Duncework
January 25th, 2008 by 
Morgan J. Locke
Via Pacific Views, a great, short post from blogger Wandering Ink entitled “How to Prevent Another Leonardo da Vinci” that plays off Michael Gelb’s book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. The post describes how to squelch students’ creativity, drive, and critical thinking. Here’s a sampling:
This is how we kill each trait that may yield another Da Vinci:
1. Curiosita (from “How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci”)
What? Intense and insatiable curiosity; constantly learning due to a desire to ask and answer questions
The Murder: In schools, for the most part, students learn only what the teacher decides they will learn. Student questions will often go unanswered if they lead away from the material (go off-topic), or if there are time constraints on what must be learned that leave no time for these questions in class.
Snap! It’s almost like somebody took the how-to-prevent-a-da-vinci list from Wandering Ink’s blog and used it as the design specs for our educational system. The post was nominated for the 2007 EduBlog post of the year.
RTWT.
Posted in Dammit!, Education, Geniuses, Morgan | 
2 Comments »
January 26th, 2008 at 7:07 pm
This one is painful, Morgan. It’s weird when you’re around kids of various ages enough to watch the stages where the lights go out in their eyes. They start off with a joyous, pure hunger to learn and create, and by about the 4th grade, they’re shutting down and are just enduring school.
Rach had one of the best educations that HISD had to offer, and almost all of her HS classes were in the International Baccalaureate program, where they actually learned to do stuff like research and write and learn.
But, in order to get some specific credit hours, she was forced to take a couple of mainstream classes. I still remember how enraged she got at the total waste of her time and energy. Both the teachers and the kids were just going through the motions, and almost no teaching or learning was taking place, just baby-sitting and teaching to the state-mandated tests. And this was in a highly-rated school.
January 27th, 2008 at 1:41 am
Yeah. It’s appalling, how much talent we waste, ain’t it? Bright, excited and creative entity in; extruded educational product out.