in "The Human Lives Behind the Labels" by Bill Bigelow, he talked about the students' descriptions of a soccer ball and how unimaginative they were. In all honesty, how creative would you have been in this situation (before having heard the poem he read). Do you think this is an excercise that might be relevant in your classroom?

I absolutely think this excercise could be used in my classroom. I think the lack of creativity [in the first writing he had his students do] is the point of the excercise. It shows the stark and drastic difference between the writings with and without the people in mind. The creativity begins to flow when students are asked to think deeper and go beyond where they initially traveled. I like this activity!

I probably would have been about as interesting as the students in the article were: its black, white, and made up of a bunch of polygons. I think in a Math classroom, you could ask the students to write about it from the point of view of a shape (or other geometrical concept, ex: line segment) that helps make the ball. (Have you ever read The Greedy Triangle?) That could get the creative juices flowing...

Kate and I are definitely on the same page with this one: I think that often, standardized tests and daily routines suck the creativity out of students. English class is the perfect opportunity for children to express themselves and their unique sense of originality. I think that learning to examine, question, observe and express are skills left out of exams, but essential to producing free-thinking adults. This activity seemed to cultivate all these skills while leaving the students with an important lesson: seeing past the obvious often reveals hidden beauty and depth.

Good activity!