#356 – Inspiring Creativity, with Kevin Honeycutt

If you are listening to the podcast with your instructional team or would like to explore this topic more deeply, here are guiding questions to prompt your reflection:

• How does play show up in your classroom?
• Why is creativity important?
• Why is joy so critical to learning?
• How can you inspire your students to be creative?
• What “tradigital” learning experiences can you facilitate in your classroom?
• How are your students allowed to fail and iterate in their learning?
• What is your purpose?

• Kevin Honeycutt (official website)
• Courting Whole School Learning (Kevin Honeycutt)

#356 Inspiring Creativity, with Kevin Honeycutt

AVID Open Access
50 min

Keywords

creativity importance, play every day, student agency, digital recess, cardboard engineering, lunar colonies, joy in learning, music integration, flow state, iterative learning, emotional connection, low-tech creativity, STEAM education, mentor role models, passion unleashed

Transcript

The following transcript was automatically generated from the podcast audio by generative artificial intelligence.  Because of the automated nature of the process, this transcript may include unintended transcription and mechanical errors.

Kevin Honeycutt 0:00
Yes, it’s a box when it comes from Amazon. After that, it’s whatever the kid says it is. It’s a spaceship, it’s a submarine, it’s an airplane, it’s all of those things. And in their mind, it is that. How do I know that that fifth grader isn’t going to be on a mission on the way to Mars in 20 years, isn’t going to be the mission commander? So all they’re doing right now is auditioning for a part in the brain’s production of understanding.

Paul Beckermann 0:25
The topic of today’s podcast is Inspiring Creativity, with Kevin Honeycutt. Unpacking Education is brought to you by avid.org. AVID believes every learner can develop student agency. To learn more about AVID, visit their website at avid.org.

Rena Clark 0:46
Welcome to Unpacking Education, the podcast where we explore current issues and best practices in education. I’m Rena Clark.

Paul Beckermann 0:57
I’m Paul Beckermann.

Winston Benjamin 0:58
And I’m Winston Benjamin. We are educators.

Paul Beckermann 1:02
And we’re here to share insights and actionable strategies.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 1:07
Education is our passport to the future.

Paul Beckermann 1:12
Our quote for today is actually from our guest, Kevin Honeycutt. He says, “Play every day for as long as you can.” All right, Winston, what are you thinking about the play quote today?

Winston Benjamin 1:25
That’s so much fun. That sounds like me. I think it’s a really good way to look at the day, because a lot of times people think of a day as a task. Like, “Oh, I got to deal with this Monday. Oh, I got to deal with this Tuesday.” But I like this because it reminds me of a quote from a song that I used to listen to and play for my students. The quote goes—it’s from Anthony Hamilton—it goes, “Today is an opportunity to get a chance to make another chance.” So it gives you an opportunity to do something that could possibly make something happen, that could make something happen. So I just like the idea of that.

Paul Beckermann 2:01
Cool. Rena, how about you?

Rena Clark 2:04
I just want to say that play is not just for childhood or small children. It really is for everybody, all ages. I know, like for me, in my little maker space, I like to play and just create. And I think about how it fuels creativity when you just get to play around.

And I was thinking about recently—my youngest son and I, him and I were on a trip home, and he’s so creative, but we just went out on a walk into the wheat fields, and I wanted to connect with him. And I said, “Okay, what do you want to play?” And he’s into Minecraft, but we played real live action Minecraft in the wheat fields, and we were pretending to be all different characters.

And the thing is, just by playing with him, I learned so much about him. I got to connect with him about what was important. And in that play world, because he struggles to communicate sometimes, he was able to communicate with me some of his feelings. And I had so much fun. It’s a very fond memory. And I was like, you know what? Sometimes we’re just embarrassed or we’re not willing, but I’m like, just play. And it was a way for me to connect, and so we can also connect through play.

Paul Beckermann 3:15
That’s awesome. I love that story. Well, our guest today is Kevin Honeycutt. Kevin’s been on the show before, and we’re excited to have him back. Kevin is a Technology Integrationist and Staff Developer from Colorado Springs. He spent 13 years teaching K-12 art, and now travels all over the country and the world sharing ideas with educators. He’s passionate about student creativity, project-based learning, STEM, STEAM, and his website, kevinhoneycutt.org, is a great treasure house of resources for educators. Hey, welcome back, Kevin.

Kevin Honeycutt 3:49
Good to be back. Good to see you all. Y’all look good.

Paul Beckermann 3:51
Thank you, you too. You’ve been doing some traveling, I understand, getting all over the place.

Kevin Honeycutt 3:56
Getting a chance to talk to teachers and work with kids. It’s been fun.

Paul Beckermann 4:00
Super. Well, today we’re excited to talk to you about creativity, which I know is a passion area for you. So to start the conversation, do you want to give us your perspective on why is creativity even important in the first place?

Kevin Honeycutt 4:17
I’ll do it with one of my quotes—to quote myself. It sounds a little self-congratulatory, but I think it’s important, because every once in a while, I think the muse reaches through the ether and hands me an idea I don’t deserve to have. I swear it happens. I think that the muse says, “Kevin is not really up to it, but he’s the only one that will say it, so I’ll give it to him.”

And here’s the quote: “Play is where ideas audition for a part in the brain’s production of understanding.”

Paul Beckermann 4:48
Oh, I like it. That’s a t-shirt right there.

Winston Benjamin 4:51
Say that again.

Kevin Honeycutt 4:52
Play is where ideas audition for a part in the brain’s production of understanding.

