Minding Education for Educating the mind

Introduction

Open your mind,

Let your brain breathe

            Open your mind only once and you will never be able to close it again. With an open mind, life looks infinite and interesting, but some people persistently never want to open their minds for fear they should be disturbed by the bright evidence that they were in the dark. There are people who look as if they prefer sticking to ignorance. There are no stupid learners except the ones who never accept openness and improvement. They don’t want to exert any mind effort. They just wait for the teacher to offer them readymade answers to global issues. When teachers give anything, they must show that every piece of knowledge has an expiration date. Nothing is permanent in knowledge. The previous year already belongs to the far primitive past. Therefore learners have to make use of what they learn at school in progressing by themselves using their minds. This way they’ll perceive the world from different angles as it will have varied shapes, colors and dimensions. They’ll gain a new perspective for transforming old views and ideas into a powerful tool for improvement which will not only affect the world around them, but it will have a positive impact on their future.

            The social web has greatly affected the students’ knowledge and beliefs as the mind is very sensitive to the environment it belongs to. The social media has the power to shape a new risky culture for the new generation. Now most of the youth are hooked on the multiplying social networking sites, and they are normally receiving huge quantities of information that forge their thoughts and tendencies. They have neither the time nor the skills necessary to sift, pick up, adapt and adopt knowingly. The impact is so significant that school has to boost the students’ minds to be able to evaluate and filter the input. Most of the information they encounter is wide-ranging and often fallacious or contradictory. It is also far from being scientifically proven. Most of it is generally an amalgamation of impressions and volatile pieces of information that have no basis in reality. Therefore, the damage on the brain is fatal, and it could lead to serious dysfunction of the mind, or even complete brainwash.

            If you cannot understand a text in the way the author wants you to understand it, it is not the writer’s problem, and it is not yours either. I am sure the problem is in the content of the text. Fair enough, isn’t it? Maybe, but there should be a certain degree of compatibility between the waves of transmission and those of reception; otherwise both the writer’s mind and yours have different natures. The writer and the reader are accomplices in forming the meaning of the text. The mind is the machine which can transmit and receive information according to its references or conceptions based on formerly installed programs. That’s why closed minds never tolerate anything which doesn’t dovetail with its already existing fossilized designs and thinking patterns. Open minds, on the other hand, have habits and traits which are so flexible that they can receive, analyze, synchronize, and then accept or reject providing sufficient arguments for each of both reactions. Therefore, it all depends on the type of mind one has.

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Expressing Concession & Contrast Creatively

Introduction

            At school, creativity killers are numerous, and they are not easily detectable because they are mostly unintentional. It is after rigorous investigations that they can be spotted and avoided for more creativity among the learners. Basically, creativity is killed by orders, fear, control, conformity, conditioning and so on. Susan Greenfield says that “growing up” is what kills creativity. True, because adults have already developed ways to do things and refuse to think about alternative ways. Creativity is revived by the need for something, like saving time, effort, material, space, money, energy and a lot more. This reminds me of the old proverb which goes, “The art of necessity is strange, it makes vile things precious”

            Simply, what kills creativity at school is “Do it this way”. And it is in tests that the phenomenon is amplified, “Rewrite as indicated” or “Rewrite with the words given”. When we ask the students to do an activity in a predisposed way, they don’t have enough options to think creatively. However, like problem solving, when we ask them to do an exercise in their own way, they might astonish us by doing it in a way that has never come across our minds, and that’s creativity.

            “Here is a “useless” thing, what can you do with it? How can you make it useful for something? Give it a new feature to make it functional somehow”. These instructions incite creativity and allow the students to think beyond the usual. Believe me if the students were given freedom to do a task in their own way, they would do it marvelously well. They can even reveal a lot about their thinking strategies, and why not about their innate genius faculties. On the other hand, those with little or no imagination will be forced to sharpen their imagination and thinking skills to come up with rewarding results.

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