Painting the canvas with imagination

A while ago in a class we watched a video of a speech about how school kills creativity. After spending almost four hours on perfecting a presentation that we refused to do as a boring generic PowerPoint slideshow, moving half of my friend's furniture to create perfect settings for photographing hand-written papers functioning as slides, and several ideas that started to get too extravagant, we finally created an elegant, creative and different presentation.

I know it took about five times more time than a really basic presentation would have, but it is partly due to the fact we haven't done anything like this before. Doesn't that already sound alarming? I feel like this and any kind of creativity should be encouraged a lot more in education. Damn, if I don't remember the points of the article the presentation summarized after all that work, I probably have a serious medical condition. There are tons of ways to present an idea, why settle for the same exact thing everyone does every single time? Besides, our presentation looks awesome and we had so much fun making it.

It might not even be about school killing creativity; I think it's more about the lack of opportunities to express yourself in artistic ways. If you had a task of presenting a novel you had to read for a class, why couldn't you make a sock puppet story, a song, a music video or a role play out of it instead of a slideshow presentation? I'm so gonna try to incorporate such methods in my teaching someday. I'd love to hear a subjunctive song or see a play demonstrating the prepositions.

In the end, we don't remember the sentences following the bullet points after some time has passed, we remember the things that made us laugh, the ones that impressed us and the ones that we couldn't take our eyes off. 

Wow, I think I should start writing about educational themes more often. I feel like I'm bursting with ideas and enthusiasm to shake up the traditions of teaching, which I understand to be also a bit naive and idealistic. I just hope I won't ever lose this enthusiasm, 'cause if I do I will be guilty of killing my own fire. And that would be just dumb, since that's the flame where my passion for teaching comes from.