“We need to put a beach right there”, she said, pointing to a grassy area near the school.  “Lots of sand and beach chairs!”.  The 4th grader and I stood outside together at recess in the cold drizzle under my umbrella, talking about her dream for the space.  “And we could have those big umbrellas and put an all-you-can-eat doughnut bar over there”.  This is my kind of kid.

You just never know what is going to happen when a kid stops to talk with you.  “May you do the floss please?”  Yes, you read that right.  I have this one kid who is insisting I do the floss for him and he knows I insist on “may I” when asking permission for something, so I appreciate the effort, even if the words are a bit out of order.  As for the floss, as much as I hate it, I’m going to learn it this weekend to get this kid off of my back.

“Mrs. Bush, I need a favor”.  Yes.  “Well, I’ve decided I want to be on America’s Got Talent and I need you to help me write an original song and probably get a trumpet and a violin and some other things to play for it”.  So I ask, how much money do you have to pay the musicians?  She looks at me a little sideways.  “What do you mean, pay them?”  Well, musicians don’t just play their instruments for fun – they do this for a living.  Maybe you could put something on Garage Band instead.  “Well, you will help me write a song, right?”  Sure. You write some words and I’ll show you how to put it to a melody.  I think she’s rethinking the American’s Got Talent thing.

Imagination is one of the things I’ve always loved about children, but in the last ten years or so, I’ve seen it begin to disappear.  Kids seem unable to pretend as much as they used to and so everything is very literal.  In the old days, if the kids wanted to create a chair to be part of something they were acting out, they created one out of people or other items.  Now they go directly for the chair.  Oh sure, every once in a while I still see that spark where a student thinks of something so out of the box that it catches me by surprise, but again, not as often as I used to.

So, what has caused that?  Is it more screen time?  Not enough free play?  Adults doing all the thinking for them?  Maybe a combination of all of those things.  I don’t know.  I’m figuring out this is one of the curses of getting older.  You see these things happening or patterns of behavior changing over a period of time and those who are younger, who have no context from which to compare can’t see it at all.  What they see is what has always been to them.

Is there any real use to children pretending and dreaming?  Well, at one point I’m sure some kid said, I’m going to make an electric car!  And another kid said, imagine if we could have artificial intelligence all over the house to talk to.  And how cool would it be to have hover boards to ride through the neighborhood?  Somebody took some crazy dreams and ideas and created things that we take for granted today.  But without the creativity to dream of things that don’t exist, where will we go from here?

Here’s where I put in my two cents about the arts in schools, the one place where creativity is alive and encouraged, doing our best to help kids not be afraid to try new things to see what happens.  Allowing kids to think outside the box without telling them how things should be, where there is no black and white, no right or wrong.  A place where if you want to dream of an all-you can-eat  doughnut bar you can.