Creativity Reflection

This is it. This is the time, the week, the day that I was dreading. This is the last week of TAG. I know that I will spend the next month or two talking to camp friends about what we plan to do next year, how amazing this year was, and who is coming back.

By September we will probably have created a count down and will know exactly how many months until TAG next year. It's something always on the back of our minds. All of our friends are quickly sick of our never ending sentences that start out with phrases like, "Oh! When I was at camp..." and "At TAG sort of the same thing happened..." I try not to talk about TAG all the time because people really don't understand. We get annoyed looks, sighs, rolled eyes. But instead of thinking about these next, sad, few weeks, I'm going to focus on the last three.

This year in Creativity has been so much fun! I loved learning about the different ideas about creativity, and I didn't know that there were so many. I always thought that creativity was not something that you couldn't produce and build up, I thought it was something that you were either born with or not. I was very interested to learn how you could develop your creativity. In Twyla Tharp's book, she has gray sections at the end of each chapter that show you how to develop the part of creativity that the chapter was talking about. I really enjoyed the book in this class. I thought that it fit in very well to what we were talking about, and it was easy to understand it, and fun to read.

After the book, my favorite part of the class would have to be the games we played. We played The Triangle Game, The Picnic Game, and solved riddles to enhance our creativity. My favorite was The Picnic Game, and we had lots of fun playing this game with some of our friends. Whenever we were bored we would play The Picnic Game. We even played The Triangle Game a few times. Everyone loved The Picnic Game!

What I enjoyed a lot were the exercises that we did to build right and left side brains that were equal, to create a Superbrain! They were called lateral exercises that are really difficult at first, like Finger Walking, but after five minutes or so, you get the hang of until you are really great. The thing I loved about Finger Walking was that it looks like you are just twiddling your thumbs. You can just sit when you are bored, Finger Walking, and no one knows that you are building a Superbrain! That was one of my favorite parts.

There was so much more to this class that trying to go through everything would take a really long time. If I could, I would take this class again next year. It's a class that I would recommend to anyone, started at TAG, or finishing.

Images: http://www.blogcdn.com/nintendo.joystiq.com/media/2008/11/calendar_pages_flipping_sm.jpg

The Creative Habit: Book Review

As part of the Creativity class, we read Twyla Tharp's book, The Creative Habit Learn it and Use it For Life. Though we didn't finish the book, we read bits and pieces of it from scattered places in vague chronological order. It was a much more personal book than I expected.

All authors have voice. They have a certain way of writing that allows you to identify that author, just from the way they string a few words together. It's what I believe makes us say, "Wow! This is a great author!" You can even think about why some people particularly enjoy a certain writer and others think they aren't that great by thinking of it like personality. You could say, that the people who love a certain author love their personality, the way they tell a story. I think it's the same thing that draws us as individuals to certain people.

Tharp has a interesting way of pulling your attention to her book and what's in it by speaking very normally. She doesn't talk with huge words no one can understand, and you can easily imagine her then as a very approachable person if you were to actually meet her. Whether or not this is the case, you are happy to be reading the book, you feel welcome. She makes the book very applicable. I loved the examples of people that she gave for each of her chapters, making it easy to imagine how this applies to you, and you aren't stuck wondering what the point is.

When I first picked up the book, I was afraid of a book that was written in a dense, boring textbook style that would make it a pain to get through. I was very happy to learn that it wasn't. Going back to voice, this is what made this book so enjoyable. It felt like a normal conversation, not something you would have to have a Ph.D. in creativity to be able to follow. It's written for the average person, which is a breath of fresh air to me, since I have been reading psychology journals and theorists' papers for the past three weeks. It was a welcome change. It was written almost in the style of Sean Covey, who wrote the book Seven Habits For Highly Effective Teens, required reading for me last year. Both books have a very easy going style that make them easy, effortless, and even enjoyable to read. Outside of class I have even read the Seven Habits again, which is something that I plan to do with Ms. Tharp's book as well.

The structure of the book also was great. She has one page at the beginning of each chapter that is written in a much larger font that is a brief summary of the chapter, usually with the help of an example. Paragraphs are broken down into sections with big bold headings, sort of like a text book has, and what at the beginning seems like random, here and there, sentences pop out of the rest of the book's pages by having been changed to a red font. These are important parts. The parts that, if you forget anything else from the chapter, you should remember that part, and how it applies.

This was not something that I would have found myself drawn to if I wandered down bookstore shelves, looking for something. But it really would have been a loss had I seen it and decided not to pick it up. I consider myself fortunate that this book was brought to my attention this way. Since I haven't finished it, my first stop at my town's library will to be to see if Tharp's book is in stock.


Image: http://www2.winthrop.edu/studentaffairs/DSU/pages/calendar/images/tharp.jpg