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so long as the buyer has a purchase permit or a concealed-carry license.

I felt uneasy

He liked the rifle. I needed the cash. We shook hands, and off we went.

There is rarely a moment when I’m not within reach of a firearm.

We don’t touch the guns or draw them from their holsters. They are unseen and unspoken of, but always there.

Rarely do we mention what we carry

I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew the rules: Always assume a firearm is loaded. Always keep the gun pointed in a safe direction. Know your target and what’s beyond it.

Guns were often a bridge between father and son.

or my family, guns had always been a means of putting food on the table. My father never owned a handgun. He kept nothing for home defense.

had a gun put to my head

I can remember that

steel

I can remember

In the end, what happened was swept under the rug. My parents said the school was probably trying to keep the story off the news.

surrounded myself with the people I did as a form of protection.

I dropped to the ground as gunfire rang from a car at a bonfire party.

I pushed friends behind the brick foundation of a house as a shootout erupted over pills. There were times when someone could have easily been shot and killed.

his service weapon pushed into the base of my skull.

I stood there trembling while they apologized.

Jackson County

I found a community that reminded me of my grandmother, where folks still kept big gardens and canned the vegetables they grew. They still filled the freezer with meat taken by rod and rifle — trout and turkey, dove and rabbit, deer, bear, anything in season.

hared passion for wilderness and time spent in the field with gun in hand.

Those types of things are rare now, even in places like Appalachia.

A few weeks later, the boy took that .30-30 lever action into the field and killed his first deer with it — the same as his uncle, his grandfather and great-grandfather.

centuries of experience gathered around the campfire each night

the .308 blew apart the morning.

There is a sadness that only hunters know, a moment when lament overshadows any desire for celebration

Life is sustained by death

the killing is not easy, nor should it be.

would feed me for a year

I asked if there was anything I could’ve done differently to make him more comfortable when he first approached the truck.

He smiled and told me: “But this is South Carolina. Most every car I pull over has a gun.”

As I headed toward the mountains, all I could think about was Philando Castile,

situation was re

All I could think about was how things might have been different if the

versed and that young black state trooper with braces had been behind the wheel, a white trooper cautiously approaching the car.

It was impossible not to recognize how gun culture reeks of privilege.

Ruger 10/22s and Marlin Model 60s, the .22LRs

There were always guns, but nothing like the assault weapons that line the shelves today.

firearms whose sole purpose would be to take human life if I were left with no other choice.

I’ve witnessed how quickly a moment can turn to a matter of life and death. I live in a region where 911 calls might not bring blue lights for an hour. Whether it’s preparation or paranoia, I plan for worst-case scenarios and trust no one but myself for my survival.

they joke about the minute hand of the doomsday clock inching closer to midnight.

as they wait for the end of the world.

they own them because they’re fun at the range and affordable to shoot. They use the rifles for punching paper, a few for shooting coyotes. E

step as close to Title II of the federal Gun Control Act as legally possible without the red tape and paperwork. They fire bullets into Tannerite targets that blow pumpkins into the sky.

None of them see a connection between the weapons they own and the shootings at Sandy Hook, San Bernardino, Aurora, Orlando, Las Vegas, Parkland. They see mug shots of James Holmes, Omar Mateen, Stephen Paddock, Nikolas Cruz — “crazier than a shithouse rat,” they say. “If it hadn’t been that rifle, he’d have done it with something else.”

They fear that what starts as an assault-weapons ban will snowball into an attack on everything in the safe.

I understand what’s at stake

I think about that boy picking up that AR in Cabela’s, and I’m torn between the culture I grew up with and how that culture has devolved.

changes I know must come, changes to what types of firearms line the shelves and to the background checks and ownership requirements needed to carry one out the door.

an unrelenting fear of what could be lost

a subsistence culture already threatened by the loss of public land, rising costs and a widening rural-urban divide; the right of individuals to protect their own lives and the lives of their families.

He cut a look in my direction as if I’d absolutely lost my mind.

I’d be fine with an assault-weapons ban

question is irrelevant, that the reason doesn’t supersede the right.

Despite everything we have in common, despite the fact that he’s my best friend and we were going squirrel hunting in a few days, the two of us fundamentally disagree

As sad as it is to say, the silence is easier

there were kids on the television in the background, high school survivors who were willing to say what we are not, and I was ashamed.

ne of those pretty, late-winter days with bluebird skies when the trees are still naked on the mountains and you can see every shadow and contour of the landscape.

The muzzle was pointed in our direction. Ashley was terrified.

The truth is, there are guns I feel justified in owning and guns I feel belong on battlefields.

I know that part of what they’re missing or refusing to acknowledge is how fear ushered in this shift in gun culture over the past two decades.

Fear is the factor no one wants to address — fear of criminals, fear of terrorists, fear of the government’s turning tyrannical and, perhaps more than anything else, fear of one another.

I recognize this, because I recognize my own and I recognize that despite all I know and believe I can’t seem to overcome it.

I don’t buy into that only-way-to-stop-a-bad-guy-with-a-gun-is-a-good-guy-with-a-gun bravado.

I have no visions of being a hero. Instead, I find myself looking for where I’d run, asking myself what I would get behind. The gun is the last resort. It’s the final option when all else is exhausted.

we walked, I could feel the pistol holstered on my side, the weight of my gun tugging at my belt. The fear was lessened by knowing that there was a round chambered, that all it would take is the downward push of a safety and the short pull of a trigger for that bullet to breathe. I felt safer knowing that gun was there.

