Day -32: "Imagination Is More Important Than Knowledge"

I'd never heard that quote until this weekend, but apparently it's from Albert Einstein. Imagination is so the opposite of what our educational system is setting me up to encourage in my students. I think if I were teaching next year I would put "Imagination is more important than knowledge" up in huge letters at the front of my classroom and make it the theme of my year - just to push myself to foster it, despite all the countervailing forces of standardized testing and memorization and carving even knowledge up into little tiny pieces that can be assessed by multiple-choice items.

I mentioned a few days ago that my students were making collages to launch the new oh-so-inspiring theme in our Houghton-Mifflin language arts series, "Nature: Friend and Foe." I gave them a bunch of calendars and magazines and told them to make fantasy scenes which somehow showed friends and/or foes in nature. Students are in the process of writing paragraphs to go with their collages. Here are a few samples of what they've come up with so far (in my words, based on students' comments to me):


I don't remember who made this or what the friend/foe story is, but I like the beaver(?) presiding over the coral reef.




A polar bear plopped into the Kentucky woods.




One elephant jumping over another on the Great Wall of China as a two-headed sea monster looks on.




A baby harp seal says "Yummy!" as he sips Coca-Cola and dreams of a tropical paradise. (I'll try to transcribe the actual story Alex wrote to go with this eventually.)




An egret(?) makes huevos rancheros for everyone as a bug squashes the people below. (Really, that's what Ramiro told me was happening.) And, yep, that's a bird smoking in the corner.


Vote for your favorite in the comments!