XplanaZine

My dad had a saying that he’d always pull out when one of us would suggest a major change in the way the family did something. “Better to stick with what brung you,” he’d say.

Now, this isn’t to say that my father was opposed to change. Not at all. He is an intelligent and adaptable man who grew up during the Great Depression and has survived and embraced incredible changes in the world and in his personal life. No, it’s not that he’s opposed to change — he just doesn’t think you should rush in to it without carefully weighing the pros and cons of leaving your current reality.

“Better to stick with what brung you,” he’s always say.

I’ve been thinking about that a good bit the last couple of weeks. You see, my wife and I have been riffing on the theme of writers, musicians, artists, and film makers who achieve greatness at a certain point in their careers — often at a young age — and then seem to enter a phase of decline for the rest of their lives. From García Márquez to George Lucas, we’ve taken a close look at the role that “more stuff” has played in that decline.

In particular, I believe that many creative people do their best work when they don’t have anything other than their basic imagination. When there’s no public, not technological wizardry, no opulent surroundings or support staff — when there’s only the creator and her imagination, without constraints, it’s often easier to let the creative genius explore in its highest form.

In the artist’s life, it’s often easy to do wildly imaginative work early on because there aren’t any real constraints. There’s no one to write for, no commercial partners to cater to, and very little in the way of resources with which to work. It’s just creator and creative energy. And the results can be astounding. Later on, as success happens, as money or public or technology enter the process, the purity of the creative drive is dulled. Of course, my father never said it would be easy to “stick with what brung you.”

I’m talking about all of this because I think that it is something terribly important for good teachers to hear. My greatest fear is not that we won’t have adequate technology to reach the children of the world, but rather that we lack sufficient creative teaching energy to make good use of it all. I’m afraid that our wealth of technology could potentially hamper us from doing our best teaching. I believe our best work comes when we strip away all the trappings of classes and students and computers and Google and video. I believe we are at our creative best as teachers when we start with just a subject and our imagination, wondering how we might best encapsulate the knowledge at hand to pass along the generations. It’s where we all started out at one point, and it’s not necessarily a bad idea to stick with what brung us.

Naturally, the fact that I am sending this out via blog and podcast means that I have already resigned myself to having lost the pure creative energy of my simpler years. But I do find that, even for as tainted a teacher as I, it helps to get back to Luckenbach, back to the basics of life. So, here are a couple of suggestions for all of us who teach. I hope these will help you get back to what brung you, back to a wealth of creative energy.

1. Stop thinking about technology (for just a minute).
2. Focus only on what it is you need to say or communicate.
3. Forget about a specific audience.
4. Forget about any particular theory or best practice you may have picked up in the last twenty years.
5. Forget about any way you’ve ever said or communicated this information before.
6. Forget about any way you’ve ever heard someone else say or communicate this information before.
7. Just think about what it is you need to say or communicate.
8. What is the simplest way it can be said or communicated?
9. How can you say it so that it will be understood equally well be the greatest number of people possible?
10. That is your lesson. That is what brung you. The rest is merely reflection.

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