What spaces can we build online that aren’t quantified, tracked, scored, graded, assessed, and accredited?

What we have is a series of online classes with no real infrastructure to support the work that students do on college campuses outside and between those classes

Up to now, online learning has taken little notice of the web upon which it’s suspended

Today, the road to access doesn’t necessarily detour through the university, and anyone, of just about any age, can travel it.

We’ve created happy little caskets inside which learning fits too neatly and tidily (like forums, learning management systems, and web conferencing platforms). We’ve timed learning down to the second, developed draconian quality assurance measures, built analytics to track every bit of minutiae, and we’ve championed the stalest, most banal forms of interaction — interaction buried beneath rubrics and quantitative assessment — interaction that looks the same every time in every course with every new set of students.

“Sometimes students only need to get the main idea,” Singer said, “and then digital is just as good as print and a lot quicker … But if you want deep comprehension and synthesis of the material, have the students print it out and navigate the material that way. Think about what you want students to get out of a lesson” before assigning a printed or digital reading.

Donovan added, “I do agree that we’ve got to figure this out … because it isn’t going away, for sure, for lots of reasons: accessibility, cost, sustainability. We have to figure out how we can support students in comprehending from this format.”

But he said he believes “we can still get as much meaning out of digital text. We just haven’t found the right transitions to do what we actually do with a physical book, with digital text … We haven’t found the digital equivalent of interacting with text. We haven’t really trained people to do that.”

When faculty of a major Chinese university asked Plucker to identify trends in American education, he described our focus on standardized curriculum, rote memorization, and nationalized testing. “After my answer was translated, they just started laughing out loud,” Plucker says. “They said, ‘You’re racing toward our old model. But we’re racing toward your model, as fast as we can.’ ”

The argument that we can’t teach creativity because kids already have too much to learn is a false trade-off. Creativity isn’t about freedom from concrete facts. Rather, fact-finding and deep research are vital stages in the creative process.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions. Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with. Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better

Creativity has always been prized in American society, but it’s never really been understood. While our creativity scores decline unchecked, the current national strategy for creativity consists of little more than praying for a Greek muse to drop by our houses. The problems we face now, and in the future, simply demand that we do more than just hope for inspiration to strike. Fortunately, the science can help: we know the steps to lead that elusive muse right to our doors.

What’s common about successful programs is they alternate maximum divergent thinking with bouts of intense convergent thinking, through several stages. Real improvement doesn’t happen in a weekend workshop. But when applied to the everyday process of work or school, brain function improves.

kids demonstrated the very definition of creativity: alternating between divergent and convergent thinking, they arrived at original and useful ideas. And they’d unwittingly mastered Ohio’s required fifth-grade curriculum—from understanding sound waves to per-unit cost calculations to the art of persuasive writing. “You never see our kids saying, ‘I’ll never use this so I don’t need to learn it,’ ” says school administrator Maryann Wolowiec. “Instead, kids ask, ‘Do we have to leave school now?’ ” Two weeks ago, when the school received its results on the state’s achievement test, principal Traci Buckner was moved to tears. The raw scores indicate that, in its first year, the school has already become one of the top three schools in Akron, despite having open enrollment by lottery and 42 percent of its students living in poverty.

project-based learning

highly creative adults frequently grew up with hardship. Hardship by itself doesn’t lead to creativity, but it does force kids to become more flexible—and flexibility helps with creativity.

When creative children have a supportive teacher—someone tolerant of unconventional answers, occasional disruptions, or detours of curiosity—they tend to excel. When they don’t, they tend to underperform and drop out of high school or don’t finish college at high rates. They’re quitting because they’re discouraged and bored, not because they’re dark, depressed, anxious, or neurotic. It’s a myth that creative people have these traits. (Those traits actually shut down creativity; they make people less open to experience and less interested in novelty.) Rather, creative people, for the most part, exhibit active moods and positive affect. They’re not particularly happy—contentment is a kind of complacency creative people rarely have. But they’re engaged, motivated, and open to the world.

solutions emerge from a healthy marketplace of ideas, sustained by a populace constantly contributing original ideas and receptive to the ideas of others

The age-old belief that the arts have a special claim to creativity is unfounded.

When scholars gave creativity tasks to both engineering majors and music majors, their scores laid down on an identical spectrum, with the same high averages and standard deviations. Inside their brains, the same thing was happening—ideas were being generated and evaluated on the fly.

those who diligently practice creative activities learn to recruit their brains’ creative networks quicker and better. A lifetime of consistent habits gradually changes the neurological pattern.

The home-game version of this means no longer encouraging kids to spring straight ahead to the right answer

The new view is that creativity is part of normal brain function.

“As a child, I never had an identity as a ‘creative person,’ ” Schwarzrock recalls. “But now that I know, it helps explain a lot of what I felt and went through.”

In China there has been widespread education reform to extinguish the drill-and-kill teaching style. Instead, Chinese schools are also adopting a problem-based learning approach.

fact-finding

problem-finding

Next, idea-finding

there is one crucial difference between IQ and CQ scores. With intelligence, there is a phenomenon called the Flynn effect—each generation, scores go up about 10 points. Enriched environments are making kids smarter. With creativity, a reverse trend has just been identified and is being reported for the first time here: American creativity scores are falling.