Brainstorming in Jordan

Yikes!

Why did I "yike" upon reading that "brainstorming" as a mode of creative thinking is being introduced in Jordanian classrooms? Because, to begin with, I don't think highly of brainstorming, at least of the institutionalized form of it, in an American classroom setting.

Secondly, it's not that the Jordanians have discovered for themselves the virtue of brainstorming as a learning method. It's being foisted upon them, as it were, by Americans.

I'm not sure how American brainstorming will work in a Jordanian class.

Think Unlimited is an educational non-profit started by two Peace Corp workers, Shaylyn and James Garrett, whose mission is to teach creative thinking and problem solving in Jordanian classrooms.

An afterthought: The American system of K-12 education is excellent and a sophisticated scientific approach has gone into the making of it. However, it can become, at times, too rigidly dogmatic and insistent on prioritizing certain approaches to teaching above other.

"Creative" thinking has, in my opinion, settled into a dogma rather than a real, meaningful and dynamic activity in the American classroom. It's morphed into a trendy thing for teachers.

Nobody can define what it actually is, but an elite corp of decision-makers insist, like propagandists of a particular system, that it's the next best thing in learning to inventing a new alphabet.

At best, the mandate to "think creatively" simply means "be as quirky as you can."

Besides, what's wrong with a bit of rote memory as a learning method?

As a college English Professor, I tinge my ideas of effective learning with a bit of a belief in the virtue of old-fashioned memorizing and re-writing of what's been said by a culture's "best" and the "brightest" (forgive me for, not only, reverting to an Arnoldian dictum in an era of the Internet, but also mis-quoting Matt Arnold).

I believe learners can learn something valuable from a contra-brainstorming exercise now and then, especially what constitutes a "good" thought, a sentence, an idea.