Creative thinking comes to you when you think out of the box. Thinking out of box says no to traditional thought. When conventional thinking can not solve your problems, then take the help of creative thinking. It makes your life easy too. Why am I saying so?
If you read this post, you will know how the creative thinking of my wife, not my traditional thinking helped my younger son to read and write Bengali. It made our life easy.
Traditional approach failed
A usual traditional approach to learn a language starts with learning its alphabet. But when I took this approach to teach my son, I failed miserably. Can you think why? If you want to write the first Bengali alphabet, then you need to move your holding fingers in a clockwise direction. But my son always used to move them in an anticlockwise direction.
I said to myself, “If he repeats the mistake to learn this first alphabet, how long will he take to learn 21 vowels, 36 consonants, and 15 modifiers of the Bengali character set?” So I just gave up and said to my wife, “I can not teach him now. I don’t have patience. Probably you can do it.”
Creative thinking brought success.
Since then, she took charge of teaching my son. To my surprise, within three months, he learned how to read and write Bengali words and even the Bengali alphabets. How did she do so? She used her creative thinking here.
Do you know how? In the first place, she purchased some unique books for him. Every book was full of colored pictures that had a name printed below. Then She used to point out a specific image to him and ask him, “Do you know it? Can you write the word written below?” It made his learning enjoyable as well as fast. So he loved it. So, when he identified a picture of a mango, he quickly engaged himself to try to write mango in Bengali. As a result, he learned to write common words such as umbrella, donkey, cow, and so on one by one in Bengali. In the end, he learned the most commonly used words. He started reading and writing simple Bengali words.
Had he not been taught to read and write in childhood, he could not pursue his masters now at Virginia Tech University, USA. All credit goes to my wife, who used creative thinking.
Creativity not only brought success here but also made our lives easy. Similarly, if you use your creative thinking, you can, too, make your life easy.
I must close here with this beautiful quote.
“Once we rid ourselves of traditional thinking, we can get on with creating the future.”
— James Bertrand.