Dave Burgess writes about Six Words that bother him: "It's easy for you. You're creative." While I see colleagues spending money on Teachers Pay Teachers and looking for lesson ideas in the Teacher Edition, I have always done better by making lessons myself. I will curate ideas and materials online and from a variety of sources, but I seem to require taking "ownership" before something works for me. That means I have to be creative in the way I put things together. "It's easy for you. You're creative." Yeah, I've heard that several times from several people, but I've never thought of it the way Burgess presents it in Teach Like a PIRATE. |
It's easy for me. Really? So with four words she dismissed sixteen years of had work!...Sixteen years of failures and lessons that blew up in my face. Sixteen years of fine-tuning ideas and making adjustments because what I thought were great ideas went completely wrong. Sixteen years of having to abandon lessons part way through the day in order to salvage something useful.
...It wasn't easy when I started, it wasn't easy last week, and it won't be easy next week either. It's not supposed to be easy - it's supposed to be worth it. You can build something incredible if you put the effort in on the front end, and then keep putting the effort in until you turn the lights off and close your door for the last time. But it won't be "easy."
Still, the author accurately espouses that creativity can be developed, and solely depending on provided script is not the way to develop it.