Improv in Real Life and "Wonderful Ideas"- Juliana

Improv can help you react in a situation when something unexpected happens, even when you think you have everything planned out. This happened to me just last week, when Sophia and I did the wind column field trip lesson together. We planned out who would teach each section, and about how long we wanted each part to be. Everything was going smoothly, until we went out to the wind columns to do the demonstration with a crumpled up piece of paper and a flat piece of paper – and none of the wind columns would turn on. This was a moment where we really had to think on our feet about what to do next. So we took the students back into the classroom, and I explained that sometimes in science our experiments don’t always go as planned. Luckily they had all seen the wind columns and most of them knew what was going to happen with the two pieces of paper. And we were able to get the wind columns fixed before they started testing their designs. In the moment I wasn’t thinking about this as an improv lesson, but after reading this week’s blog prompt, and reflecting back on the lesson, I thought this was a great example of how you can never completely prepare for what is going to happen (although I guess we could have checked if the wind columns were working prior to the lesson- oh well!).

During this field trip lesson, I also observed some “wonderful ideas”. One girl decided that her contraption would contain not one, but three parachutes attached to the penny. While I knew from my own past experiences that even just one parachute will usually cause the contraption to completely fly out of the wind column, I wanted to give her the opportunity to plan her design and build it so that she could figure out on her own whether or not it would work. When she finally built it and got the chance to test it, she found that it flew straight out of the wind column. This was a much more valuable learning experience for her compared to if I were to tell her that usually parachutes will fly out of the wind column.

The concept of “wonderful ideas” reminded me of something that Dan frequently brings up in our improv classes. He says that as children, we grow up being taught that there is always one right answer. In “The Having of Wonderful Ideas” the author points out that children are often discouraged from having their own wonderful ideas which is why we lose our creativity as we grow older. We are trained to be uncreative, which is why some of the games that we play in improv class that require creativity are so difficult for us as adults. This is why it is so important to encourage wonderful ideas that children have so that they can continue to learn and be creative.