

Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students - mhb
http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/12/teachers-dont-like-creative-students.html

======
feralchimp
The article title sensationalizes the sum of two separate findings, without
arguing (except by anecdote) that the findings can be summed that way (or at
all).

That is, "teachers don't like creative students" is not at all the same thing
as "teachers report not liking disruptive behavior" + "creativity is
positively correlated with disruptive behavior."

I strongly suspect many readers on HN:

\- are creative

\- were at times disruptive in school

\- were nevertheless well-liked by the vast majority of their teachers

------
commieneko
I spent a couple of years teaching at a career college in MA. The problem was
not so much dealing with disruptive creative students, and I certainly had
several of those, as it was dealing with students that didn't have the
prerequisites and mental tools to learn the skills they needed to express
themselves usefully.

An example: I had one student who spoke very well, he was from Cameroon and in
fact spoke _several_ languages, was something of a class leader, he had very
good visual ideas and his presentation style was remarkable. But. He did not
know how to read a ruler and fractions were a complete mystery to him. Algebra
was completely beyond him at his current state.

He was in a graphic design class and was going into a web programming class,
and following that a 3D modeling class. He often became actively resentful
that I was forcing him to focus on things that he considered trivial and not
apparently related to the results he wanted. He very much felt I was stifling
his creativity.

Convincing him that he would simply fail at his goals without studying some
basics was very difficult.

We got the fractions and ruler issues licked with some outside class work, but
he simply was not able to handle the coding in the web design class and
failed. I didn't teach the 3D class, so I don't know how well he did there,
but I can only imagine.

(One of the reasons I left the school was that with such a wide variety of
students with incredibly varied levels of education, I wasn't allowed to adapt
the classes to meet their needs. I did finally get the school to offer
remedial math and reading lessons, but they were _not_ prerequisites and they
did no kind of testing to determine need.)

My point is that creativity is important, but basic skills often are more
important, at least at the beginning. And no matter how gifted one is,
developing the discipline to work on non-interesting and non-creative tasks is
essential in the real world. There are problems that have aspects that are
simply beyond hacking and shooting from the hip. And they are often,
ultimately, the most interesting and rewarding to solve.

------
pnathan
Speaking as a former TA who ran _college_ classrooms for a while...

Classroom management rides the line between order and chaos. You don't want
students constantly interrupting, but you don't want them to be silent.
Assignment grading is rife with judgement calls - what qualifies as 'correct'
work? Some students feel _incredibly_ entitled and challenge any slighting
(ie., getting downgraded for being wrong). In these conditions, it's easy to
see how rolling out a pigeon hole system becomes the solution to the
challenge.

So _Teachers Don’t Like Creative Students_ is a bit of an unsubtle title, full
of false dichotomies and ignorant of nuance.

~~~
Maro
I attended German, Hungarian and US schools in K-12. In my experience, the US
system is the weakest form of education and all the touchy-feely liberalism
just results in a crappy education. I knew guys who were taking some idiot
version of algebra in 11th grade, homework was doing multiplication on a
calculator?

    
    
        but you don't want them to be silent
    

Yes you do, most of the time.

    
    
        what qualifies as 'correct' work?
    

Most of the time it's pretty obvious.

Btw. I agree with the OP.

~~~
mahyarm
In non hard subjects, the 'correct' answer often crosses into opinion.

~~~
lazerwalker
This is true.

However, it's still not that difficult to grade for "well-done" work in
subjective areas.

Whether the thesis of a literary analysis paper is "correct" may be opinion,
for example, but it's definitely possible to grade fairly based on a rubric of
"did the student defend their thesis in a clear, organized manner, properly
using appropriate citations from the text" (after filtering out theses that
are completely inane or insane).

------
imroot
It's not that teachers don't like Creative Students -- my wife is a K-12
Special Ed teacher working on her Ph.D -- but that the educational system
doesn't know what to do with students who do not fit into their state-provided
lesson plan. In Kentucky, the state dept of Education provides:

    
    
      - The lesson plans
      - The Powerpoint slides 
      - The quizes
      - The lecture outline
    

The lazy teachers use the state provided materials and don't change it.

The good teachers modify the plans to suit their students learning behavior
and work accordingly.

The great teachers identify a different instructional design model and make it
work for all of the students in their class.

~~~
yummyfajitas
There are two more groups of teachers you missed:

The bad teachers modify the plans in a manner they _think_ suits their
students, but works worse than the provided materials.

