Around each March, a few students say they can do my job better than me. At the end of the year, I let them mock the adults in the building for a bit before they graduate to high school. A few years ago, however, I decided to flip that challenge and gave them a lesson plan template to work from. They were interested in how they could get their class to learn. They’d create whole poster boards for their lessons and develop PowerPoint projects that they’d use to teach me. In May, they were a few days from presenting and teaching their classes.

A few adults walked in with power and gaze. One of them said, “Does this look like the kids are learning?” The question already prompted disapproval. Instead of asking for my lesson, asking my students, and watching them speak as if the learning was theirs, a few minutes passed by and a whole department and district would be pushed, prodded, berated, and prompted over the years and to this day to the traditional, rote pedagogy that would supposedly raise test scores and, ostensibly, learning.

With only a hint of irony in these adult voices, the call for creativity has rung louder recently. No. Don’t do that.

Creativity continues to float around the educational zeitgeist even as the ropes tighten the noose around our pedagogies. The move to emulate rigorous – the actual meaning of the word – instruction may have had good intentions. We assigned more numbers to what we felt the students learned. Graduation rates. College acceptance rates. Test scores. All of them. If these and other numbers attached to our status quo form of education dip or level out, our current inclination is to squeeze tighter, thus granting less freedoms. Our current education system does not believe in emancipation, and too many theories of practice use systems that double down on the oppression.

We love using words like “creativity” and “imagination” when we want to inspire adults, but never instill these words in the culture and framework of the schools. Our actions still yell.

How does it feel for a black educator who started his career as an openly creative mathematician to now feel himself subverting, bobbing, and weaving mandates while calls for creativity come to the fore? Frustrated is a word. Disoriented is another. It’s important to keep the eye rolls and snickers to a minimum. Questions like “Who gets to be seen as creative?” and “Why do students appreciate my classroom even as I feel as constricted as ever?” come to the fore.

Creativity in the classroom isn’t something you write as an objective or a standard, but how you’re able to play with the time that you’re not talking.

To wit, creativity is supposedly the most sought-after quality from employers in the new century. People have complained that creativity as a resource has been depleted by the uber-measurement era. College professors from on high have said their students are no longer as creative. Many op-eds have lamented the decline of society through millennials and their sui generis way of approaching the world. A new millennium with its leading people burnt out, and society keeps burning.

The question remains, however: why ask for a quality that our schools don’t invest in? And are we willing to fail in earnest?

Until then, keep writing those mission and vision statements. It’s all the same to me.