And later on, I would run into an article on a flight by Rodolfo Llinás. And if you don’t know Rodolfo Llinás, I hope your listeners Google that—Rodolfo and then Llinás is L-L-I-N-Á-S—and he’s a neuro researcher and just, I think he’s got this thing figured out. And he talks about FAPs, or fixed action patterns.

So whenever we think something’s magical, we call it the muse or the ether or “he’s/she’s an old soul.” We have all this verbiage that we use when we don’t quite get the research. But Llinás gets the research and he talks about FAPs, or fixed action patterns. What he’s trying to talk about is, how does the human brain still run faster than the best supercomputer on Earth when it can’t do one tiny little portion of the calculations at the speed those computers can?

It’s because the brain runs a fixed action pattern. It runs a little software subroutine. For instance, let’s say I was going to throw you a ball, and I said, “I want you to catch this ball.” A supercomputer would think of, you know, 100,000 variations of where the glove should be in order to catch the ball, where a human would say, “I’ll hold my glove approximately here, and as the ball comes, I’ll make a minute adjustment, therefore catching the ball.” And we do that. We do that with this crazy MacGyver way of handling inputs and outputs and all of that. So that’s an FAP. When you put that glove there, it’s an FAP. When you sing a song, it’s an FAP. When your kid plays a game in a wheat field, it’s an FAP.

And education is to let a kid get out an FAP or a fixed action pattern, work on it, adjust it, and put it back. He actually thinks these FAPs live in a given place in the brain, the cingulate gyrus. And if so, it’s like a bag of marbles. So think of everything you know as a bag of marbles. And the only time that FAPs get to interact with FAPs—yes, things you know interact with things you know—how cool is that? There’s only two times in life that happens: when you sleep and when you play. That’s it.

So if you’re sitting there being told what to do, your FAPs are not in play. But when you have a dream and you’re going down Times Square, and you’re with Elvis and you’re riding on a unicorn, all of those variables that seem so weird and creative are happening because the senses are turned off, and the consciousness is turned in on itself, and it only has what it already has to play with.

So if you want kids to create, if you want them to invent—and you can say creativity, and you can say play—what you’re really saying is invention. If you want kids to invent or make anything new, you’ve got to give them assigned time to do nothing, assigned time to play. And sometimes when you work with kids and you say, “We’re going to play,” some of them look at you confused, because they’ve not been given that kind of unstructured time most of their lives. It’s like it breaks your heart, because you think, “Oh, my God, that poor child doesn’t know how to play.”

A lot of gifted kids—the minute they’re identified, and the minute the whole family’s proud of how well they perform—they perform. A dolphin loves to play, but it’ll also be in a show and do the same thing every day for tourists. I’m afraid that we’re making captive dolphins out of our children. There’s my start.

Winston Benjamin 8:11
I mean, wow, that’s a great start. I’m still stuck on the audition quote, because that is impressive. And just the idea of, like, I appreciate that, because that allows me to really accept that students are willing to try new things.

So as you’re seeing this audition, the thing that I want to try to shift it into is supporting teachers to use technology, because sometimes it’s so rigid. How do they use technology to inspire and facilitate that creativity in the classroom? Because, as you said, sometimes I gotta structure everything, give every student a chance. So how do I as a teacher get some ideas to allow for students the space to be creative and invent in class?

Kevin Honeycutt 8:57
First of all, good question, because if we don’t think about this, it won’t happen. It won’t accidentally happen. We have to ask ourselves a question. Do we ever get to the last chapter of the book anyway? And if we don’t, then it might not be as sacred as we think. Okay, that’s one.

Two: do kids ever get bored and they sit there and endure what we’re doing to them, not with them, to them? So how many days of school did you go to that you remember none of? And if that’s a lot, then what was that? So here’s my contention: if you don’t remember it, you didn’t learn it.

“But wait a minute, I taught it.” No, no. If you don’t remember it, you didn’t learn it. So what makes learning happen? I’ve been studying this my whole life. What makes learning permanent? Because everything else is just, it’s a drive-through. It’s a drive-through, but we’re renting with an option to buy learning. But the learning that stays, I think, is attached to emotion. Emotion cements learning. How you feel at the time of learning is forever associated with the learning.

Play is a whole different thing. If you’re playing, there’s joy attached to the learning. Joy. If joy is the number one emotion attached to learning, then you’re going to want to do it again and again and again. And if pain is attached to it, you’re going to want to avoid it any way you can.

So what’s important here, when you start to work with technology, is not that—yes, you’re going to have a lesson plan, you’re going to have pedagogy, you’re going to have rigor, all of that provable behaviorism—just make some room for digital recess. Digital recess. That means we get to play with coding. We get to play with robotics. We get to play with obstacle courses for our robots. Or think about being on Mars and programming a robot to go out on a mission on Mars and read the book, The Lonely Robot. So the kids are like anthropomorphizing and adding human ideas to the robot and extending the story of programming into something more than just pedagogy.

Rena Clark 10:55
And I think now, in this time and age, we think that we have to associate technology with creativity because we have to make it—we got to make videos, we have to do all these things. But there’s so many ways that we can use low tech, no tech, to promote and have kids be creative in our classrooms or play. I know you do a lot of work with cardboard, actually. After the last time, after we talked to you, I went out and bought some cardboard screw things, and we built things in my house. So what are some ways that maybe teachers can take that creativity away from technology offline and do that in their classroom?

Kevin Honeycutt 11:33
I love the question. And if you’re all kind of watching the world right now, have you seen this recent backlash about screens and phones and classroom technology? Okay, that worries me a lot, because we tend to pendulum swing in this country from totally doing something and losing the hounds to totally taking it away. We do that. I don’t know why we can’t find a middle ground there, but I think kids will find it on their own through play.

