Thinking about creativity – exercise 1
TED is a website that showcases often unknown speakers with powerful ideas to enable them to reach a global audience through web videos.
Be warned! There is a noisy start to this video, in which Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.
There are three exercises based on this talk, as it is long – about 20 minutes. The second exercise will take you through the talk word for word, and the third exercise is a summary.
Sir Robinson has a light, jokey manner which is very common in people who give lectures in Britain. You can hear people giggling in amusement every now and then. It is important to understand that, despite the way he talks about creativity he is not under-estimating the importance of knowledge – that to be creative does not mean all intellectual processes stop!
Can you put his amusing comments in the order in which you hear them?
A He makes a joke about teachers not getting invited back to dinner parties because they are boring.
B He relates an amusing incident involving some young boys who interpreted their lines wrongly.
C He makes a joke about academics being very cerebral, and living in their heads.
D He pretends he is about to leave the lecture hall.
E He jokes about being lazy, as a young student.
F He pretends he looks like a ballet dancer.
G He makes people laugh about the idea that if you’re an artist you’re ill in some way.
H He cracks a joke at his own expense about his cooking.
I He creates a hyperbolic phrase based on the world of entertainment and adapts it for his own anecdote.
J He pretends that he has run out of anything to say, by joking that he is about to tell the audience his own life story.
K He makes a joke about people not wanting to be talked at by people interested in education.
Q He makes a joke about being an indulgent, proud and pushy parent.
L He develops for the sake of amusement the opinion that women often voice about men ‘getting it wrong’.
M He makes a joke about his son’s girlfriend, saying she was the main reason they were leaving the country.
N He jokes about his wife being bad at cooking.
O He makes his audience laugh by conjuring up the idea of Shakespeare being a child.
P He makes a joke about teachers not getting invited to dinner parties.
R He makes a joke about academics being unmusical, saying they move off the beat.
S He makes a joke about a little girl who was confident she knew what God looked like, and that she could draw Him.
T He makes a joke about academics being ‘a different form of life’.
U He makes an amusing anecdote more so by introducing the idea of his wife carrying out major heart surgery while busy at home with household tasks.