Baby Pierre helped me learn creativity
and every time I see him, I remember how he did it
HERE WE GO AGAIN
Last week we all had to drag ourselves through some of America’s worst social and political moments in our history as our government simultaneously went to war against a foreign country and its own citizens.
And people died on the city streets in both cases.
Personally, I think it was a creative success to write about Electric Vehicles while all that was going on and make connections to these other big stories in the day. Today, there are such obvious social and political connections in our world, it’s difficult to write about anything without getting political.
But this week I’m focusing on a couple of new ideas I have to communicate around Creativity. These are ideas I’ve used in teaching over the years and some I’ve used in my own life and career as a media producer and now as an artist.
One place I learned most about Creativity was during what we called “Junior High School.” I had so many creative classes like Home Economics where I learned to cook and make Lemon Meringue pie. I also had wood shop, where we learned to make creative objects with wood, and Small Engine Repair where we created ways to fix broken lawn mowers with the resources we had available at the school.
However, most of what I learned about Creativity in school happened in Mrs. Taylor’s class.
In the photo montage—from my 1974, 8th grade yearbook Humanities section—you can see photographs of me behind the video camera and on the right side closest to the television. In that shot we were watching videos we made in class.
The school’s Librarian, Mrs. Griswald, received a grant that year which she used to purchase 3/4 in., reel to reel, portable video equipment and a camera.
My teacher, Mrs. Taylor, got the equipment to use in our class. Mrs. Taylor was a brand new teacher at the time.
At one point she just handed me the equipment and told us to start making videos.
GO BE CREATIVE!
Think about this scenario for a minute.
I’m 13 years old in 1974.
A teacher hands me thousands of dollars worth of video equipment and tells me to be creative by instructing me to go out and make videos.
So, I made videos!
However, it was more complicated than that. Much more.
There had to be a script. The video would need editing. Students would have to act in the plays or shows we created.
If you made a show about us it would be about a bunch of kids in an 8th grade classroom thinking up ideas and turning them into tv shows.
Like the Dick Van Dyke show.
CREATING SOMETHING OUT OF NOTHING
We didn’t really have much in terms of operating instructions so we became creative many different ways and the creativity depended on who was working on the project and what they brought to the group.
In one video we did a spoof on late night talk shows. In one segment the host interviewed William Shakespeare as if he were alive in 1974. Thinking back today, I recall our show looked a lot like what became a short lived Norman Lear/Alan Thicke show about late night tv shows.
That was a show called Fernwood 2 Night which aired for just a few months three years later in 1977.
We did a show called “Mission Smashed” which was a spoof on the popular tv show Mission Impossible from those times. I recall a toilet flush sound effect we used to add emphasis to different points in the story.
We had to edit in the camera which meant each show had to have the plot written down in sequence so we could shoot each segment or scene in order. The recorder was placed into the record mode and then paused while we set up the next shot. The camera was placed in position for the next scene or shot and the recorder was taken out of pause to shoot the next clip.
We learned there had to be a director to get “quiet on the set,” instruct the camera operator to “roll tape,” and tell the actors when it’s time for “action!”
I later learned during college this type of editing was called in-camera editing or pause-edits. We had a slightly more complicated editing system in college which involved going from “tape to tape” using two machines to transfer and pause-edit the segments on to the second tape.
This way you could shoot any scene in any order and edit into the final piece in the proper sequence.
The fancy new editing decks we used had a two and a half second “pre-roll” when placed in the editing mode. That meant, when you pressed go in the edit process, you had to use a stop watch to know when to actually un-pause the editing deck and begin the new recording.
We’ll see a clip from one of those videos next week!
TODAY IT’S MUCH EASIER TO BE CREATIVE
Beginning in 2015, I taught mostly 8th grade Social Science and a Journalism/Current Events class for the James Denman Middle School in San Francisco. The first year I taught at Denman we received a grant from the Verizon Innovative Learning program to deploy tablets to every student and teacher in the school.
One of the first places these devices impacted the school, and the learning in my classroom, was in the multimedia class Denman TV.
Being able to quickly create images, video, and sound and do editing all on one device was a big change when it came to getting students to think of creative ways to tell stories with video.
Just like I did when I was in 8th grade.
For eight years I purposefully and methodically created an open curriculum that allowed students to express themselves in any way they could imagine about any topic they were interested in at the time.
This strategy worked well with the SFUSD 2025 district-wide learning goals at the time which included an emphasis on student voice and choice.
We did have plenty of instruction in the class but the majority of the time was spent creating videos which always began with an assignment prompt and a “mini-storyboard” document they needed to complete before they could start their projects.
This week I want to share a brief clip from the class. It includes my good friend and colleague Dartanyan Brown when he Zoomed into my classroom from Iowa during the Spring of 2023 to lead some interesting discussion about creativity.
In the class we focused on: 1) how you know you are being creative; 2) when you know you are being creative; and 3) what are some of the things you typically are doing when you are at your most creative.
Here Dartanyan talks (3:50) about the importance of writing and what’s happening when you practice writing and when you practice writing every day.
Remember, these students have spent their entire middle school days working on tablets and computers in almost every class they had including PE. The Current Events Multimedia class Denman TV also had to write but they wrote more than words.
They also wrote with photographs, sound, and video.
Just like I did when I was in 8th grade.
But it’s always good to remember that you should start your work with writing. That is the best way to Communicate Your Ideas.
I have a few links to the class Vimeo archive below and here is a peek into my classroom when I did the (:37) introduction to their collective work on “What Makes You Happy at Denman?”
Additional videos from @DenmanTV archive:
Denman Art Electives DTV does a video about arts at Denman
Journalism Elective DTV is “where students express themselves through film”
Is ChatGPT (AI) Good for Education DTV opinion on artificial intelligence
SCHOOL HAS CHANGED AND CREATIVITY IS STRONG
To me it was no surprise that I became a middle school teacher and taught hundreds of students for 10 years—exactly the way Mrs. Taylor taught me.
Well, not exactly. The tools were far superior and they had tons of experience even in 6th grade.
But the learning was the same. I know because I was there both times!
When I was in high school it was Photography that gave me the opportunity to express creativity. Baby Pierre is the best expression I have of the success of those endeavors today.
Working as an artist is the newest way I am communicating my ideas creatively. I’m very excited for the opportunities I’ll have to do that in 2026.
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