If you just make conditions favorable for creativity, whatever you’re doing, you set the thing up. Look, don’t come downstairs and open the presents on Christmas day before the kids wake up, don’t do that. Okay, get all the stuff out and let them come down excited, and let them tear open all those packages and decide what learning is going to be on that day.

So that’s what I’m working on. I’m saying this is a traditional approach, and this is something to write down: “tradigital,” “tradigital,” inclusive of digital, inclusive of tradition. So it shouldn’t scare anyone. It goes right down the middle and doesn’t wake up guard dogs on either side.

So I’ve got all the ingredients here. I’ve got cardboard, because cardboard is just waiting to be told what it is. Yes, it’s a box when it comes from Amazon. After that, it’s whatever the kid says it is. It’s a spaceship, it’s a submarine, it’s an airplane, it’s all of those things. And in their mind, it is that. And how do I know that that fifth grader isn’t going to be on a mission on the way to Mars in 20 years, isn’t going to be the mission commander? So all they’re doing right now is auditioning for a part in the brain’s production of understanding. That’s what’s going on in their head right there.

So yes, they’re wearing a fake space helmet, and yes, they’re wearing a cute vest from Amazon, but man, they’re going to grow up. And you talk to any scientist, anybody that’s in the field of science or technology or programming, they all will say, “I went to an art museum. I went to a museum when I was 10.” It always starts that way. “And I saw a dinosaur, and I touched a T-Rex tooth, and electricity went through my soul. And now here I stand. Here, I’m the docent of your learning.” It all happened on one day.

So how are we doing that? And by the way, the good news is it doesn’t take a lot of extra work. It means chill, stop having all this structure in mind, get all the ingredients out, create a buffet of learning possibility, and stand back and become a sociologist and watch your kids and let them teach you how they learn best.

Paul Beckermann 14:02
I love it. And now—I’ve been following you on Facebook, Kevin, and I’ve seen recently, you’ve kind of taken this cardboard idea and this experiential thing to another level, kind of a school-wide project thing, in fact, building lunar colonies and things like that. You want to talk about what does a school-wide event like that look like, or what can it look like? And then, what are the benefits of that kind of approach?

Kevin Honeycutt 14:30
For 25-plus years—I’m an old man, I’m 58 years old. I still feel like I’m 25 because I don’t know until I look in the mirror that I’m visually unpleasant.

So all of those years of summer camps when I would do five at a time, and we would do really cool things, like we’d build a Millennium Falcon plane in half scale, or the Apollo 13 in half scale. And I was always doing half scale. I was doing scale because it was mathematics. It’s, you know, it’s accidental teaching. So math would be part of it. So the kids would make all these models—from submarines to you name it.

So I’ve got years and years and a couple decades worth of those templates, lesson plans and ideas, and I remember the ones the kids loved most. The kids would bring their mom and dad on Friday, and they would film the whole thing, and the kids would have an adventure, and they’d walk on the moon, walk on Mars, destroy Pompeii, something that stuck in their mind forever and ever and ever and ever. I called them anchoring artifacts.

So I take all of those, and I said, “What if I did all of those in one place in two days?” So I looked at the gym. I looked at the gym, the basketball court, literally. Courting whole school learning is on purpose, because most schools have a gym, so that takes the excuse away. “We don’t have any space.” No, you do. You have a whole gym, and a gym is big enough—a high school regulation gym is big enough to fit eight, one-room schoolhouses in. If that’s true, then tell me why I can’t create a science center or a lunar colony, a Martian colony, a museum in the gym, and we don’t put the kids on a bus to go down the Maryland Science Center. We walk them down the hall, and they learn in their own school. But it’s transformed on those days.

So last time I did this, about 670 K-6 kids came through that opportunity. You should have seen it, and if you want to see it, you can. If you go to kevinhoneycutt.org, all right, kevinhoneycutt.org, H-O-N-E-Y-C-U-T-T, look on the right side, you’ll see this thing. It says, “Courting Whole School Learning.” Click on that link, and it will take you to a whole page here that kind of lays this whole thing out for you. This came from a Google Slides document in my planning with my school that I worked with in Indiana who had the audacity to let me do this.

So day one, it’s high school kids and junior high kids. And I had 50 high school kids and 25 junior high kids. The idea is to turn them into learning mentors, to turn them into teachers. And these weren’t the easy kids. By the way, a lot of these kids were the at-risk kids that nobody trusts, that nobody trusts, and I had those kids.

So the first day they stand up the lunar colony with the cardboard. By the way, they owned all the cardboard. It was out in the shed. They just ordered all these new interactive screens, and so the cardboard is just sitting there. Didn’t have to buy anything. So the kids get this whole thing propped up, standing up. But they didn’t finish it out. They got it started, and they were taught, “You know, the kids are gonna come in here, K through six, and oh my gosh, if you think those kids are going to mess around or be bad.” There’s no time to be bad. You ever taught elementary? There’s no time to be bad. You know, never mind that. Here comes Mongo, you know, here comes Mongo. Those kids are coming. You better be ready.

So the create—the situation was all built up for these kids to be responsible, and they were. So there’s two layers here. One, creating mentors, teachers and leaders out of those junior high—why junior high? I had 25 of them and 50 high school kids. Why? I have to anoint the next generation of high school kids in the form of those junior high kids. So I wanted 25—that’s a lot of kids now—to be your teachers. But there’s a whole gym here.

