Posts tagged as:

problem solving

Critical Thinking 101: Understanding Mutual Exclusion

November 3, 2011

(…or, Why The Drive-Through Habit Portends Terrible Critical Thinking) Since I teach high school students all over the United States, it’s pretty noticeable when they’re uniformly unfamiliar with something. For almost ten years I’ve been explaining to students from Boca to Toronto to Palm Springs the same term. I mean, every time it comes up [...]

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The Closer Look: Creativity Starts with Examination

July 13, 2011

Bad news/good news. You’re not necessarily being creative if You’re doing something with “flair.” You’re being unorthodox. You used glitter. You’re painting a painting. Meanwhile, you might be doing something extremely creative if Your solution is simple. You’ve only made a slight change. You’re repairing a fence. When we want to enhance our own creativity, [...]

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Asking Creative Questions: On Salad Tongs

April 12, 2011

A few Halloweens ago I was in San Francisco with one of my most favorite people, Sarah Prevette, of Sprouter.com. We were traveling, heading to Hawaii, so neither of us was particularly prepared for a Halloween party we were slated to attend that night. We spent the afternoon blowing around San Francisco putting together costumes. [...]

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Arts and Innovation: What’s Our Problem?

February 8, 2011

A few months ago I posted about the artist’s creative cycle, which was basically a diagram I developed to visually simplify the creative process. At the time I was thinking specifically about artists in the most traditional sense, and my goal was simply to chart (both for artists and less intuitively creative thinkers) what the [...]

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The Artist Interviews: Rita J. King, Writer

October 21, 2010

Rita J. King

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Jazz and Fundamentals, Part 3: Improvisation

May 15, 2010

You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail. —Charlie Parker It’s often suggested that, with the evolution of technology and accessibility of information, we don’t really need to memorize fundamentals anymore. Why not outsource them? [...]

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Fundamentals and Jazz, Part 2: Connection

May 12, 2010

Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity. —Charles Mingus I love that: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace.” This gets me every time I read it because it’s so easy to think of jazz as really really complicated versions of simple songs. Isn’t that so? One might think [...]

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