"My Thinking is Ugly"

Student: my thinking is ugly
Miss Jess: your thinking cannot be ugly. That's like saying your brain is ugly. I guarantee you your brain is not ugly.
Student: But I don't know what to write!

True that. 45 minutes had passed and he had written 3 lines. My requirement for the 4th grade writing assignment was 1 page, to the very last line, no exceptions.

This is a problem plaguing the youth of America. Students either don't know how to put their ideas and thoughts into coherent words on paper, or just don't know how to write.
I have had students come to me with minds as blank as copy paper, as empty as our nation's treasury. It takes me several weeks to tap into the childish creativities and imaginations that have been buried away by too many hours and years of endless worksheets, practice workbooks, math drills, and memorized facts and concepts.

It's a very scary reality. Some of these students can do multiplication as quickly as I can, but when it comes to applying the learned facts to word problems, they draw blanks.
They have all memorized the definitions for adjectives, adverbs, and other various parts of speech. But their minds can't come up with any really interesting examples, or move on to the even more important task of using it in their writing. All memorization, no application.
They're like computers. They have difficulty thinking on their own. (sometimes, I think even cleverbot is more creative than some of the kids that have come across my classroom).

All laments aside though, this is not the end of the world. They're young, many of them have barely reached a decade's worth of life. Their minds are like sponges -- they can absorb anything and everything. We just have to provide them with the right things to absorb. They shouldn't be doused in the commonly repetitive and factory refined bottled water. They need creative juices, tropical punch, spring water, experimental mixes, the occasional dose of something stronger. Then we will have the next generation of fearless, creative thinkers. Then, anything and everything will be possible, in all its entirety.

We'll play real Wizard Quidditch on low gravitation fields, as pigs fly over the moon.