A Small Plant Study
This week, I decided to tackle an intelligence that is neither my weakest nor my strongest: nature intelligence. I have a complicated relationship with nature. I was deathly afraid of all things creepy-crawly so I mostly just tried to avoid things like hikes, camping, etc. As I’ve grown up, I have found that the rewards of being out in nature far outweigh the potential risks of encountering things with more than six legs. While it would have been nice to go for a hike in this challenge, my lack of a car and the heat in Boston this past week led me to try something else. For this challenge, I decided to re-pot a new succulent that I got and then go one step further to sketch it and compile some basic care information about it.
My new plant in its old pot next to its new home!
I’ve re-potted plants before and had some potting soil on hand, so I set everything up and got to work. A spoon, a small pile of dirt, many damp paper towels, and a single Clorox wipe later, my plant was in its new pot. During a short research process, I tried to identify my plant and ended up identifying it as echeveria pulvinata, or a chenille plant. My particular one grew from a clipping that one of my friends took in his mom’s garden at home in California.
After potting my plant, I moved on to the next stage of my creativity challenge: drawing it. When I draw, I normally work from pictures online so I decided to draw from the actual live plant this time. Doing this allowed me to notice more about the plant: the fuzzy texture of the leaves, the reddish color of the tips and outsides of the leaves, the tough, dry looking stem of the plant, and the small new leaves growing from the top. I took my time with my sketch and tried to make it as accurate as possible. I started with a pencil drawing, then added some watercolor pencil for color and finally inked the pencil lines at the e
Finally, I wrote some information about my plant on the side, to help me remember how to take care of it. I’m not a bad plant mom (I don’t think) but I have caused the unnecessary deaths of a few plants in my past. Hopefully this will help me take care of it better!
The thing that stuck out to me most about my creativity challenge this week was how relaxing and fun it was. In thinking about the readings this week, this challenge also made me realize how much I enjoy creating alone. I also like creating alongside others, but generally not while working on the same thing. I have a hard time giving up control. When I’ve worked on creative projects in groups in the past, I’ve mostly just found it frustrating. These experiences make me want to encourage collaborative creation in the classroom, not just as something that can be chaotic and fun, but also as something that can be legitimately productive and beautiful. I want to foster creative relationships like the one described in Questlove’s book, between the author and Tariq. The author describes the moment that “a bond began to form. It was a bond of mutual respect but also mutual need. He saw that his performances were greatly improved by backing percussion, and I saw how my growing sampler skills could turn into something that had real social and cultural power” (Questlove). I want to provide my students with enough flexible group projects throughout my curriculum that they can work with other students often. I want my students to be able to explore their talents and the talents of their peers and work together to create something.
After reading the excerpt from Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind, I like the idea of using drawing to emphasize the relationships between things that, when considered, can help turn students into experts on symphony. Design thinking similarly emphasizes out of the box thinking and seeing the big picture. As Daniel Pink describes it, symphony “is the capacity to synthesize rather than to analyze; to see relationships between seemingly unrelated fields; to detect broad patterns rather than to deliver specific answers; and to invent something new by combining elements nobody else thought to pair”. I want to push my students to consider things from multiple angles and perspectives. I want to push my students to have confidence in themselves and their ideas and to not be afraid of creativity. I want to push my students to work collaboratively on creative solutions to problems. As for how to do all of this, I think my strategies to engage students in open-ended, creative activities together will develop in the coming years as I find my footing as a teacher. However, I truly believe that design thinking is the best place to start in this endeavor.
References
Pink, Daniel. A Whole New Mind. Penguin Group LLC, New York City. 2006.
Questlove. Creative Quest. Harpercollins, 2018.