The incident last week of a ninth grader with an Arabic name disassembling a digital clock and passing it off as his own invention to try to impress his teachers is telling, in many ways. I actually did build a digital clock--when I was in the 11th grade, out of SN7490 SSI integrated circuits. When I saw a picture of Ahmed's clock, I knew immediately it could not possibly be a bomb and was certainly not something he'd invented. It had a big LSI chip that handled virtually everything. Ahmed is better at electronics than 90% of 9th graders for being able to take it out of its case without breaking it, but he's passing off the work of a team of professional engineers as his own. Most teachers can't be expected to know enough about electronics to know how to rate a claim of invention, but a teacher that knows so little that they can't tell that there was nothing there that could explode needs to seek another way of making their living.
In a long commentary on facebook, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, who was more precocious with electronics than I was, saw the same thing and mentioned how he really got his start in electronics because he had an idea for a prank. He did it and got into trouble--one of his teachers thought he'd made a bomb--unsurprisingly, because the device was meant to sound like one. He learned from this to keep his pranks secret. From the sound of it, his pranks were a little scarier than mine--several of them involved shocking people, and he spent a night in juvie for the fake bomb. Several of my stunts involved pyrotechnics, but I was always very careful to make sure lots of people understood what I was doing, especially my safety precautions. I still have all my eyes, ears and fingers...
Woz also said that "From
the most creative people I meet in high tech, I'd suggest that slight
misbehavior is an essential ingredient of creative thinking". This is exactly my experience. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, if you don't have at least a little bit of a rebel and scofflaw in you, you have basically no chance of ever doing anything very creative.
The schools today are removing a great many of the exhilarating things from the curriculum. Cuts in the arts and recess are only part of it. I made lots of things that went poof or boom or flash in chemistry lab. I learned a lot from these games. The teacher kept an eye on me and realized that I was probably the safest kid in the class, precisely because I was always looking for ways to have fun and understood, better than most, that these things could hurt me. He even helped offered suggestions for a few of my projects. He was a great teacher. Thanks, Mr. Wong. Today, most of the chemicals I used are gone. I'd have been stymied. Chemistry would have been boring.
Zero tolerance has been one of the most harmful ideas ever imposed upon the school system. Kids get major punishments for bringing toys to school. Kids need to rebel a little. It's what makes them feel different and creative, and in a lot of cases, actually be creative. If you stop the little fun, their only option becomes unsupervised fun. Big fun. Kids doing bad things, things with consequences and that may deserve real punishment. Little fun stays little and it can satisfy kids creative urges if they have enough of it.
Creativity requires rebellion. Doing the same thing over and over is not creative, but it is one of the definitions of insanity. If we stop our kids from being creative, we are over as a nation.
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