Joe Mills - Creativity

Brain Fitness

February 18, 2008 By joemills 3 Comments

I’m always into anything that talks about brain fitness. In this day and age where it is so easy to just sit in front of the television and do mindless activities, I think brain fitness is SORELY overlooked by most Americans. I know I want my brain to stay as sharp as possible for as long as possible. I’m a big purveyor of the Flow theory brought forth by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi which basically states that most people are at the happiest when they are completely immersed in an activity that requires their brain to be working at its peak. We can get so used to letting our brains idly go through life, but I think that is the wrong way to go through life. Yes, we all get tired and need to rest, but that does not mean we need to deprive our brains from the “fitness” it needs. So, with that in mind, here are some tips from Pick the Brain:

What can we do to maintain our brain? Focus on four pillars of brain health: ensure frequent physical exercise, eat a balanced diet, learn effective stress management techniques, and get a constant flow of brain exercise. Stress management is important since stress has been shown to actually kill neurons and reduce the rate of creation of new ones. Brain exercises range from low-tech (i.e. meditation, mastering new complex skills…) to high-tech (i.e. using the growing number of brain games)

Back to my brain fitness…

Filed Under: Creativity, Personal

Tinkering School

January 18, 2008 By joemills Leave a Comment

I came across the Tinkering School through this video on TED. The presentation is given by the head of the Tinkering School, Gever Tullery, and it is titled “5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do”. Just to let you know where he is coming from, and for the record, the “things” he talks about are play with fire, own a pocket knife, throw a spear, deconstruct appliance, break the digital millenium copyright act, and drive a car. The point of this lecture was that in this overly cautious and overly protective world, kids lose out. If parents are afraid to let their child do anything dangerous, how will they learn to be safe? For example, if students do not learn how to properly use a knife, what will they do when they are confronted with one? There are many simple rules to follow when using knives and the only way a student is going to learn what to do is by using them. Always cut away from you. Always be aware of where the blade is. Make sure the blade is sharp. I am doing a project right now with my 5th graders that requires them to use X-Acto blades. And while it is sometimes daunting to have 32 children using a knife simultaneously, it is skill that most of them have not learned. When are they going to learn it?

The other point of his presentation is subtle but important to point out. If you do not let kids experiment with things and try things out and see how things work, their creativity and curiosity is going to be stunted. Kids need to be able to explore and test things. Giving kids a safe, easy to understand toy that has a specific play pattern and is a one trick pony, might look nice under a Christmas tree, but will do nothing for a kids creativity. It seems that the Tinkering School recognizes that and uses it as their motto. This is from their site:

The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 7 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational.

Grand schemes, wild ideas, crazy notions, and intuitive leaps of imagination are, of course, encouraged and fertilized.

Too often, kids are not allowed to tinker and explore and if they do not learn to do that when they are young, they might never learn. It is not an easy skill to pick up.

Filed Under: Creativity, Education, Video

David Simon…My Hero…

January 16, 2008 By joemills Leave a Comment

David Simon is one of the creators and writers of my favorite dramatic series, The Wire. One of the things that I love about The Wire is that it does not pander to the audience. If there is such a thing, it is high brow commercial television because it does not believe the audience is a bunch of morons. It throws you right into the action as if you were standing there and has the viewer sort out the pieces of what he is seeing like you might do in “the real world”. In an interview by Nick Hornby of The Believer, Simon sort of explains why he writes the way he writes. I’m going to clean this quote up a little, but he does make his point:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: —- the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. —- him. —- him to hell.

Beginning with Homicide, the book, I decided to write for the people living the event, the people in that very world. I would reserve some of the exposition, assuming the reader/viewer knew more than he did, or could, with a sensible amount of effort, hang around long enough to figure it out. I also realized—and this was more important to me—that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect.

I know it is easy to bash the television offerings we have nowadays, but let me just say it is shame that truly creative people like Simon do not get more of a voice in mass media entertainment. I think the executives of mass media would be surprised by the viewer response to shows like The Wire…if there were more of them.

Filed Under: Creativity, Inspiration, Television