Now go scroll down that page. You listeners, if you’re already on my page and looking, you’ll see I’ve broken that gym down into quadrants, little areas, and then those areas is where different learning happens. So over here, it’s robotics, and if you’ve got Vex, do that. If you don’t have Vex, here’s a supply list of all the things you can buy, so that when we’re done, you get to keep all of that STEM/STEAM stuff here. And I shopped it down to the cheapest price I could find online, but you might—you could outdo it. No ego here.

Okay, so now we know where the learning is going to occur, and like an amusement park, or Busch Gardens, or Six Flags, the kids want to ride this. They want to ride the wooden roller coaster. They want to go on the water feature, whatever that is. “I want to do the Makedo blocks. I want to do the hands-on. I want to do the Knex. I want—” They get to choose.

Now, here’s the sad part. Here’s the sad part. The kids only had 20 minutes in each station, and they only got to do two stations because they were on their specials schedule. Who knows what I’m talking about, specials schedule? Okay, so to not upset the apple cart, we stuck with their special schedule, and they were totally cool with that.

But my rule is you got to stay here with your kids. They could go back and grade pieces of paper. I don’t want you to—stay here. You don’t have to help me. You don’t have to help us. I’ve got a team. Watch and learn. “What do you want us to watch?” Watch how your kids learn, and watch what they’re delighted by, and let them surprise you with the things you didn’t even know they knew. Do that and I’m happy, right?

And only a couple teachers left their kids and left. I think we’re so used to dropping our kids off. We did that with computer labs. Remember, we’d drop our kids off and go grade paper. We didn’t learn beside our children and they got better than us. That was a mistake. So don’t do that. Stay with your kids and learn.

So anybody could do one of these, because it’s a basketball court, right? So if this is interesting, shoplift this from me. So here’s the rules: have some older kids become mentors and role models. Don’t miss the opportunity to plant STEM/STEAM engineering math in the minds of girls and boys of all ages. So after that day, they are on fire. They are on fire. And trust me, watch the video I’ve got—a whole playlist, a whole YouTube channel of nothing but the video that came from that two days in Indiana. And I want people to watch it. I’m gonna put a link on that page of just that folder on Google so people can see that.

Watch my little short video on there, and I’m gonna walk you through that entire thing. But now, what am I doing? Now I’m doing other things like mining on the moon or ancient civilizations, Night at the Museum, cities of the future, STEM in the gym, undersea builders—we’re building an undersea colony. Wherever you want that to go, it’s going to be everything going on at the same time. It is a crazy mess. And probably the coolest thing I’ve done in my entire 30-plus year career.

Paul Beckermann 20:39
That’s cool. So I’m curious, what did the mentor students say about the experience?

Kevin Honeycutt 20:46
They have a film program in eastern Hancock in Indiana. And so there were interviews by kids with kids. So it was fun getting to listen to them talk about what they loved about it. I think it caught them off guard.

I would tell you, I have about 10 kids who didn’t sign up for this—the kids who came by with their teacher, who are usually in trouble and have a plan for how they’re not going to get kicked out of school today. They said, in numbers, “Can we be part of this? Can we join this? Can we do this?”

And so I said, “Yes.” The teachers looked at me like, “Are you nuts?” And they lived up to that expectation. I think they felt proud that they were the role model for those little kids. And you should have seen how wonderful they were. And there were certain rules, like, if you see a kid walking around Disneyland crying, go get them. Take them and introduce them to Mickey Mouse, but don’t leave them standing there.

So the kids were on the lookout, like Border Collies for lost sheep. You should have seen it. Some of these kids are lost themselves. The best way out of darkness is to make your own light. We made our own light for two days.

Paul Beckermann 21:50
That’s so cool.

Winston Benjamin 21:50
See, that’s the thing. I think sometimes people forget that the kids who have the hardest time want to feel that they’re valuable, and you gave them an opportunity to feel valuable and then value the thing that they’re engaging with, right? Like, again, they don’t want to have another kid feel like they don’t know nothing, sit at the corner, feel alone, feel unconnected. So that’s great that you value them enough.

Kevin Honeycutt 22:15
That is a beautiful thing that you observed just there, my brother. That is beautiful. And it’s true, right? If you’ve ever worked with at-risk kids, you know a kid will save you when they don’t know how to save themselves. And so you give them that moment, and you anoint them, appoint them, and disjoint them, and you make them important.

Now that was for one, two-day period. Why isn’t this every day at school? Why do we put them in a special class and make an accommodation plan and let them know there’s something wrong with them? They are broken in some way. They are less than in some way. Make them leaders. They will rise. I have seen it. We’ve all seen it. Will they mess up? They always do. We all do. Get over it, shake it off.

Winston Benjamin 22:58
They’re kids. They’re gonna mess up, man. Like, even adults—

Kevin Honeycutt 23:02
That’s right. If we’re honest, yeah, you know what I mean?

Winston Benjamin 23:05
And that’s the part that’s really hard, is like, adults, we’re not—we’re not honest as we are in play. So I appreciate that you’re continuing to recognize the value of honesty. Like, “Yo, I messed up. Like, my bad. You know what I mean? Like, let’s do it again. Let’s try to make it work.” And I think that there’s a bit of that that’s also intrinsic in play.

Kevin Honeycutt 23:26
No one teaches us in college to role model vulnerability and to role model imperfection. I think the safest place to be in front of kids is you with fidelity. So say, “Yeah, I messed up.” Then they’re like, “Okay, then that’s part of the thing.” Yes, how many light bulbs did Edison make before one stayed on? Right? So he was allowed to mess up, allowed to fail.

And I think in a situation like this, it’s cardboard. No one is married to it. Okay, we’re all dating this concept. So it can be fun, it can be loose. Don’t draw dark lines because they don’t erase. Draw light lines and erase and change and erase and change and fall in love with iteration.

