How to Kill a Kid's Creativity

“Hey Dean, have you written that essay we had to write for homework?”

Adrian, my friend, was rather excited about the creative treatment he had given our homework, essay assignment.

We had to write an essay from the perspective of being a British soldier in the Anglo Zulu War. A war where the Zulu nation, with far inferior technology but far superior man power defeated the British.

We had to ‘write home to our loved ones and explain how the war was going.’

We had all been to see the movie named ‘Zulu Dawn’ as a class outing. It was part of our history syllabus, part of the history of the country where I was born.

Adrian continued excitedly.

“I decided I would write my essay as a British officer, not just a soldier, and I would write my last letter to my lovely fiance back in Britain. I was facing my death because of the Zulu attack and as I was putting the finishing touches on my letter, a Zulu spear pierces my heart. I never finished my letter, and then, this is the best part, the Zulu King, finds my letter and, being honourable in war, makes sure that it reaches my fiance in England.”

Adrian was excited about how he had planned and structured his essay, and he showed me he had written the two pages required and then he had started the third page and he had written I want to… and then his pen runs down the page, as the spear hits him, and he writes ‘good bye’ in a scribble format, obviously suffering from the spear piercing him, as he was still trying to finish his letter to his fiance.

Now we were twelve years old and none of the rest of us had been as creative as Adrian in the completion of our homework. Most of us just regurgitated some scenes from the movie, but had no ‘story within a story.’

We were merely describing scenes from the movie. There was no true love story, or dramatic death and execution in any of the rest of the essays. Other than rather documentary like descriptions of our men dying in battle.

I thought, ‘Wow! Adrian is surely going to get exceptional marks for the effort he put in.’ He had written his essay with real feeling and was so excited to hand in his creative treatment.

Well, two days later, we received our essays back after the teacher had assessed them, with red ink pointing out our spelling and grammatical errors. She gave us an ‘overall impression remark’ at the end.

Adrian’s face was full of excited expectation, and I looked over at him and gestured with a thumbs up.

I looked at my essay book and I had received the following comment from the teacher. ‘Good effort and true to life.’ Or something to that effect.

I was excited to see what Adrian’s great story would receive. I asked him eagerly, but he was looking like his dog had just died.

“Hey Adrian, why are you so down? I bet you got excellent comments on your story. It was so great!” I said, thinking that the great comments he would have received would cheer him up.

He passed his essay book over to me, and there were those words that are forever etched in my memory, in red thick lettered ink and all capitals.

Two words that killed the creativity in that kid, the words.

‘HOW STUPID.’

Specifically referring to how the British officer in his story had died and struggled to write ‘good bye’ at the end of his story.

And that folks was the day that Adrian’s creativity died…