I spent a couple of years teaching at a career college in MA. The problem was not so much dealing with disruptive creative students, and I certainly had several of those, as it was dealing with students that didn't have the prerequisites and mental tools to learn the skills they needed to express themselves usefully.
An example: I had one student who spoke very well, he was from Cameroon and in fact spoke _several_ languages, was something of a class leader, he had very good visual ideas and his presentation style was remarkable. But. He did not know how to read a ruler and fractions were a complete mystery to him. Algebra was completely beyond him at his current state.
He was in a graphic design class and was going into a web programming class, and following that a 3D modeling class. He often became actively resentful that I was forcing him to focus on things that he considered trivial and not apparently related to the results he wanted. He very much felt I was stifling his creativity.
Convincing him that he would simply fail at his goals without studying some basics was very difficult.
We got the fractions and ruler issues licked with some outside class work, but he simply was not able to handle the coding in the web design class and failed. I didn't teach the 3D class, so I don't know how well he did there, but I can only imagine.
(One of the reasons I left the school was that with such a wide variety of students with incredibly varied levels of education, I wasn't allowed to adapt the classes to meet their needs. I did finally get the school to offer remedial math and reading lessons, but they were not prerequisites and they did no kind of testing to determine need.)
My point is that creativity is important, but basic skills often are more important, at least at the beginning. And no matter how gifted one is, developing the discipline to work on non-interesting and non-creative tasks is essential in the real world. There are problems that have aspects that are simply beyond hacking and shooting from the hip. And they are often, ultimately, the most interesting and rewarding to solve.
An example: I had one student who spoke very well, he was from Cameroon and in fact spoke _several_ languages, was something of a class leader, he had very good visual ideas and his presentation style was remarkable. But. He did not know how to read a ruler and fractions were a complete mystery to him. Algebra was completely beyond him at his current state.
He was in a graphic design class and was going into a web programming class, and following that a 3D modeling class. He often became actively resentful that I was forcing him to focus on things that he considered trivial and not apparently related to the results he wanted. He very much felt I was stifling his creativity.
Convincing him that he would simply fail at his goals without studying some basics was very difficult.
We got the fractions and ruler issues licked with some outside class work, but he simply was not able to handle the coding in the web design class and failed. I didn't teach the 3D class, so I don't know how well he did there, but I can only imagine.
(One of the reasons I left the school was that with such a wide variety of students with incredibly varied levels of education, I wasn't allowed to adapt the classes to meet their needs. I did finally get the school to offer remedial math and reading lessons, but they were not prerequisites and they did no kind of testing to determine need.)
My point is that creativity is important, but basic skills often are more important, at least at the beginning. And no matter how gifted one is, developing the discipline to work on non-interesting and non-creative tasks is essential in the real world. There are problems that have aspects that are simply beyond hacking and shooting from the hip. And they are often, ultimately, the most interesting and rewarding to solve.