B2

During Raul Cuero’s interview, I learned many ways to stay creative. Cuero stressed multiple times how important it is to be observant. He said kids nowadays tend to have unintelligent conversations about superficial things. I reflected on this and realized that it would be a great idea to unplug for at least 20 minutes every day. The purpose of this break would be to observe everything that is around me, whether it’s what I see or what I hear. It could even be what I taste if I go to a restaurant. This semester I am going to try to keep my creativity up as much as possible with my music and write at least 4 bars of lyrics every day.

            Cuero also spoke on how important reading is, especially for growing children. This, however, is interesting because it sort of goes against the rest of his statements throughout the interview. Whenever he bounces from one response to another, he has the common theme of leaving behind technology and going outside to do nothing but observe and take mental notes. This note about how important reading is for learning and staying creative could be taken in a way where technology is the best route. Nowadays everything is accessible online. We watched the interview online didn’t we? Also, there are millions of articles written solely for online purposes, so how can he say we should leave behind technology?

I know things have changed a lot in the past couple of decades with technology, and Cuero also touched on that. He said, “You can’t plan creativity.” He went on to talk about how ideas come from nature, or rather inductive knowledge which is new knowledge. On the other hand, deductive knowledge is preexisting knowledge. Cuero said that you will only learn deductive knowledge from technology. This is what made me realize that being observant was his main advice. It was because he kept going back to it every other question he answered. He made a way to relate it to nearly every question that he was asked.

When talking about the problems with the American school system, Cuero said that there is a very solid foundation, however, he thinks that people in America go to school for the wrong reasons. In his eyes, the only reason someone would want to enroll in education would be to learn, but that isn’t the case today. Students today enroll in education because they want a job. Now, I don’t completely agree with what he was saying here because an end goal is key. If you don’t plan ahead for what job you want to do, then you will waste a ton of money going back to school after you realize that you should’ve been planning for a job. Yes, it is important to learn and enjoy the learning process, but planning ahead is essential. My favorite piece of advice given during this interview was to be committed and focused without the fear of failure. Just do what you want to do, it’s as simple as that.

HoustonPBS. “Microbiologist Raul Cuero PhD on Sparking Creativity on Living Smart with Patricia Gras.mpg.” YouTube, YouTube, 24 May 2010, www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZugtaO85T_Y.