I am going through the book “Creative Acts for Curious People”, a collection of prompts from the d school at Stanford.

I keep having the thought that ‘my students can’t handle/understand/think that deeply about that topic. I am not sure that I am wrong on those assessments but also just realized that I’m accepting that limitation without any attempt to modify or adapt the concept to a middle school class.

Part of the problem is very real – deep conversations can happen in class, but expecting the majority of the class to integrate that concept or experience quickly is not going to happen. I’ve literally been trying this for years.

But what CAN happen is countless possibilities that I am in a great position to discover.

This will be painful, but I will be listing the limitations I see in my thinking as I go through the 80 exercises. These can become brainstorming prompts in the future.

Things I think my students might not be able to handle:

Students cannot handle picking a theme or sense and physically following it into the community for an hour. Safety aside, many would not be able to do it, even with an honest effort.

The seeing exercise – looking at a busy picture and noting down what you observe, repeated daily. Whole class motivation would make this a tough exercise.

Having a wordless conversation with only photos from the past day (taken intentionally) would not fly

‘Think about the ppl you consider creative. What sets them apart? What do they do differently? What do maturity and muscle mean to you in the creative work you do? How could you expose yourself to greater variety to build these two skills?” Students would have a hard time articulating this.