Being a creative person can be hard sometimes especially when you have kids. I was sitting on the couch one day while I was working on this album and my child came up to me and asked me to come play with her. And I said I couldn't because I was working, and she gave me the strangest look. I realized it was because all I was doing was staring into space. But that's a lot of what creative work looks like It looks like spacing out.
If I were to insult your intelligence by summarizing what you just read for you into an easily shareable, hopefully viral meme format, it would be "Sometimes creating looks like spacing out." But I won't do that because both Al and I have more faith in your than that.
This is on hundred percent my process. Or at least part of my process. I either sit and stare at nothing while talking to myself or I move all over while scribbling useless and illegible notes on scraps of paper while talking to myself. And sometimes my process for creativity is sitting down at my computer with no ideas and forcing myself to type until something worth exploring comes out. I call all of these "mining for ideas." One of my favorite metaphors for creating is thinking, and I know this isn't technically true but that's why it's a metaphor and not a fact, that no one delivers the block of marble to the sculptor. You, as the creator, have go to the quarry and mine the marble for yourself, you have to drag it back to your shop, and you have to beat it into a giant rectangular prism. And that's all before you can start actually working on turning it into whatever it's going to be. Now all the mining and hauling can be the homework you have to do, or the brainstorming, or the prep work. It's the gathering of mental materials. Then you can actually start going at the block of marble with your chisel. And even then that's just the rough draft. Once you release the Thing from the marble it's still not done. You go at the marble with finer and finer chisels and files and rags until you have removed the last piece of excess marble. Then you're done.
Often the going to the quarry to mine looks like sitting on the couch (or chair or whatever) staring into space. The mental gathering of energies.
From there the next thing I think about is teaching. I do a lot of spacing out after school. That's how I lesson plan. That's how projects come to me. If you work with me (and the world isn't ending like it currently is) and you come into my classroom after the kids are gone chances are high you'll be met with me scowling at nothing while something that sounds like death metal to you* blasts out of my computer. That's what working looks like.
Unless I'm actively teaching. Then it happens very quickly because you can't space out for too long in front of 30 fourth graders. Trust me on that. I have learned to trust my instincts and listen when the little cricket that lives in my pocket goes, "WAITAMINUTE! Wait...One...Second..." My students learn it quickly. I stop talking, freeze, point up at nothing, look into the middle distance, smile slightly, and then 'Ok, no...wait...ok...put away your books- NO DON'T you'll need them. Push your books to the side. Ok!" Then we do a thing. That's spacing out at warp speed.
Which brings us all the way around to the most important part of teaching- The money and drugs Students!
If I know that creating for me looks like spacing out for who knows how long, and I'm constantly asking my kids to think creatively and push their boundaries, how can I expect thinking to look any different? So often we, and I include myself in this of course, know what "think time" means but we forget that time moves at different speeds in different places in the classroom.
It is so tricky to know when a kid is spacing out (ie "I wonder what I'll do on Minecraft after school...") versus thinking (ie "So if this math problem works like this, then this next one..."). They look the same on the outside, but they look different on every person. Like I said, my Resting Think Face is a scowl, probably because I'm annoyed at stupid brain come on get it together let's go. But it could just as easily be a more slack-jawed, wide-eyed look. Or have a half-lidded sleepy vibe. Or it could look like Work. Like if you asked an amateur actor to play Thinking, the face they would make. Kinda constipated, but not to a panicked level yet. Constipated but making progress.** Those kids you see and think "Ah, she's working." But she might be in Minecraft too! We don't know.
A theme of this school year is going to be Patience and Grace, but think time should always be filled with Patience and Grace and that's hard because we have places to go and things to cover. We all know 30 kids don't learn at the same rate but we do our best to make it happen because that's the system we work in and it's not perfect but it's the best we've come up with so far. What does your thinking face look like? What does your spaced out face look like? How can someone around you tell if you're mentally solving complex equations or thinking, "You know, I don't care what anyone says- I really like vanilla ice cream."
I have to remind myself of this all the time. Not just when I'm blasting "Weird Al". Because I forget. But I have gotten pretty good at it. Unless it's early in the year and I don't know the kids yet. Then I have no idea what thinking looks like to them. This, by the way, is a conversation I have with my students (minus the constipation thing, but I make the face and they get it anyway because some humor is universal). I tell them I am trying to figure out what their work style is.
BUT I'M IN CLASS WITH THEM FOR THAT! What am I going to do this year? What does thinking look like online? How do I teach cognition skills from my office when they're in their homes? How can I learn to look at a kid on Meets and know what or if they're thinking. Or did their screen freeze? Or is that really their thinking face and it looks like a frozen screen?
Patience and Grace as teachers relearn instincts we've honed over years of work. Patience and Grace with ourselves because we are going to miss so many cues we would have caught in class. It's going to be so much harder to find the kids that had a tough morning or a bad lunch or have something really exciting to share but they're too polite to chime in with it and besides they don't know how much to trust me because humans aren't really built to make close connections through a screen.
What does your thinking look like? Maybe we could ask our students if they know what their thinking looks like? I do that during my conversation and the kids all strike funny poses. Then we do it again and I ask them to try and be a little more serious the second time and they do because they got to play once.
I'll have to think on it...
*It probably won't be death metal, I don't like much straight death metal. It might be melodic death metal, or maybe black metal, or maybe blackened trash, or perhaps experimental jazz black metal, or maybe Taylor Swift or "Weird Al".
** no idea why I'm not paid to write for bigger education publications
If you like this post and the other posts on this blog you should know I’ve written three books about teaching- He’s the Weird Teacher, THE Teaching Text (You’re Welcome), and A Classroom Of One. I’ve also written one novel- The Unforgiving Road. You should check them out, I’m even better in long form. I’m also on the tweets @TheWeirdTeacher.
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