Inventiveness

Inventiveness is an escalating need now more than ever in our 21st century schools. New technologies and the more wide-spread integration of cultures and learning abilities, all of these things require teachers to be creative. To come up with new teaching strategies and other means of getting information to students, a teacher must be innovative, be able to think on the spot. A bit of wittiness is almost required at times. Especially in my field of music, inventiveness and creativity are essential. We as music teachers must be creative in our ways of interpreting and teaching music. We must ask ourselves, "How can we bring a sense of freshness to this music?" For music teachers, creativity is required for writing lesson plans, putting together a program, writing choreography or marching band drill, etc.
It is also crucial, though, that we inspire creativity in our students. For students of music, creativity is necessary for composition, improvisation, musical interpretation, etc. Inventiveness is critical for any child. Creative people are the leaders in this fast-paced and changing world; they are engineers, entertainers, scientists. Yet, as the world seems to seek more and more creativity, our schools are taking it away. Arts in the schools are rapidly loosing funding and being cut from school budgets. And we seem to only be looking toward achieving high scores in areas such as math and language. The pressures of schools and workplaces stigmatize mistakes until we are afraid to be wrong. In his talk on creativity in schools, Sir Ken Robinson said, "If you are not prepared to be wrong, you will never come up with anything original." I completely agree. These factors produce a diminished creativity level of children on schools. In order to help combat this, it is important to realize that creativity is just as necessary a skill, if not more so, as math skills for example. Creativity is necessary for every subject in school, and every subject should emphasize this. It is necessary that we continue to allow the arts to be prominent in our schools.