I Need More Noise, Please! And Random Conversation! And Distractions!

Some people prepare to release their creative Djinn by turning off the radio, closing the doors, sending the kids out to play and putting a sheet over the goldfish tank.  They like peace, quiet, and tranquility for their surroundings.  This allows them to carefully focus their grey matter on the task at hand, with no distractions.

I am not those people.  Today, I wanted to try to rough out a writing project and finally gave up working at home — it was just too quiet.  So I’m here at “Cool Beans” Coffee Shop on the campus of the University of South Carolina.  It took me a good ten minutes just to find a place to park, and there isn’t another empty table in the whole place.

There’s Blondie playing on the sound system, young people chattering at seven other tables in the room (there are three other rooms), and the clang and bash of dishes in the kitchen as people yell out their orders and greet favorite customers.  Starbucks, it ain’t.

This makes me think about the typical model of education that we offer to students — aligned in neat rows, keeping quiet and listening carefully, afraid that they’ll miss something that will be on the final test.  Then we send them out into the noisy, un-planned world where they have to make sense of all the input on their own.  (When the Army teaches people how to do urban warfare, they have situations where both “good guys” and “bad guys” pop up randomly, some with guns and some holding babies.  Turns out that there’s a world of difference between teaching people how to shoot at paper targets and doing it in real life.)

The best learning I’ve ever done has been messy.  Where I didn’t really know what was going on, didn’t understand exactly what the rules were, and was allowed to push that old envelope to the point that all four corners were in tatters.  Then I could reel things back in and take a look at what I’d found.

In Minnesota, as a young pup, Dad would take us out to a big empty shopping mall parking lot on the first snow of winter — and let us go wild driving the car around with abandon.  Spins, skids, locked-wheel stops — we had a better time than any bumper-car ride at the State Fair.  I’ve always suspected that’s why we never had any bad accidents — we all had a pretty good idea of what “awful” looked like, and it wasn’t too surprising when it happened.

So how about you?  Do you work to keep everything neat and tidy?  Or is it ok if there’s a little mess involved in your learning?