Entrance Slip: What gets lost in the scientific process

At the very beginning of Janet Bavelas' piece, when she's describing the discrepancies between how we do research and how it's taught, she briefly describes how creativity does get included in current 'research' education. She mentions the dichotomy of people being sorted into 'creative' and 'uncreative', and the "fuzzy romanticism" of the common anecdotes. She then contrasts this with her proposed logical, process-based creativity that can be learned. I had never really considered this, but I think this is where my view of myself as an 'uncreative' person came from. Whenever creativity was portrayed in school, it was always one of the first two ways that Bavelas described, never her way. Creative moments in math/science were always shown in the sudden 'eureka' moments that are so inaccessible. The sudden creative awareness always came from a genius mind that noticed all these brilliant things around them and were 'instantly' able to see it, understand it, and tie it together. Whether or not that's how it actually happened, that's how it was portrayed. Creativity stemmed from a staggering intellect and natural ability, and was produced in sudden, unexplainable, unreproducible bursts. In other subjects, creativity was a skill that you just did. Like in art: either you had creative skill to make a cool piece, or you didn't. The class taught you the skills to do the art, but not the creativity to think of the art. Creativity was something you just had to have. Because of all that, I always viewed myself as an uncreative person, and creativity was something I viewed as an inherent skill or a consequence of expertise, thus something unattainable to me. With Bavelas' perspective of creativity as a process one can learn, it makes me really think about how we frame creativity, discovery, and inquiry. Often we essentially tell kids to just "think about it" when proposing inquiry. We're essentially expecting them to just have creativity and go forth with it, but many people don't work like that. I definitely don't. In the few times math was done through inquiry in my schooling, I hated it, because it was done in a 'figure it out' kind of way. I was given a problem and told to just explore it, but that wasn't something I knew how to do. I wasn't taught how to be creative and explore. I had no idea where to start or what to do, and I got overwhelmed, embarrassed, and discouraged. This is such an important framing of creativity that Bavelas is stating, and it's one I never considered before.

Bavelas also describes her "what not to do's" with a fledgling idea. She frames all her discussion in psychology, but the ideas are transferable to math. For students, I often see them falling into the trap of dismissing new ideas. I often see students working on a problem and, if they end up going down a path slightly different to the method shown in class, they immediately stop, say "I don't know what I'm doing", and erase it. Students rarely stop to look at the logic they've used up to that point, decide whether it's flawed or not, fix any flaws, and then continue. They assume that if it's not the exact teacher's way, that it's wrong, and they abandon it. Often, the student was right and was simply taking a different path down the known method, or was leading towards a new method altogether. Students often don't have the confidence or awareness that they can take their time, explore a little, and still find the right answer. Students often get embarrassed by wrong work, thinking they need to instantly know how to do it and get the right answer. Just this past week on practicum, I was marking tests, and one student had erased all their work for a question and left it blank instead. They hadn't erased it perfectly though, and I could see what they had been doing. They had been right! They weren't all the way there, but they were on the right track and had done quality work, but they had been unsure, and so they had immediately abandoned it and erased it for any fear of being wrong. Such a crucial part of creativity in science and inquiry is the okay-ness with being wrong. We need to experiment, sometimes think ourselves into a corner, and then find a new idea and work our way out. Given the set up of school and the way we present material, students often do not have an environment to do this type of thinking.

I actually think the ideas about bias that Bavelas mentions and that she quotes Feynman as describing can really apply to the inquiry struggles of students in math. Bavelas talks about categorizing, describing, and applying structure too early as a killer of ideas, and Feynman's quote discusses the dangers of going in with a preconceived idea of what you're looking for. I think all this relates to student's interactions with math. Students often go in looking for a simple solution. They want a step by step formula to answer the question, and they want to group and categorize formulas into easy "when do I apply this" check boxes. Students kill their own creativity by structuring all math. Even when they're at the beginning of a unit and they're still learning the 'lay of the land', they're already categorizing and describing, killing any ideas or wonder they might have. Bavelas summarises this into the positive reminder: "Have faith". This is a perfect reminder for our students. Have faith in yourself, in your wondering, and your ability to work with it. This isn't blind faith, or un-due confidence. You may not find the right answer, you may not figure it out, but have faith that you can try. Don't discount yourself right at the beginning, and don't equate success with worth. Don't relegate your faith in yourself to faith in success, instead, have faith in the work you'll do, the ideas you'll try, the creativity you'll produce, the interesting examples you'll find, the connections you'll make.