Winston Benjamin 24:07
So I got one thing—I think everybody in this crew on this thing right now, we love music. We’re into music. We play music. We do something with music. I hated school as a kid, even though I was good at it, because my parents put a fear of success in me, which was needed. But there were times when I was, like, disconnected, right? And the things that I remember from a childhood is every single song I can repeat, every line that I ever listened to, from the age of 10 to 23.

My question is, how can schools bring music into that creativity process for learning?

Kevin Honeycutt 24:49
So first things first, number one, support your music programs that you already have, and love those and value those and sing about those to your taxpayers. I say people support what they’ve learned to be proud of, and we’ve got to work on that. That’s number one.

But number two, not every kid is going to do it the conventional way. Not every kid is going to be in band, not every kid’s going to be in choir. So make lots of places for music to happen. So the first thing I think you have to do is you have to admit how powerful music is, and here’s why I think it is. I’m gonna give you my theory, not burdened by research, ready?

Music is, by its nature, temporal. Now, let’s hang with that concept for a minute. We are temporal learners, but we don’t talk about temporal. What is temporal? Everyone? Temporal is the passage of time concurrent to learning. The passage of time concurrent to learning. This matters because things are inculcated. They’re put into the brain in that order, as if we’re cutting an album in wax. We’re cutting an album, an experiential album in wax, and it plays at a certain tempo, a certain time signature.

So when I rewind the learning, and by the way, if I can’t rewind the learning, I didn’t learn. “Wa” is not a good single. No one’s gonna buy it. Good luck with the album art. That’s not working. But it’s that crazy teacher that—according to Cosmos, or that crazy teacher that’s teaching chemistry, and she blows up that thing, and everybody in class is like—every song needs a hook, and every lesson needs a hook, and that kid needs to set their own hook.

We think we can set the hook. Every fish—you know, every fish you’re gonna catch, every fish in that pond? No, no, I gotta get a treble hook. I gotta put some meat on there and a worm on there and some marshmallow on there. I don’t know what they’re gonna bite. I don’t know, you know, they always say, “What are they biting?” “I don’t know yet.” Well, that’s why I’m using everything. I’m using everything, right? And so when they bite, I gotta be ready.

So with music, I want lots of ways to approach music. You want to rap, I’d love for you to rap. You want to do slam poetry that leads to rap? Well, we can do that, or maybe we just do slam poetry. It’s got its own tempo, its own timing, its own thing, right? But I got to broaden the definition of the on-ramp. What is it that makes it real, right?

And if I can’t do that—and that can happen, by the way, in any classroom, that can just be in every STEAM room. And I say STEAM, not just STEM. STEAM includes art, and music is art. Okay, so where’s your music production station in that STEAM room? There should be that too, right? It should be a microphone over there. Always there, always out. PA system, mixing board, whatever software you’re using. Music creation should happen as often as coding, programming, robotics. Music is one of those things. So just add that in there.

And I promise you if I could play a song right now for you and take you back to your fifth grade year—that quick, and you’re there. You’re there with fidelity. You’re in grandma’s house, listening to Motown, and you’re standing there smelling grandma’s biscuits. Because when you learn something with love, every adjacent thing happening at the same time is also written into your memory with it. Everything, everything beside it. Grandma’s house, the smell of that mildew, smell like church basement coming from Grandma’s house, because she has that smell, you know, that smell. She warms the house with gas, and it has a certain smell, that old person, you know, the old person smell. Old person smell is mixed with biscuits and gravy and little bacon. Ah, that smells like love. And that’s Motown for the rest of your life. That is Motown, right? Because you allowed music to be the background track, right?

So we need to have that background track in every classroom, and kids should be creating that. It keeps getting quiet. I’m all done. It was like, okay.

Winston Benjamin 28:33
I think what we’re doing is, like, again, you’re asking us to process things that is sometimes outside of the expectation of the way we were taught. I sat and got, you know what I mean? So just having this idea of breaking the fourth wall is like, “Oh, true.” You know what I’m saying? Like, even that is hard so—

Paul Beckermann 28:57
And I’m watching you take out your guitar, and I swear I saw somewhere that this was, like, a—

Rena Clark 29:03
It looks like a 3D-printed guitar.

Kevin Honeycutt 29:05
It is, it is. So again, music meets tech, music meets STEM and STEAM. I’m in Chattanooga, Tennessee, at the Fab Lab conference with Michael Stone and his crazy crew, and they know I’m gonna end my keynote by getting musical, but it’s what I do. But he comes out before I start, and hands me this, and his crew has made me this.

Now you can go to Thingiverse, if this is interesting to you, and you can download everything you need to make this 3D guitar. On the back, you’ll see it’s made in modules that go together, right? And it’s configurable, so like the bottom of it is already built to look like a Fender Telecaster. The top you can customize. So I can put your initials right here. This is K, H. I can put your initials in there and the conference logo in here, your school mascot in here, whatever you decide.

$50 for the kit of electronics, the neck and everything—it makes it work. So this is all filament over here, and the neck is a neck. It’s made out of wood. You put the whole thing together, and suddenly you got a playable guitar, right? That’s 3D-printed. And kids’ brains just go, “What?” Teachers’ brains just go, “What?” Because, literally, technology rocks in this form.

Is it perfect? No. Does it work? Yeah. Do you want to leave it in the hot car? No, it will melt. You leave this—it will—you come back and see what you got if you leave this in the hot car. So, you know, just take it in the house when you get home. There’s things about it that are not perfect, but because it’s a prototype, it’s so much fun. And, man, kids want to come up and they want to play. They want to play it. That’s what I’m going for. Remember, we’re trying to catch those kids with bait. This is this musical piece of bait here. It’s also technology.

