Thursday, December 18, 2008

Creativity is never a single act

Our students quickly learned that creativity is never a single act. Creativity is always a lengthy process requiring huge amounts of preparation and persistence. As counter-example to the Mozart myth, they learned that Beethoven filled notebook after notebook with musical dead ends and futile variations in painstaking composition. They considered that the lack of documented trial-and-error for Mozart didn't necessarily mean that he didn't struggle, too, though in his case those struggles seem to have taken place in his head rather than on paper.


-Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein, Psychology Today blog "Teaching Creativity 2"

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