Zing! Seven Creativity Practices for Educators and Students

Pat Mora

• Publisher: Corwin
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412978392
• eBook ISBN: 9781452271422
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

"Zing! is a wonderful book that encourages others to be creative by sharing what has worked for Pat Mora in all of her creative efforts."
—Camila A. Alire, Dean Emeritus
University of New Mexico

"In a series of letters to teachers written with her signature poetic grace, Pat Mora gently reminds us of the potential in ourselves and our students."
—Lee Galda, Professor
University of Minnesota

"In this era of mandates, accountability and adherence to canned curricula, Mora reminds us that great educators are fueled by passion and creativity."
—Gary Bloom, Superintendent
Santa Cruz City Schools, Soquel, CA

Cultivate your own creativity and the creative potential of all your students!

Zing! Seven Creativity Practices for Educators and Students is a beautifully written guide that offers seven powerful practices for personal creativity and professional inventiveness. For each of the seven practices, author Pat Mora proposes seven symbols and presents parallel exercises for teachers and students. Evocatively written in the form of letters to teachers and librarians, this book:

• Helps educators access their creative selves and, in the process, become better teachers
• Nurtures students in expressing themselves through writing and other creative pursuits
• Includes activities at the end of each chapter

This moving and inspirational volume serves as a reminder that inventive teaching is truly an art form that enriches lives and transforms teachers and students.

Pat Mora was named one of the "Fifty Most Inspiring Authors in the World" by Poets & Writers magazine.

CHAPTER ONE

---

Value Your Creative Self

Dear Teacher,

When my first book, Chants, a poetry collection for adults, was published in 1984, I began speaking and giving readings at colleges and high schools; and when my first children’s book, A Birthday Basket for Tía, was published in 1992, I added school visits to my travels. Who wouldn’t want to spend time with young readers who say with deep feeling, “You are my favorite arthur!” These visits and professional conferences not only allow me to listen to students but also to hear you talk about your current challenges and successes.

Trust your initial, spontaneous responses and jot down your answers to the following questions. Are you creative? Does the word intimidate you? Does it motivate you? What is creativity? Name some creative people and not only the famous ones. Describe their work, occupations, or professions. What interests you about creativity? I was intrigued that my son, Bill, a scientist and writer, defined it as “the ability to discover and communicate multiple, unusual solutions.” He applied this to varied activities, from playing basketball to the arts. My daughter Libby, a lawyer and writer, also included the arts and aesthetic abilities but added inventive, practical, and problem-solving talent.

Thinking about the topic of innovation, I realized that I might once have answered as teachers occasionally do, “I’m not creative, but I’m organized.” Some people firmly respond yea or nay often based on childhood experiences and family encouragement. People can initially equate the word “creativity” solely with the arts but then mention that creativity includes the ability to make new connections, and isn’t that a major part of the teaching process? So I’m surprised when some teachers question their creativity. How can you constructively balance a room full of easily distracted bodies with different personalities, learning abilities and styles, home languages, cultures and teach them critical thinking and new skills? You must be creative! You may not have released all the inventiveness within you, but it’s there. Women are particularly prone to doubt their talents. Those prickly doubts probably never vanish.

In a letter that I’ve saved for years, a California psychologist struggling with her book manuscript wondered how she ever believed she could complete her task. She felt incompetent, foolish, “desolate.” She wrote, “I’ve been so focused on what others might think that I’ve forgotten about the meaning of my writing to me.” In Colorado, I listened to a quiet, wise English professor and writer describe the months of his sabbatical and how he couldn’t complete the project he’d proposed to his colleagues. He became reluctant to even see them and felt like a sham since he taught writing and yet couldn’t perform this complex act himself. He talked about his self-doubts, his “grief.”

You bring special gifts to the planet, gifts uniquely yours, linked to your individual experiences, education, history. So how do we begin Practice 1, to value our creative self? We exercise: We exercise the courage to value our talents. As in much of life, faith is a good place to start, in this case, faith in our capacities to enrich the world. For such important work, we need time, a welcoming place, and, ideally, friends who believe in that imaginative part of ourselves. “Time? Time in my busy life?” Yes, time.

“But I’m afraid of trying and failing. Maybe I’m not that clever. I need to grade papers, do a load of wash, change the car oil, make supper. Anyway, people will think it’s silly.” We all have excuses—children, jealous partners, unsupportive parents, to-do lists, and lethargy. The most persistent challenge: the doubting voice within, the audible frowns of our face in the mirror. All of us around the world who choose or are compelled to write, paint, discover cures for deadly illnesses, or compose a song, take a risk. We leap.

Sometimes, when I teach a writing workshop to adults, I distribute small boxes of Guatemalan worry dolls and ask my students to lay out the dolls and privately name their writing worries, to confront their fears. “What if I hurt someone I write about?” “What if I discover I’m kidding myself and I can’t really write?” “I’m afraid I’m dull and won’t have good ideas.”

