"Schooled Up"

In talking with several teachers at my placement, I got a general consensus on whether teachers felt imagination has been “schooled up.” My cooperating teacher says she feels that as students progressed into high school, the focus on grades and getting into college leads to a loss of creativity. In her conversations with other teachers in the building, she believes that teachers who teach grades that have large standardized tests feel the pressure of accomplishing a certain amount before the test is taken. This limits the creative/imaginative liberties they can take within the classroom.

Another teacher who I interviewed also works with a wide range of students in the classroom (1^st-6^th grades). She showed me a poem one of her second grade students wrote, and explained how creative she thought it was because it did not follow any set form. On the other hand, she said if she had given the same assignment to her sixth graders they would have obsessed over the format, how many lines the poem had to be, etc. She told me that in her experience, older students seem less likely to take risks because they are afraid to be wrong. I think this is something I notice even in college. If an assignment does not have specific guidelines, many worry that they will be doing something wrong and are afraid to put their own ‘spin’ on a project (myself included). This is something that is slowly ingrained in students so that the difference between this particular second grader and a sixth grader would be a loss of imagination.

This teacher also pointed out that teachers definitely put limitations and guidelines on students. While this may ultimately lead to a loss of some imagination and creativity, it is also necessary to provide some guidelines to assignments so quality work is received. My cooperating teacher talked about this as focusing an activity. I feel that in some ways this does limit creativity. Ideally, there would be free play for each grade in the music classroom. My cooperating teacher feels that part of this “schooling up” of imagination in music class could relate to time. We see each class for a minimum of 30 minutes a week in kindergarten to a maximum of 50 minutes a week in general music. Therefore she feels that some of this control/focusing of imagination is necessary due to scheduling. While this is obviously not an ideal situation, it is an unfortunate reality of many programs.