What I really what to talk about today is Mind Mapping. I'm about to climb up on my soapbox so run while you can! When I started this blog as a teachers log, I thought I'd vent more often. As it turns out, I'm far too busy with teaching and my small business to take the time for such self-satisfying rants. However, with today being a short day, I'm going to purge onto this blog one of the aggravations of public school that makes me crazy. It's not one of those things that will make or break a students educational career. Rather, it just one of those little concepts which has been completely removed from its mark. In an effort to actually do something good and appeal to the visual learner, teachers have utterly blown it when it comes to the idea of mind mapping.
So let me start off by giving you Wikipedia's definition: A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. They even include a diagram:
Wiki gets it, so why don't teachers? How many of you have had something like this come home from school?
These make me crazy!!! This is what the mind map has become and I just can't stand it! Now, rather than allowing the free flow of thoughts and then looking for the connections and organizing them in the way the best suits specific needs, children are forced to fill in more circles. This is not visual learning. This is not free thinking. This is not mind mapping! What's worse is that these diagrams often come with instructions for use. Your story title needs to go in the center and you must have three characters in one circle, a conflict in another, a setting in the third and so on. When my sons have brought these home from school, I have literally fed them the information that I know the teacher wants to see and then we set the sheet aside and start to really talk about the writing assignment.
One of the things I love about homeschooling and that I know I'll miss when Wes goes back to public school, is the opportunity to right these egregious wrongs. This week Wes and I are working on a creative writing project. Wes is writing a fable. The first thing we did was sit down with a flip chart and I had Wes just throw out ideas. I scribbled them down changing colors as new things were introduced. In the end, we had something exactly like this:
From this we were able to easily generate an informal outline of events:
To make this process even more creative and visual, Wes next made a quick story board or drawing of each point on the list. Once he has written the story, we will incorporate these drawings as the illustrations. Our next step will be to begin writing, but Wes will be writing with his thoughts in front of him, organized and visualized, all from his mind.
Mind Mapping should never ever be about filling in circles with specific information. Maybe such diagrams can find a use somewhere, but don't call them mind maps! The mind is a beautiful, chaotic and independent treasure that needs to be set free for real creativity to flow.
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