers: you are not punk, and you are not DIY. You haven’t even gotten close. Where’s the community? Where are the equal voices?Until a teacher is willing to listen to student voices and include them in discussions about their learning and education, they are not what I would call edupunk.

What do you think?

1. Photo by Negrillion Flickr
2. Photo by The Hell Caminos on Myspace