Creative Inventiveness With Materials

If there is one thing more than any other that helps to create a liberating and stimulating atmosphere for growing, it is the learning materials that teachers make available to their students. Materials may be seen, heard, examined, rejected, accepted, used, dispensed with, recovered, re-created, and seen anew.

Materials may be made up entirely of symbols-letters, figures, musical notes-or they may be of the flesh and blood of living things as are the two goats that may be staying in a small shed in a corner of a playground. One can never be completely surprised of the form that materials take: one may hear a rooster crowing from the fenced-off enclosure near the door of a first-grade room; or see against a hill at the north end of some campus, near the physics laboratory, the outline of a cyclotron, or watch a library rising where before there was only a vacant lot. The art in the management of materials is to have them at the right place, at the right time, in proper condition and amount, and appropriate to the need of the moment; the right book for the little boy in the front row, the fresh egg for the experiment in osmosis, the new film on transportation that introduces the jet plane, enough copies of the ''Mysterious Cat'' for the fourth-grade choral reading, an extra bag of apples for the children who might have forgotten to bring theirs.

There are some schools where the problem is a death of materials; but more often the problem with materials arises from a willingness to accept the obvious, the humdrum, the dull, the usual. Teachers sometimes fail to distinguish between material that is useful for drill or looking up information and material that introduces new values and ideals, stimulates new feelings, and provides the precise and substantive knowledge that is needed at he ''input stage'' of creative thinking and doing. ''....even creativity requires a sense of criticism and precision.''

Utilizing Humble Things Creatively

Often it is in the use of nearby, humble things that a teacher can encourage in his students the power of observation and appreciation. Few materials introduced in to a class for just three purposes have as delightful results as the apple. This was one of the resources used in a unit in English for high school which, like the unit for second graders, encouraged, on a more adult level, exploration of the world of the five senses. Smell, taste, sound, sight, touch-these were the proper subject of study. To start off the adventure each student brought to class an apple of this choice; Jonathan, Spitzenburg, Northern Spy, Delecious, McIntosh. As they studied the apple, one turned it slowly in the light, sniffed it, felt it, and finally devoured it. In this process, they recorded the words and phrases through which they might communicate to others the sensations and thoughts that crowded in on them. A class list composed of contributions from students began to look like this:

Sight - red, rosy, autumn scarlet, ivory flesh, flecked, shining, striped

Sound - swish, crunch, crack

Taste - - refreshing, juicy, cool, moist, tart, mealy

Touch - - waxy, smooth, rounded, tapering

Smell - - aromatic, fragrant, tangy

Aware that much of the aesthetic satisfaction of language Rosetta Stone is found in imagery, the members of the class tried their hand at the field of association;

red berries against white snow

autumn haze in the valleys

red sumac

Halloween

winter fires

With words and ideas on paper and on the chalkboard, the class was now ready for writing. Each student wrote no more than a page to record in whatever way he wished the thoughts that had come to him during the feast of apples. The rarity of the experience, the emphasis upon the unique and the personal, the informality of the relationships engendered between teacher and students, the common search for meanings and words to express them, the appreciation of each one's final ''masterpiece'' as it was shared in the group-all led to transactions of the kind that permits everyone to be himself and to write freely of himself and his feelings. No none was limited to a single topic. As a result, there were papers about the taste of Jello, Thanksgiving turkey, toothpaste, and Chinese teas as well as apples.