What are your fears? Would it help to name them, write them down, and then push on? Journal writing as you read this book might help. Journals allow us to hear our inside self and years later provide a window back to our younger selves. With friends or colleagues, you could also start a bookjoy club or creativity loop or circle (the book has many circles) and do the suggested exploring and writing together. Sharing, bonding—and munching—we sometimes become braver.

Bored by my whining, I now have an idea journal, a place to paste images, quotations, and thoughts that appeal to me rather than dwelling on my woes. Writer and educator Donald Murray suggests a “daybook.” Devise a system that appeals to you and prompts ideas that lure you to the page, canvass, clay, yarn.

Although, like my mom, I’d always enjoyed making a nest for my family and me, a place with some visual delights, I didn’t realize then the value of designing a space to nurture my creative impulses. My home revealed what mattered to me—family photos, books, a cheerful kitchen, houseplants, light. Our surroundings, our reminders, help shape us, reveal much about us if we step back and study what we’ve chosen, says Professor Clare Cooper Marcus, author of House as a Mirror of Self. Unconsciously, we may be re-creating what comforted us or rejecting what was painful.

Look around. What messages have you left for yourself in the places where you do your most inventive work? Is it at your office, desk, kitchen, garden? How are you nudging yourself in the directions you want to be moving?

How I spend my time tells me what matters in my life. Examining my daily habits, I see the choices I’m making. Then I can ask, “What are the practices I want to develop?”

I typed my first collection of rhyming poems on the gray, portable typewriter my parents gave me when I graduated from eighth grade. Years later, my writing life as an adult began on a dining-room table. I have a tidy side, but I tend to write in clutter with dictionaries—English and Spanish—books, articles scattered around, working my way through the mess of ideas and notes. I need space. When I began making time for writing, I’d sit at the table and feel awkward, foolish. What made me think I had anything to say and that anyone would want to read my thoughts and creations? I love the mystery of writing, and part of the mystery will always be how and why I stayed faithful to the work. Expect that awkward feeling, and firmly, kindly, and with a touch of humor, pull (drag) yourself along as you did the first day of college or of a new job. Be affirming. Pat yourself on the back. If we want to develop our full selves, this isn’t really optional work. It’s essential.

Writers write where they can, unwilling to wait for the perfect spot or for a sizzling bolt of inspiration. Although I’ve written at airports, in hotel rooms, and in restaurants, when possible, I now try to find a space that lures me to want to write, that sustains me a bit. I agree with Virginia Woolf on the value of “a room of one’s own,” but it’s a luxury we don’t always have, even those of us with many luxuries. Ours is often a noisy, violent world. Advertising and films can trivialize us, portray us, particularly women, as mere consumers or manikins. It takes work to remember the challenge of being human and extra work to believe we’re unique. Retreating to a space that nurtures our good spirit assists our imagination to surface. I keep a few bears around—not the breathing, furry ones but figurines to remind me of the importance of hibernation. I’m often too busy, or believe I’m too busy, completing my endless list of tasks to retreat enough to hear my deeper self, to burrow in. I have to practice, intrigued by possibilities, by what I learn from writing

Design a special place, dear teacher, a welcoming place, even just a comfortable corner in a room or a desk or a table to foster your creative self, a tiny haven. Leave symbols that matter to you: rocks, pinecones, bird feathers, dried flowers, shells, whatever invites you to pause and ponder. Make regular appointments to savor time there. See your space as a work in progress (as we all are). Add to this private place—a photo, a saying, a book of photography. By shaping our space, in a small way, we nurture our creativity, our inner voice. Georgia O’Keeffe, who painted the objects she collected and studied—shells, rocks, bones—said, “I have used these things to say what is to me the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it.” How do we keep that sense of wonder as fresh as it is for a child?

The habit or discipline of regular time for exploring this imaginative part of ourselves, of persistently connecting and reconnecting with our inside self, yields rewards. When I began making time for writing in my life, I was working full-time as a university administrator and was “Mom” to my three children. Because helping them with homework and enjoying our dinners together were important to me, I began by setting aside the time I could, two to three hours on the weekend, for sitting still with books, paper, and a typewriter—my precomputer life—making time to develop my skills. The custom of valuing our inner selves begins to shape our week and our self-perception.

In one sense, no one will care much if we don’t write or paint. Our internal yearning or curiosity is the medium in which we plant our hopes and our desire to develop our full, complex selves. You and I are seeking to let our voices and talents unfold. Tending required. Develop the daily and weekly habits that are quiet reminders. If it’s writing you wish to explore, read, yes, for pleasure, but also read to experience fine writing. Thinking of you, I’m reading about creativity, gardens, teaching, diversity, and rereading Gifts from the Sea.

Unleash your curiosity and enthusiasm. We all need guides, teachers, master craft artists. When I choose my reading wisely, the possibilities excite me and bring me back to the page just as supportive readers of all ages do. Find the artists in your chosen medium, be it dance, sculpture, science, or education, who dazzle you. Float on that excitement into your own work.