I wanted to play something just to let you hear it. Like, see if it comes out. I just got off a plane. I just got off a plane. So it was in a soft case. So it’s going to be—let me turn it up a little bit. Try to get a little bit of a—gotta get some reverb on there. Tone. Ooh, clean and overdrive. Oh, baby.

Paul Beckermann 31:09
There you go.

Kevin Honeycutt 31:12
I’m in Chattanooga, and I wrote a song with ChatGPT right there during the keynote. In three minutes, I said, “ChatGPT, write me a song in the vein of Johnny B. Goode, that includes the name of the conference.” And I put the conference name in there. I had the prompt ready to go. I hit the button. Oh, I made sure it’s an E, A and B, E, A and B, a blues riff. Instantly, you know what happened? It wrote the song. I sang it. Then, exactly—then words and all.

I just wanted to show them if AI is your muse, co-pilot, not pilot, it’s your co-pilot. You can create fast. Don’t think you’re creating perfect. These are iterations. It’s okay, shake it off. These are sketches. This is pencil without dark lines. Give me some teachers. Give me some kids. We get some guitars. And I’m gonna tell you, you guys can all see this. Okay, one finger here. Now watch where it is. I’m trying to tell people this. Doesn’t have to be hard, right? If it’s not hard, if it’s inviting and not hard, I can hook you. I can hook you.

Are you going to be Juilliard? Not today, not today. Get over it. Not today. What I’m planting is a deep hook into hope, a deep hook into dreams, not finished stuff. Finished stuff comes with passion. Rigor is passion unleashed. Write that on something. We think rigor is a behaviorist punishment model where—why? Why do we gotta make rigor painful? Why is that the only version of rigor? We’re cool with rigor mortis. I get it. You’re dead. You’re stiff. I get it. Learning doesn’t have to be that.

Winston Benjamin 32:47
I totally agree with you. That makes me think about all the hours I put into scratching. And it’s like, even though it’s rigorous, I still enjoyed that toil.

Rena Clark 32:56
I know. I was even thinking all the hours I put into, oh my goodness, the hours I did practicing piano or playing saxophone, and I’m like, I’m okay, but I get joy out of it. So it doesn’t matter. It’s not for anyone else, really. It’s for me.

Paul Beckermann 33:11
Exactly. I’m mixing an album or recording something, and eight hours is gone. I didn’t even know what happened.

Kevin Honeycutt 33:17
Okay? You know, we know what that is, right? That’s called flow. Csikszentmihalyi. Google that. Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book called Flow about a cognitive condition where you are so in love with what you’re doing, you literally lose track of time. So every time you feel rehearsal or practice running contrary to that idea of loving it, don’t stay there too long. Don’t stay there too long.

My kid and I—I’ll give you guys a link after the show, a link to a YouTube video of my kid doing his recital. So he’s eight years old at the time. He’s about to quit piano because we’re doing theory way too long now. It’s not me. I’m not the teacher. They’re doing theory, and he’s falling out of love with piano, because piano hurts, it hurts. But you gotta, you gotta hold your hands like—it hurts while you’re playing, because you can’t stop doing it this way, because that’s proper form. Guitar hurts. The strings hurt. You got calluses. I just published a picture of that. You show them what calluses look like, because that’s pain and commitment and passion all rolled into physical effect, right?

Same thing with piano. So if I’m not playing a song I love pretty quickly, I’m done. I’m done. I could do anything else, right? So I got my key. I said, “Okay, we’re gonna learn how to play some songs.” So I’d use Jerry Lee Lewis, not as a role model, but there’s a movie he can watch of Jerry Lee Lewis just bouncing those chords. So I said, “Okay, to his teacher, I’m not teaching to be a performer for a minute, okay? For a minute. So we’re gonna go—” It’s just slamming a little roll. Is it perfect? No, it’s loose.

So he gets the outfit. He puts his hair up in a pompadour. Here’s the—now, here’s the recital. Everyone’s doing there—there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with that. That should go. Then my kid walks up with his pompadour. And we went on Amazon. We bought a fire maker. It’s just, you know, this plastic thing, and you flip the button and fire comes out. And it’s all just LED backlit. It looks like fire. He gets up there, and he rips out “Great Balls of Fire.” And my kid, he wants to stand up. He wants to kick the piano bench back. Now that’s a step too far for some people. I get it.

But he plays this thing, he does this, and the whole audience is sitting there. You could almost hear them relax. You could almost hear them—even the audience, because they were all uptight about making sure the kids were uptight enough. What the heck? These are their own children. Now, my kid gets up there and he breaks the whole thing, and they all clap. He gets like this ovation from that audience, and I think all of them were like, “This hour and a half just got better, because that kid is crazy.”

Now, I promise you, he’s confirmed in his love for piano, all because he got to jump ahead. I know he hasn’t earned it. I don’t care. Get over that idea that they gotta earn joy. No, joy should be there on day one. Why? Why do we gotta be so hard? Why is membership in this club so painful?

Winston Benjamin 36:12
Oh, um, that’s so true, though.

Rena Clark 36:14
You don’t have to earn joy. Yo, all right, and you just gave me ideas because I got a kiddo that is not liking piano now. Now, I know. But I also let them get on the apps when they’re done, because now they have all these apps, and they like—you want to play a fun song that you’re excited about, use the app and just play around whatever you want. You know?

