Before you read on, step back and recall what you learnt from your pre-school or primary school art teacher, or the art teacher that taught you at the community centre.
Try to picture in your head:
- A drawing of a house,
- Then a door, followed by:
- Windows
- What is on top of the roof of your house?
- What is beside your house?
House
Does your house come with 1 door in the middle, 2 windows, a chimney on top of the roof and you have trees next to your house?
Then you'd probably got a similar looking house with many of us.
I went for a Cirriculum Tea, held for the parents of students at Pat's Schoolhouse. I went in without expectation except to understand better how my son spend his 3 hours in school.
Before that part came on, the founder, Ms. Patricia Koh, addressed us. To me, it was the best part because I felt that I learnt lots from her on parenting, besides knowing what our son is learning from her school.
The 'picture of a house' exercise was one of what she mentioned that was linked to creativity. Although our parents tried to send us to art enrichment classes or thinking that art classes make us more creative, the sad fact is that our houses all turned out to look about the same because the teacher taught us so. More than half the auditorium mumbled "1 door", "2 windows", "chimney" and "tree" after her questions. Amazing, because I was starting then to wonder if the people around me were a bunch of psychics. How did they know how my house looked like?!
Cat eats Fish
She asked us too, "what does a cat eat?". Our answer: Fish. She had a student who went to primary school and told her teacher, who gave her a cross for the wrong answer, that her cat does not eat fish.
The girl confidently told the teacher that she has never seen her cat eat fish, and she is very sure her cat eats "cat food - Whiskas brand".
The teacher’s response? “The answer is ‘fish’, you did not have the correct answer so I marked it wrong.”
This is a sad fact but true, that teachers in our education system are not flexible at all. For Ms. Koh, her point was to urge us to look beyong the model answer because sometimes what our children tell us may be valid and true too, even if it’s not ‘textbook’ correct.
Moving Forward
These examples made me conscious and more aware of how I should respond when my kids answers my questions. I should listen and probe more, instead of correcting them with a standard right answer.
Recently, Aidan enjoys playing ‘scissors, paper, stone’ now. Every time his opponent comes up with a ‘five’ which stands for ‘paper’ and Aidan has a ‘stone’, he says he wins. His reason for winning? “Because when you wrap the paper too tight around the stone, the paper tears, so the stone wins”.
I guess it’s quite an acceptable answer, if you believe in encouraging creativity and thinking that is totally ‘out-of-the-box’!
