The Miracle of Creativity

We hear a lot in the media about the “drive to achieve” that fuels success in the classroom and in life. This drive propels an individual to strive toward accomplishing admirable goals and reaping prized rewards. The question, “What does it take to be successful?” undergirds popular philosophy of gifted education. And it induces parents to exhort their children to try harder to succeed in school. Is this what giftedness is all about? The potential for success? I don’t think so.

I think what drives the gifted child or adult is the need to create. Creativity is a powerful, mysterious force. It has no curriculum. It is its own reward. It permeates every aspect of existence. The need to create can be seen in the single-mindedness of the toddler who spends hours with tape, cardboard and imagination. In the teacher who stays until dark to construct exciting bulletin boards. In the homemaker who invents new dishes or a beautiful, comfortable home. In the endless ideas that come—sometimes in the middle of the night—all begging for our attention, stretching the limits of time.

Diana Zaheer

Diana Zaheer teaches healing tools from many different traditions and guides people from all over the world. You can find out more about her and her approach here.

In February, the Colorado Legislature agreed to move forward with a study to determine whether biochar could effectively help to cap orphaned oil and gas wells. There are estimated to be over three million abandoned oil wells nationwide, many of which leak climate warming gasses into the atmosphere. The gasses can also have negative effects on the health of people and animals living near the wells. 

Biochar is made through a process called pyrolysis in which wood and other organic materials are burned at very high temperatures while oxygen is removed from the chamber. Biochar can sequester and keep carbon inert for millennia. If successful, the biochar will not only cap the wells but sequester the carbon dioxide and methane, removing it from the carbon cycle. This is an important approach that goes hand in hand with efforts to release fewer harmful gasses into the atmosphere. Additionally, the trees that are being used to make biochar come from beetle kill and forest fires across Colorado. Using them to make this material prevents them from being burned and releasing more carbon dioxide. 

Lawmakers hope that this new process will not only help Colorado but could become a model for other states. If oil wells nationwide were largely capped experts estimate that it could keep millions to billions of tons of carbon dioxide from being released into the atmosphere. I am excited about this approach because it is doubly good for the environment by both sequestering and limiting the release of carbon dioxide, and it has the potential to have a huge impact.

Betsy Franco, a prolific author of more than 80 books for children, has created 20 delightful poems depicting mathematics at home, in school, during school breaks, and in fun verses that examine the world at large and are labeled as math musings. Priscilla Tey’s frolicsome illustrations superbly complement the text of Counting in Dog Years. In her new, best-selling book, Visual Thinking, Temple Grandin says we are creating a generation of students who hate math. She says, “what kids need are real-life projects.” This is exactly what Betsy Franco delivers in this engaging book. She makes mathematics real and fun, rekindling the love of math that is our children’s birthright. 

Nancy B. Miller, Ph.D.

Editor of Advanced Development, Nancy B. Miller, Ph.D., serves as a Board Member for our nonprofit agency, the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development (ISAD), is one of GDC’s assessors, and conducts research on gifted children and adults. A social psychologist, Nancy discovered Dabrowski’s theory as a graduate student at the University of Denver. For her dissertation, she developed a coding system to assess levels of emotional development. For more than 3 decades, she has worked, presented, and published with Linda Silverman and Frank Falk.