Kevin Honeycutt 36:34
It’s a fast forward into Joytown, right? So like in the old days, you had to earn your way through theory and through practicing and through drills to just get to the city limits of Joytown. You didn’t even get inside. You just saw the sign, got your pic, didn’t even do a selfie, right? And it took five years to get there, five years to get there. It was awful.

And now we can give them that fast forward. You can say, “This is what you will sound like.” Now I’m doing this. I have a practice amp, and it’s amazing. It’s called a Spark amp, and it has an app and everything, and you choose your background band, so I can choose a drummer, and suddenly it will sample my playing and throw in a bass player and a drummer. Now I’m an ensemble all with my little app and my little amplifier, and so I’m not playing by myself alone. I feel like I can assemble my own band, my own ensemble. And it just reaffirms my joy. It gets me to be performing right away.

I want to bring everyone into the room and say, “Hey, you don’t have to buy a ticket. You can be part of my concert. Come in here.” And the sooner your kid is trying to get you to come downstairs and watch their show, that’s when you know. That’s when you know they got something they want to show off, that they’re proud of what they’re doing, you know?

Rena Clark 37:50
We want to make sure we get the question, what do you wish we would ask you?

Kevin Honeycutt 37:56
Oh, ooh. How do you want to spend your heartbeats? Because you only get so many and it’s game over. I think all of us should think of that sooner. It’s not a morose question. I want to write on the world with permanent joy ink. I want to leave a contribution that makes a bunch of kids in the future fall in love with learning that leads to a better, more joyful life. And so whatever that looks like, there’s no one answer to this little question, right? There’s a million ways. It’s more of a buffet and less of a happy meal. It’s a buffet of everything on the menu, plus more. So you lay it all out and you watch kids in it.

When I have kids hitting me up on Instagram that are 35, 40 years old, and I’m a 58-year-old Yoda right now living on Dagobah down here in my basement, and when they say, “Mr. Honeycutt, the one day of school I remember is your art room. When we made that spaceship, I bent the system to match your joy. I didn’t bend you to match the system.” And so you do that for somebody else. You do that for somebody. You make somebody possible every day.

And so, man, I don’t need to walk through evaluation. I don’t need to read what some administrator said. I got Instagram. They will tell you, you know. Kids will tell you the truth. Now I’m at the age now—hey, young Jedis, hey, let me tell you, joy works. Joy works. So first, conditions favorable for learning that are tied to joy, whatever that looks like, make room for every kid to be kind of pre-amazing, pre-amazing, and get out of the way. Create an opportunity for them to perform. Create an opportunity for them to be Jerry Lee Lewis. Let them set the piano on fire, right? Not for real.

So I’ve made a commitment to myself today, and I think a lot of my friends are doing this right now. I’m going to make a commitment to build something new in my life that makes me proud and gives me joy. So I’m gonna start into my next book, and I’m gonna get it done because that gives me something—I know I’m making the world better. It gives me a placeholder in which to put my dreams and joy. And I want to do this with everybody. I want to do this with every kid that I work with. I want us to concentrate on making this world a better place. If we pour ourselves into that, good stuff is going to come next.

So that’s my recommitment to myself right now is I’m going to write that next book. I’m going to write some more music. I’m going to keep doing what I do, because that’s what I do. So I spend my heartbeats. And so I want you guys to think, “Yeah, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to get on this mission, and I’m going to make the world a better place.”

Rena Clark 40:38
All right, we’re going to jump to the toolkit. Maybe we can think of something to help us make this world a better place.

Transition Music with Rena’s Children 40:44
Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. Check it out. What’s in the toolkit, or what’s in the toolkit. Check it out.

Rena Clark 40:55
I don’t know, y’all. Who wants to jump in? We’ve heard about a lot of different things.

Winston Benjamin 40:59
I’ll go. I don’t think it’s a tool. It’s like a sharpening tool. I’m thinking about how to make what real digital recess looks like, in terms of creating a space for students to explore and engage in technology with joy. Because, again, sometimes I think I’m rigid, so trying to, like, do a little bit more release.

Paul Beckermann 41:23
Offer a buffet, right? And offer a buffet where kids can do things together to create. I think too often we have kids creating in isolation because we want to keep everything kind of quiet and in order, but let kids interact with each other and bounce ideas off of each other and create together. They can inspire each other through that, and they’re developing all those skills that we want them to develop, you know, collaboration, communication, critical thinking, creativity. It’s like the secret recipe for creation.

Rena Clark 41:53
Yes, kid, yeah. And have an opportunity for those flow spaces. I always think of, like, I know my own personal little maker space, my little closet in my basement, that I can disappear for hours and not know I’m gone. But I think for our kids too, and having those low tech options as well, I think just having, like, some string, like having kids create things with string, rubber bands, like, there’s just so many different things that we can put together, which is in the line with what you’re all talking about, digital recess. But having those maker space options, and I love even—I see that a lot in libraries now, like opportunities for kids to go into libraries and have that.

Paul Beckermann 42:35
Kevin, you get a chance to drop another tool in our toolkit. Is that something you’d like to offer up?

Kevin Honeycutt 42:40
I like everything that you all have articulated. I think keeping it loose, keeping it real and keeping it fun are important. But if you go to that Courting the Cosmos page on my website, I literally have a shopping list if that’s what you want. So, being true digital, I’ve got Makedo blocks. Makedo blocks is a kit where kids could do some fast engineering and build things. They could actually ride on little go-karts. They can make Makedo blocks. They don’t cost a fortune.

Make-A-Fort—in a town called Augusta, Kansas, a couple of former educators started a company where you take all these squares of cardboard and take these foam discs, and the kids could be up and making in no time at all.

