Mundane things bore me. Documents without clipart. Rooms without color. Design without meaning. Conversations that don’t have deep meaning. Copies and repetitive trends. Standardization strangles my brain like those tight nets around a holiday ham. Trapped, squelched, stifled. It’s not a new thing, it’s in fact something I remember very early in my years as a learner. Worksheets full of fill in the blank. Questions in a textbook chapter. I did the work. I finished the blanks. But I always wished for something more. Hoped for something beyond my 30 minutes in art class each week.
Fast forward to the first time I was in an elementary classroom as a volunteer in college, I found it.
I found hope.
The excitement of kids when they reach into a box of crayons.
The joy of learners when they are cutting and gluing and making cardboard into something awesome.
Watching a tiny hand smear paint into shapes from their imagination.
Experiencing the light in their eyes when connections were made.
Somehow becoming the one who helped give kids the opportunities for creativity gave it back to me, too. That was when I decided that teaching was for me. The hope that I had as a kid, I carry with me in everything I do. Years later, it hasn’t changed. Creativity motivates me. Possibilities drives my energy. Developing new ideas out of old ones is exciting. Embracing change and building on each other’s ideas is interesting.
It’s why my new role a an “Innovation Coordinator” feels like I’ve found my ‘home’ in education. It’s about becoming the opposite of my own personal school experience and making experiences that light up learning for kids and teachers. It’s about exciting collaboration, deep conversations, and creating all day long.
Standardization and the hanging on to ‘the way things have always been,’ It still feels like that net on the holiday ham. Trapping what might be. Squelching hope. We just can’t let that net stifle us. With a few snips and reaching out, we can connect.
Create. Design. Make things happen.
Because in every single one of our classrooms there it is.
Hope. Waiting for us.
And that is just too important to ignore.