Bad Ideas (3/23/06)
When we had brainstorming meetings at Yankee, my old boss, Jud Hale, used to say, ³everybody bring five bad ideas.² It sounds crazy, but he understood two important truths. One is that if you try to come up with a perfect idea, you¹re likely to freeze up. The other is that sometimes, the crazy idea is the best, most creative solution.
     I¹ve carried Jud¹s wisdom into my classrooms. I tell my students that when they hear someone begin a sentence with ³This may sound stupid, but...² they should listen very carefully. Something great is about to be said.
     I¹ve never known it to fail. The stupid idea, the crazy idea, smashes to smithereens the obvious answer, the conventional wisdom. Once we were talking about Arthur Miller¹s play Death of a Salesman, and I asked the class why Biff, the salesman¹s apparently good-for-nothing son, keeps coming home to face his father¹s anger and disappointment. ³Give me a silly answer,² I told them.
     The class clown yelled, ³He¹s pregnant!²
     Everybody laughed. Then I said, ³That¹s right.²
Everybody stopped laughing. ³Biff comes home because he¹s carrying something,² I said, ³something that has gotten too heavy for him. It¹s a terrible secret, and it can¹t be covered up any longer. It¹s time for it to come out.²
It happened again just last week in freshman honors English. We¹ve been reading The Odyssey, and we¹ve arrived at the point in the epic where Odysseus, who has been held captive for seven years by a goddess, is finally released. The catch is, his only means of transport is a raft. Sure enough, Poseidon, the sea-god who hates him, spies Odysseus in his frail vessel, and stirs up a giant storm that wrecks the raft and hurls the hero into the boiling ocean.
     I wanted them to describe how Odysseus is changed by the experience, and one group, heeding my call for crazy ideas, came up with this: Odysseus is like pasta, they said. When he was on the island, he wasn¹t cooked yet. He was rigid, inflexible, and broken. But when he¹s thrown into the ocean, he gets cooked. He turns softer, more flexible. By the time he¹s washed up on the other island, he¹s limp. He bends with all his troubles. He doesn¹t break.
Thinking of something crazy isn¹t always the best thing to do, but it¹s useful when you¹re faced with a huge, complex, apparently impossible problem. ConVal High School is faced with such a problem right now, and we need some help from you, the community, to solve it.
     The problem is this: What should we teach? In today¹s world, where social and economic changes happen with bewildering speed, what knowledge and skills should a ConVal graduate have in order to succeed?
     We¹ve formed a committee of teachers, students, administrators, parents, local business people, and school board members to grapple with this monster. We decided that the first thing we should do is put the question to all those groups before we try to hammer out a curriculum for the future.
     We¹ve already had meetings with the ConVal faculty and students. Next, we plan two meetings that will be open to the public -- not just parents, but everyone in the district. You pay the taxes that pay for schools; you need employees with certain skills and aptitudes. What are the most important, the most practical, the most marketable?
     The first of those public meetings is tonight at the high school, at 7:00 p.m. For people who find it easier to come to a meeting in the morning, we¹ll have another on Friday, April 7th, when our school is closed for teacher training anyway, at 8:00 a.m.
This is not a done deal. We have a tentative proposal for changing the graduation requirements, but we need your help, your knowledge and experience and wisdom, to be sure it¹s right. Please come. Bring five bad ideas.