Replying to LO27611 --
Dear Organlearners,
Barry Mallis <theorgtrainer@earthlink.net> writes:
>For reasons I'll never know, I turned up a driveway,
>then right down a set of steps into a basement where
>resided one William Jean-Jacques Gordon, founder
>and president of SES Associates, "Synectics Education
>Systems." Before I left Cambridge that afternoon for
>the two hour trip back to Vermont, where I was teaching
>at the time, my teaching life, and the learning style of my
>students, was altered forever.
>
>Bill and I developed a close working relationship. He
>would give me material to use in my classrooms. I would
>try it. We would refine the method. Bill was NOT a
>marketeer, he was an inventor with many, many patents
>to his name.
Greetings dear Barry,
Thank you for telling us something about William (for me since that how a
I learned it from literature) or Bill (for you because you had such a
close relationship) Gordon. I personally enjoyed it very much.
I can agree with your remark that he was not a marketeer. In my mind I
associated him with other post WWII pioneers of creativity like Koestler,
Guildford, Torrance and Maslow. They were all passionately committted to
figure out the complex nature of creativity rather than selling treasure
maps.
>He believed that we learn through a process
>of analogies, that in fact all discoveries are
>based upon analogical connections.
>Connection-making for Bill was the holy grail.
That I can agree to.
Gordon, like Koestler, was very sensitive to the essentiality
fruitfullness (effective connection). But he was also sensitive to the
essentiality otherness (diversity). And unlike most others, he was aware
of immense value of analogies. In a certain sense this awareness guided me
in the middle eighties to seek for corressponding patterns between
chemistry as a material system and mathematics as a mental system. It
eventually led to the discovery of the 7Es (seven essentialities of
creativity).
Now that I think about it, it is possible to call the 7Es the "seven
analogies of creativity". But the main reason why I began to call them
essentialities because I had to use Husserl's phenomenology (with the
essences of a phenomenon as its key feature) to make sure that these seven
"corresponding-patterns"=analogies go beyond chemistry and mathematics as
phenomena.
I studied his book Syntectics in the early seventies. It was after I
became aware of the tenet TO LEARN IS TO CREATE by observing my pupils
carefully. He was in those days a beacon to me because of his own
conviction that creativity and learning are deeply intertwined. Making
such waves in a systen completely geared for rote learning is almost like
high treason. The following is a vvid experience which I shal never
forget.
Once, in my last year as a teacher, I was called in by the provincial
inspector for science. He told me that I should stop teaching pupils how
to learn science creatively and rather give them worked out answers to
final examination papers so that they could memorise it. That day I nearly
had a heart attack.
I have a strange problem today which I was not aware of when I studied his
book Syntectics in the early seventies. In those days Greek was Greek to
me. But today I know that "syn"=together and "ektos"=outside/external. If
I remember it correctly, but I am not sure, Synectics meant "to bring
diverse, unrelated parts together". The use of "syn" makes sense to me,
but the use of "ektos" does not. Perhaps you can explain to me what Gordon
meant with the word Synectics.
I practiced this method using "before" and "after" work to compare what
happened. For instance, I had my 15 year old students write an essay about
the daily school assembly, a descriptive piece, really, about what the 30
minutes seemed like to them. In most all the "before" writing, I received
laundry lists of items, descriptions of what was seen. As Andrew has so
beautifully pointed out to us, the students' hearing was surely
"intermittent" while the music played continuously before their ears and
eyes ;-). Benches, the din, boring announcements, jostling at the back.
That was before. Then I introduced my students to "synectic" thinking.
"Which are you more sure of, tomorrow or gravity? Why?" Remember, no
incorrect answers, kids. "Which is faster, blue or orange? Why?" While I
won't delve too deeply here into the progression of such
connection-promoting questions, I will say that at first the students
thought this crazy. You can well imagine why. It took no longer than one
class period to get them going, though. When I asked for the same
description of the assembly hall, but using analogy techniques, I received
incredible answers filled with insight, whimsy, color, simile. The room
was like a radio being tuned. The benches were six-legged beetles, frozen
by insecticide and leaning feet out from the walls while Abe and Rita set
the room for the coming throng. And so on.
>It's peculiar for me today to deal in business
>consulting where I rely so much on the language
>of fact in order to sort out what has to be done
>via processes by people of good intention.
>Much of this method is left behind.
I am not sure exactly what you meant by the above. Were you referring to
your remark "Then I introduced my students to "synectic" thinking." In
other words, were you referring to using analogies to see the connection
between business facts?
>I could go on for a long time about Bill Gordon
>and his creativity, his explicit method for teaching
>creativity. I'll leave it at this, though. There are
>sparks of creativity igniting minds like yours and
>others on the planet of ours.
One of the things which surprises me continually is the lack of teaching
creativity itself to learners in all kinds of educational institutions
(schools, colleges and universities). Some days it makes me furious,
especially when somebody has a learning problem stemming clearly from a
creativity problem. But on other days I feel the opposite in that it is
best for the learner's creativity. To teach creativity by rote (machine)
learning is a sure recipe to destroy creativity.
However, how to teach and learn creativity is a vast topic itself of which
syntectics is but one of many facets of it. Perhaps some day we can begin
a LO-dialogue on it.
With care and best wishes
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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