I was holding the paper with my math exam with the biggest shock in my life. Zero points. I answered correctly all the questions. Teacher’s note across all of them: you used the wrong methods. I have never been so puzzled in my 15-year-old life.
I just started high school, and joined a class with a mathematical specialty, I qualified for it two years ahead of time, when I won the national championship in math. What got me there was the same thing that I was being punished for now. My math teacher in primary school has been very supportive of students finding their own ways to crack the problem. She would encourage and reward free thinking. She would give us a lecture, show how problems are approached in ‘standard’ math, and then tell us to go crack it on our own. She raised a generation of math champions. But my math teacher in high school was a different species. Her target was: to get the maximum number of her pupils to pass top university exams. And the way the exams were structured: you get points not only for answering the question right but also for applying the methods they teach you on the way.
Imagine if you were playing chess and you scored the check-mate, but you lost the match, as your opponent got points for using well-known technical tricks on the way. That was pretty much how it felt.
My biology class was the same: you had to memorize exact passages from the books and the more correct you quoted them on the exam, the higher score you got. Never mind, if you understood those words or not. That nobody has asked you about. We did not get a break in the literature class either. You’d expect this will be about exchanging views about the pain of young Werner? Nothing more wrong. We were decomposing poems as if they were recipes to make pancakes. Fun fact, my school was many times awarded for inspiring creativity in students.
In most of the world, this is the system the kids are going through. There are studies saying that the kids are the most creative at the age of 3. So what happens then? We are all squeezed into the routine of memorizing and repetition with little space for discovering our own thoughts. And one of two things happen:
- We decide we are not creative. We never practiced it and we find comfort in the routine. This means we do not have it.
- We rebel against the system and go on our own search to unleash the creativity within. But it always has to be in the opposition to the norms.
The result of it, in the later professional life, is interesting, to say the least. ‘You’re marketing, you are creative, I am not’ – I hear from colleagues in the different fields. As if being an engineer wasn’t one of the most creative jobs in the world. On the other side of the spectrum, many advertising agencies are going out of their way to secure a ‘creative’ environment for their people – with gaming rooms and rooftop terraces that are supposed to provide physical space to release their creative potential. Otherwise, it will stay buried deep inside.
We started to brand creativity as some secret magic skill that either you were born with or not and unless you got your letter to Hogwarts, you are a doomed mogul and better even don’t try. And if you have it, you need at least magic space to maintain it.
Time to call big BS on that.
The difference between humans and other animal species is the abstract thinking that makes us push the boundaries of what is possible every single day. Creativity is the feature of our brain that can be practiced and is applicable in every single field of life. If it’s cooking, gardening, playing video games, preparing your excel analysis, or coming up with a diagnosis for a patient… it applies everywhere. And each of us can practice it in a systematic way.
The first step is of course the education system, where we should stop measuring kids by tests and numbers and support critical thinking, get them into a habit of understanding the context of what are they learning rather than the ready answers. And well, if you cannot revolutionize public education, you can always contribute as a parent with constant feedback to the scholars and encourage your kids in other ways to explore their own ways. Let them decide on who they want to become based on things they are really good at and enjoy doing at the same time.
I recently came across a woman who was pushed by her family to become a doctor. She managed to get through university and get a good job in a prestigious hospital. She quit after two years and went to culinary school. ‘I always wanted to be a chef and I wasted years of my life making someone else happy, rather than me.’ She is a successful professional chef and loves her work now. Her parents did not really want her to be a doctor. They wanted her to have a good, stable job with a decent income. Being a professional chef she has that (even in the pandemic, being a creative person as she is, she re-invented her business and moved to online ordering/private dining, still on top of her game). So what was the fight about?
Kids and adults need support in nurturing their creativity. We need our time and space to explore different ways. It is like building from LEGO bricks. You would like to build a ship. If that is your goal, you have multiple instructions at hand that can support you in it and maybe show some tricks on how to put those curves together. But then, you are free to try it on your own. Don’t be scared to make a mistake. You can always dismantle it and come back to where you started. And you will learn what not to do the next time. Your first independently built LEGO ship may not be as you imagined it. But it is going to be uniquely yours.
That’s what I learned from my beloved math teacher and it stayed with me for the rest of my life. We all want to complete the task and find the answer to our equation. It’s ok if you want to follow the known and established way to the end result.
But if you want to explore your own path, go for it. It may get confusing, it may get dirty, and you may feel like you are running a fool’s errand… but this exploration gives you the irreplaceable feeling of achievement like nothing else. And that is how applying creativity in preparing your next excel or cooking your next dinner can make you happier.