Knex, designed by a dad and his kid that lets you take popsicle sticks and do pre-engineering. If you want to, you saw I talked about Makedo Tools, a company out of Australia for quick cardboard making.

Snap Circuits—if you want to get into STEM fast, but make it STEM meets Legos. Snap Circuits, you want every kit you can get your hands on. And kids will be—they’ll be engineering, they’ll be making, they’ll be designing. And you can also do coding now. They’ve got an Arduino built into that. So Snap Circuits is one of my—and I want to let you know I don’t get a dime if I say any of this. This is the stuff I take to my lunar colonies, because they’re fast. And so if you want kids to do hands-on over there with no screen, you got it. If you want to do robotics over there, and that’s Dash robotics with coding, you got that. You want to take kindergarteners and actually do coding, which I was dubious—could they handle it? They handled it just fine, just fine.

So anyway, all that is sitting there, so I love that intersection. If you want to go all the way to MIT, that’s probably not my thing. My thing is always going to be this close to cardboard, right? So once removed from cardboard and duct tape and stuff like that, but never removed from joy.

Winston Benjamin 44:25
I love that. Never removed from joy. So now it’s time for that one thing. It’s time for that one thing.

Transition Music 44:39
It’s that one thing.

Winston Benjamin 44:41
What’s that one thing that’s still bouncing around in your mind that you’re taking away with our conversation? Paul, what are you thinking about?

Paul Beckermann 44:50
It’s kind of just what you two both said about the joy thing that’s really hitting me. Kids should not have to earn joy. You know, it’s always frustrated me that the students who struggle have to go and do extra remedial work, and they don’t get to do the enrichment activities where the kids who got it get to. Kids should not have to be earning the right to have that joyful experience, because it’s maybe more important for those kids than anybody. We need to make sure that all kids get those experiences. That’s just really hitting me today.

Winston Benjamin 45:25
Yeah, right. And those are the ones who we want to come to school. So if we give them a little, they’ll come to school, right?

Paul Beckermann 45:32
Right. If you give them 10 more worksheets, they’re not going to come at all, right?

Winston Benjamin 45:38
Rena, what are you thinking?

Rena Clark 45:39
I think directly connected—that whole idea of emotion cementing learning. So if I have those positive emotions around it, well that’s going to cement my learning, those experiences, everything we’ve talked about today. And I’m going to, you know, I’m going to go outside the lines because I can, because I’m going to do two things, but I’m going to say that the “pencil without dark lines.” I just love that as a motto.

Paul Beckermann 46:12
As Kevin picks up his pencil.

Winston Benjamin 46:15
Paul wrote down one of the things that I was trying to remember, but I’m glad you wrote it down, because now I get to say it in two ways. “Play is the only time we invent” is the thing that I’m thinking about, and that connects to the thing Paul wrote down. “Rigor is passion unleashed.” So if we allow students to play and invent, then their rigor will be unleashed, and they’ll do all the hard things that they need to do because they love it. So that’s something that I’m walking away with. Kevin, what do you want to throw in? What’s the last—what’s one thing you want us to think about as we walk away?

Kevin Honeycutt 46:52
All right, let’s pretend that this podcast episode unleashes a new book, and all of you people listening right now, if there’s not enough fodder here to pre-write your book and get started, you weren’t listening. So listen to it again. Listen again, because everything’s on the table right here. But we need a book that’s all about this, right? That learning and joy are one thing, not two separate things. There should be joy. And anyone that’s taught for any amount of time knows exactly what I’m talking about. Those kids that don’t care, they’re not gonna care by making it harder and more painful, but there’s a way to get them. And anyone that’s done this for a while and had success with those kids knows what I’m talking about.

You can flip a kid in an hour like you flip a house, but you’ve gotta do something other than theory and pedagogy. You gotta focus on joy, right? Kids will self-identify what they love, if you make joy possible. And we all sit back and try to be Nostradamus, and we try to make an accommodation plan. We try to differentiate instruction, and we can’t divine what makes that kid tick. What does she like? Stop trying to be clairvoyant. Create conditions necessary for joy to happen in learning, and get out of the way, and she will teach you what she loves.

Paul Beckermann 48:05
Love it. All right, Kevin, if somebody wants to get to your website, what was the web address again for that?

Kevin Honeycutt 48:12
I’m Kevin Honeycutt everywhere. So if you’re on—is it LinkedIn, if it’s Threads, if it’s Instagram, you can find me, and I relentlessly publish every thought I have. There is no mystery in my crazy ADHD life. But if you go to kevinhoneycutt, H-O-N-E-Y-C-U-T-T, kevinhoneycutt.org, everything I have is there. If you just click around, you can go deep on one evening and look at the 30-year career in one junk drawer. And then hit me up if you want to do something, if you want to have a Zoom call and just talk about, how do we begin to do something open-ended that kids will love, that will be legendary in your community? I want to be part of that, so let’s talk.

Paul Beckermann 48:50
Awesome.

Kevin Honeycutt 48:50
All right? Well, let’s all go forth and find some joy, right?

Rena Clark 48:56
Thanks for listening to Unpacking Education.

Winston Benjamin 48:59
We invite you to visit us at avidopenaccess.org where you can discover resources to support student agency, equity and academic tenacity to create a classroom for future-ready learners.

Paul Beckermann 49:13
We’ll be back here next Wednesday for a fresh episode of Unpacking Education, and remember,

Rena Clark 49:18
Go forth and be awesome.

Winston Benjamin 49:21
Thank you for all you do.

Paul Beckermann 49:23
You make a difference.