I still remember the El Paso summer afternoon in 1981, when I opened an envelope and read that someone in Ohio wanted to publish one of my poems—my first publication. Such moments counter the rejections, the waiting. And there’s the zing of excitement that writing can bring. When I’m working on a book, my day feels different. I notice details—sounds, faces, stories. Everything matters more—or maybe, the trivial, the petty, matters less—because I’m looking and listening for threads I can lace through the book. I’m more alert, more awake. Writing daily to you is having the same effect.

“When do you feel most alive?” asked Polly, an anthropologist. She had a small studio built behind her house to return to painting, work that brought her energy and joy. Young students often ask if I ever feel lonely when I write. Quite the contrary. Perhaps because I didn’t spend time writing for many years, I feel as if I’m playing hooky when I’ve managed to make the quiet and space, internal and external, to explore with a pen or a keyboard.

When do you feel most alive?

Spend time with people who value your dream. As the wise Sufi poet Rumi wrote, “Be with those who help your being.” Through the years, friends’ faith has helped me more than they’ll ever know. In a journal entry from my late thirties, when I was feeling discouraged about choosing to write, I jotted that my dear North Carolina friend Elizabeth in one of our infrequent but long conversations asked, “But don’t you see this is part of you? You’ve let your organized side dominate. Now you must let the other side catch up.” I continued writing but months later wrote, “The writing has improved though I still feel very funny about doing it.” Find good guides and friends who cheer on your risks and dreams.

I treasure a greeting card from a librarian in Neenah, Wisconsin, in which a green seed sends down a root, then opens—and a bird flies out. Above the drawing is a Hebrew proverb, “As is the gardener, such is the garden.” How do we assist the surprise of emerging? When we value our inventive side, we release the self too often burdened by duty and thus ignored. By developing our inventive talents, we hear ourselves—explore, stretch, live more fully, and teach more effectively.

Cada cabeza es un mundo a Spanish dicho, says. A world exists in every head, a one-of-a-kind world. You can write, paint, dance, or compose a collage in a unique way. Your way.

In his evocative memoir, The Names, N. Scott Momaday, describing his mother wrote one of my favorite sentences in contemporary America literature: “She imagined who she was.” Momaday goes on to say that this same imaginative act was important in his own life. Are you and I imagining who we could be and letting that act of the imagination expand and deepen our sense of self?

One spring, my Cincinnati gardening friend Jane, who had lived in her home for years, decided to whack back a huge honeysuckle. To her surprise, in the undergrowth, she discovered a lilac bush stunted in the shade of the huge vine. Thanks to her pruning, the lilac now had space and sun. With her attention, it began to grow—and grow. The lilac thrived, climbed, bloomed. Eventually, the bush stretched to fifteen feet.

Think of that lilac perfuming the world. What a loss if it had it not flourished. Makes me think of some of our students. In my next letter, I’ll send some thoughts on the pupils we care so much about, but today I want to focus on you. Rich with meaning, powerful reminders, symbols—flowers, hearts, flags, menorahs, apples—evoke and motivate. I send you the first of my imaginary gifts: seeds. I’ll put some by me, too, as symbols for the inventive hopes and dreams locked within us, waiting for us to allow a space for them, to nurture our possibilities. With the right environment, earth’s magic: slowly, seeds sprout. Plenty of life energy in that small, one-syllable word: sprout.

Celebrating beginnings together, let’s practice valuing our unique selves. Gie, a wise Swedish neighbor and friend who spoke five languages, regularly reminded me that within us we carry inner wisdom. She certainly did. The spaces we shape externally and internally, the habits we develop to put ourselves in the company of what inspires us, help us envision what we might otherwise ignore. To help you think about your personal and professional artistic work, I send optional explorations and invitations to write. You, of course, may choose to respond by painting or writing a song or revising your garden.

Joy, dear teacher! Joy!

Exploration

First, relax. Take some deep breaths. Let go of the thinking process, and let the images come. You know how we stretch (or are supposed to) before we exercise? These explorations can help you limber up too. Draw or design a collage of your ideal space for creating. I certainly can’t draw well, but I find that doodling can loosen my imagination. Just play and avoid being judgmental. This exploration is just for you. Let your curiosity carry you along.

When you’re ready to switch to another opportunity to see yourself on the page, sketch your sprouting self. You can do this with pencil, pen, colors, clay. You’re in charge. Play!

Years ago, I spoke at a session of a program called SEED that promoted faculty book gro...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Thanks/Gracias
• About the Author
• Welcome! ¡Bienvenidos!
• 1. Value Your Creative Self
• 2. Enjoy Quiet
• 3. Gather Your Materials
• 4. Begin Your Project
• 5. Revise
• 6. Share Your Creations
• 7. Steadily Persist in Your Creative Work
• Hope/Esperanza
• Questions for Exploration
• Suggested Reading
• Other Books by Pat Mora