This week I've been thinking about how to teach kids to be resilient -- ideally without "teaching" them to be resilient. Much better if they just happen to learn it from me, I think. Also, as we continue to try to squelch our left brains and open up our right brains doing drawing exercises, I've been thinking about attention to detail and really looking at things and how it affects the way I think about things. Trying to picture what it would feel like to draw something does affect the way I end up drawing it. And showing violin students exactly how to visualize and feel their fingers this week, and then play? They improved so much that some of them were suspicious. That can't work, right? But it does.
Drawing things and trying to pay attention to every little detail (I'm not that good at it yet) and then picturing what it would feel like to draw it made me wonder whether I could do the reverse during Thursday afternoon tango practice with P: could I visualize the line of my body as I danced? Ye-e-e-sss, but it was wicked difficult. :-P Could I focus on what it sounded like as we danced? Yes, and also what C & L's two huge cats sounded like upstairs as they chased each other around the kitchen ("romance de barrio tu amor"--clunkaclunkaclunkaclunka--)
Paying attention to visual detail and helping violin students pay attention to kinesthetic detail made me really enjoy the connections that I was making with different parts of my life, and I thought 'wow, if I'm trying to teach kids to be more creative, then these drawing exercises and writing exercises and maybe...listening exercises? dance exercises? could get the connections going.' Then I thought about resilience and how part of being resilient is being able to look at a crappy situation carefully and see a kernel of good in it, something that you maybe didn't notice before when you first looked.
How to take all of these ideas and make them into some way to show kids how to be creative and resilient? Not sure yet, but the seeds of thought are starting. And I'm becoming more convinced that creativity and resilience are part of the same thing.