When watching Nicole playing her favorite colorful cartoon zoo animals board puzzles, I suddenly got shocked by a fact: I’m already a person without too much creativity, while I tried to influence her from all aspects in our life via my way of thinking. It’s a terrible finding to me, but how fortunate I am that I realized it-- better late than never.

Yesterday it was a mid-week break for both of us, no school and no work, though it was not a nice day, windy and cloudy. As her best friend at home, I couldn’t reject her request for playing together. Recently the little girl is so fond of making puzzles which she was not interested at all one month ago. And we began with the colorful animal puzzles this time.

She started the first round as usual. She randomly picked up one piece (15 pieces in total), and compared the shape to the one on the board plate, adjusted the angle and put it into a right place. Then she selected another one with relevant animal parts to the previous picture and connected to it. Sometimes when she failed to find a relevant one, she just randomly picked up any piece she likes and repeated the comparing and place hunting. Occasionally she would ask me to give her a hand to fix some pieces on the board when she was placing another one, because they were so mobile. In my eyes, her performance was so slow and clueless. For fulfilling one board, it took her about five minutes. Therefore I couldn’t help showing her my ‘fast and right way’ as soon as possible when it was my turn.

It was a small case to me. I used to finish 1000 pieces printed puzzle of a small part of “Qing Ming Shang He Tu” (Along the River during the Qingming Festival) in two days, and enjoy quite a leisure time. I could manage 15 pieces in several seconds. But since the aim was to show Nicole how to do it fast, I slowed down a bit. I selected out four pieces supposed to be located at the four corners, showed them to Nicole and told her to notice the rectangular corner of each one and put them on the plate. When the four corners were fixed, the following part became so easy. In one minute we finished the game. Then it was Nicole’s playing time. Although I reminded her of the corner pieces, she seemed to insist on her own way, and the first step was still a challenging step to her in my eyes. ‘’Let her be, she knows what she wants,” I sighed to myself, “Anyway she was so proud of every puzzle that she worked it out.” Thus I watched her playing and sometimes reminded her of the corners.

As she played and time passed by, I noticed that every time she worked in a different way. Sometimes she found the turtle first, sometimes she figured out the tiger family at the beginning, and sometimes she got the aquarium, etc. She displayed to me her new discoveries every time, and those were gorgeous and won my applause. And I also realized how boring my performance was, every time I just repeated the same way, from corners to the middle part, careless about what animals were in the picture. That was sad and shameful.

When I realized that I almost became a creativity killer to her job, I stopped my interference and only advised her when she had troubles. I need to reflect on my way to teach her, to try to not fix her thinking mode because I am somewhat fixed. Actually she showed me what creativity is in this lesson.