The terrible teachers completely make up their own system, which simply fails.

~~~
imroot
The kids are tested every year at a state level that ensures that the student
who lives in BFE, Kentucky (where I live) receives the same level of education
as a student in a medium sized town and both students learn the same things
that a student who lives in a 'major' area like Lexington or Louisville will
learn.

If a teacher isn't making the grades at a statewide level, they will get rid
of her or cut funding to the school. Sadly, this means that many lazy teachers
are just teaching to the test, and nothing else.

~~~
yummyfajitas
If the system works as you describe, then it's fantastic - state provided
standards ensure a minimum level of education, while still allowing some
students to receive a superior level of education.

Perhaps the rest of the country can learn something from Kentucky.

~~~
pantaloons
Did you read what he said? The bad teachers just "teach the test", the good
teachers are far better off without state provided standards and equal outcome
mandates rendering the entire exercise pointless.

~~~
yummyfajitas
_The bad teachers just "teach the test"..._

No, he said the _lazy_ teachers "teach the test", i.e. strive to make sure
their students meet minimum standards. A system which makes sure even lazy
workers perform adequately is a good system.

 _...the good teachers are far better off without state provided standards..._

No, he said the good teachers are just as well off - they modify the standard
lesson plans and are only penalized if their students do poorly.

~~~
pantaloons
I'm not sure if you are being deliberately obtuse. The lazy workers are not
performing adequately under the system, they are gaming it by focusing only on
monitored metrics.

This has real consequences for good teachers, who have to justify what they
are trying to teach to a principal who only cares that school funding will be
cut unless standardized test scores improve.

~~~
yummyfajitas
As long as the monitored metrics are appropriate measures of what the school
is trying to teach, there is nothing wrong with optimizing them. If the
metrics are insufficient, then the problem is the metrics, not the attempt to
maximize them.

Since neither you nor imroot actually criticized the metrics, I see no reason
to believe they do a bad job of measuring performance.

------
tallpapab
So many job adverts ask for creative people, but on the job creativity is
discouraged. Employers want employees to implement the employer's creations.

That said, getting along socially is enormously important. Smart, creative
people figure this out. The general impression that to be creative one has to
be some sort of social misfit is overblown.

As Piccaso demonstrated, great creativity is born aloft by great mastery. It's
not that hard to Get a bad haircut and some outlandish clothing to pose as a
creative naughty person.

~~~
luser001

        > So many job adverts ask for creative people
        > but on the job creativity is discouraged.
    

The book "disciplined minds" has a great phrase to capture this: assignable
curiosity.

That's what they're looking for, not creativity.

<http://www.disciplined-minds.com>

------
thetrendycyborg
Homeschool. Then you don't have to deal with group dynamics like that. If you
care about your children's education and don't trust teachers then do it
yourself.

~~~
Fliko
Learning about group dynamics and social situations is probably the most
important part of middle/high school, and more often then not homeschooled
kids are at a disadvantage in these situations when they finish school then
when compared to non-homeschooled kids.

This isn't always the case, and social awkwardness can go away after x amount
of time, but I know that I am glad I wasn't homeschooled despite the
occasional bad experiences at high school. Knowing how to deal with people
face to face is an extremely important skill.

~~~
gujk
Homeschooling is not solitary confinement.

------
blahedo
I think this is generally true, but there are counterexamples---I'm sure many
of us here remember some of our own teachers that bucked this trend. Speaking
for myself, I do try my best to foster the creative ones; they can be kind of
a pain in the ass sometimes but they keep me on _my_ toes and exert a net
positive influence on the class by hitting ideas from an unexpected angle
(i.e. one unexpected by me and therefore one that the other students wouldn't
have otherwise been presented with). That benefits everyone.

I _do_ have to rein them in sometimes, though, e.g. "when I give you a spec
you really have to implement _that function_ , not something else that does
something similar, however much more awesome that other thing is". Because
sometimes you really do have to just implement the spec.

------
Hyena
That finding relies heavily on reports by teachers, not actual tests of
creative ability. As such, the methodology tends to filter out any non-
disruptive creatives, leaving people who have both creativity and anti-social
behavior sets.

------
mathattack
I think it's only fair. After all, how many creatives like typical square
teachers?

Exceptional students and exceptional teachers eventually find each other.

------
danso
Everytime I read an article like this, I think of how if Steve Woz were
growing up today, he would be in a maximum security prison by now:

[http://books.google.com/books?id=hlA6Xv3-59YC&lpg=PA47&#...</a>

------
rkon
This was made painfully clear to me when I took an English literature class in
college. The class focused on short stories and involved a lot of "deep
analysis". My method of analysis was to approach stories from a rational
standpoint, which doesn't sound creative at first, but the problem with
fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without rules (or incomplete
rules, in the best case scenario). Approaching this type of work from a
rational standpoint usually leads to a nearly endless number of possibilities,
each of which cannot be proven more likely than the next.

Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive, amateur
attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst. Anyone who points
this out will not fare well in such a class... take it from someone who
learned firsthand. Professors who have taught the same interpretations for
twenty years don't like it when someone has a new idea of what their favorite
stories might mean.

