What About Her?

I have a piano student who is very talented.  She is a sixth grade girl and plays pieces better than all of my high school students.  Mind you, those students have all been playing four (or more) years longer than she has.  She is very well spoken, is a sweet kid and enjoys life.  So why is her mother is worried sick about her?

This poor girl doesn't do "well" in school.  Her grades in math, science are pretty bad. In addition, her state test scores are pretty low.  This all has her mother worried about where, and if, she'll get into college.  Mind you, she is acing music, art, and language arts.  In addition to playing the piano she loves to draw, read, and write stories.  The problem is, her grades are - generally speaking - pretty low.

If you were to look at this kid's report card from the outside you may think to yourself Average student at best, but I can tell you that this girl is very bright - and this frustrates me.  Why isn't there a section on the state test for art...or music?  What about a creative writing section?  Why isn't there someone at the school who can see that this girl has intelligence, but that it just comes in different ways?  Why aren't there programs in place at school for varied learning types?  If this girl's parents wanted to, they could go searching for, and maybe find a school, that could accommodate their daughter but why do they have to look?

This is the plight of education in the twenty-first century: Creativity is not addressed at all. In too many articles, and interviews, company CEO's are lamenting on how today's college grads lack creativity, and/or critical thinking skills. Yet, we insist on spending a huge chunk of the year preparing for tests that, apparently, leaves no time for questions, problem solving, or analyzation.

In one of the first posts here, I wrote about the Torrence Test (which tests creativity), and how American kids scores have been in a steady decline since the 1990's. It has become quite apparent that creativity is something akin to "real" intelligences - like math and science. Suddenly, as we begin migrating the first few years of the twenty-first century, we need to make sure our kids maintain their creative capacities. We need to do this because our kids are growing up in a world where social, political, economic, and technological shifts are an almost daily occurance. Our kids need to be able to not only come up with new ideas, but also adjust, change, and adapt them so they can accommodate those shifts.