~~~
jonnathanson
_"Analyzing fiction is a guessing game at best, and a completely naive,
amateur attempt to perform psychoanalysis on dead authors at worst."_

Actually, one of the cardinal rules of literary criticism is that you should
_not_ attempt to psychoanalyze the author of a work; rather, you should treat
the work as a self-contained unit. If you're going to analyze the author, then
it's an entirely different task. Blending the two bastardizes both efforts. So
yes, I would agree that bad criticism tends to employ such efforts. But I
would also argue that no literature professor worth his tenure should even be
proposing such methods in a classroom.

I do agree that trying to discern intent is a "guessing game." But some ways
of guessing are much more effective than others. And some guesses are more
sound than others.

While I sympathize with much of what you're saying, I think you give short
shrift to the field of literary criticism and analysis. There's some genuinely
insightful, analytical, occasionally profound stuff out there.

 _"My method of analysis was to approach stories from a rational
standpoint..."_

What do you mean by this? "Rational" in what sense? Are you studying the
rationality of the text? Are you proposing a set of logical guidelines to be
used in evaluating a text? Are you focusing on the internal coherence and
consistencies of the world within the story? Are you focused on the story's
structural soundness? "Rational" is a pretty big and broad word that begs
clarification. As you can see, I just generated a handful of different ways of
interpreting your statement. This would seem to indicate that the statement
needs further clarification.

Now, the real problem with this is that you're suggesting that your approach
was "rational," and implying that other approaches are irrational. Such a
claim demands explication.

 _"...the problem with fiction is that the stories exist in a realm without
rules (or incomplete rules, in the best case scenario)."_

Again, this is pretty vague. What do you mean by "rules?" And are the "rules"
you're proposing in any way tainted by your own subjectivity? It's very, very,
very tricky to define sets of rules for fiction. By and large, we're still
pretty much working with the set that the Greeks came up with a couple
thousand years ago.

I don't mean to knock you or your post, because I think I understand what
you're saying. But if you're going to attack a system, you need to be very
clear about a) what's wrong with the system, and b) what your alternatives
entail.

~~~
rkon
My problem with literary criticism is that it's essentially a disingenuous
pseudoscience. Critics make authoritative pronouncements on human nature,
culture, society, etc., when they're not actually qualified social scientists.
They constantly misappropriate theories from other disciplines, yet they make
no effort to support their claims with research or empirical evidence.

Literary criticism as a whole seems to suffer from a fundamental
misunderstanding of epistemology (for which I'm sure we can thank
postmodernism). It's the perfect platform for anti-intellectuals to espouse
their unsubstantiated social and political theories while enjoying immunity
from any rigorous scrutiny.

~~~
jonnathanson
With all due respect, I think you're reading the wrong literary criticism.

That's quite a broad brush with which to paint the entire field, and I can
assure you that most of it does not "deal in authoritative pronouncements on
human nature, culture, society, etc." or "misappropriate theories from other
disciplines." The best literary criticism analyzes and evaluates what's in the
text, and does not attempt to conflate literature with philosophy or sociology
(unless in an anthropological sense of those fields).

Perhaps some of you have had some bad English teachers or professors? I think
we all have. There are vanishingly few good ones out there these days. But we
should not confuse _bad_ literary criticism with _all_ literary criticism.
Just as I wouldn't look at a horribly coded mess and conclude that the field
of programming is bunk, I wouldn't look at a terrible example of criticism and
condemn the entire field.

------
smoyer
I was that disruptive kid ... And I'll bet many others here were too. Now's
our chance to have the last laugh!

