2 + 98 =100, but 98+2<<100
Have you heard about this guy Michael Grab?
No, it’s not a typo. I was not trying to write Michael Jackson OR Michael Schumacher OR Michael Jordan OR Michael Phelps OR Michael Douglas OR Michael Crichton OR name of some such popular person. I am very much talking about Michael Grab. Have a look at this site to understand what Michael Grab does.
Isn’t his work amazing?
But if we look at the way conventional thinking goes Grab will surely be classified as not a normal person. After all I don’t expect a parent to say, “Son, you have to become like Grab”. More probably a conventional parent will say, “Son, grab this Grab and throw him into a dustin and get on with life”.
As I searched more on Michael Grab and heard him speaking in some of the videos available on YouTube, I started thinking.
How will most of the people define Michael and his work?
In all probability, he will either be called genius/talented/gifted/etc. OR he will be called crazy/weird/abnormal/ etc. Definitely not a normal person.
Why is that we can’t give people, like Michael, a space in this world, the way any so-called “normal” person is given?
Why do we have this strong need to either idolize OR reject people like Grab?
While pondering over this I came across a very interesting piece of research which was carried out for NASA by Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman. The intent of this research was to design a test for NASA scientists and engineers, whereby those with the highest creative potential can be identified and deployed on the most challenging projects. Later, in an effort to understand creativity better, this test was given to 1,600 American children who were 4–5 years old (i.e., preschool children) and to the surprise of the researchers, 98% of those children got classified as creative geniuses. This kind of unexpected outcome got the researchers thinking and they decided to convert this research into a longitudinal study. So, they went back to the same 1,600 children after a gap of 5 years, and then again after a gap of 10 years, making them redo the same test. Here are the results from that study:
Later they tested lots of adults (with an average age of 31), and can you guess the result. In the population of adults, the % of creative geniuses was 2%. Yes, you heard me right. The number is 2.
Wow! Isn’t this something to be proud of?
This number 2 is exactly equal to the number of fingers in an arm of T-Rex, the king of predators in dinosaur times. Not only that, 2 is the only even prime number among all the infinite numbers that Mathematics has. So, cheer up my fellow adults… we are special. And if this is still not helping you, then hopefully the following quote will help you,
“When people don’t believe in you, you have to believe in yourself.”
― Pierce Brosnan (aka James Bond)
Ok. So, what does this research tell us?
Simply put, this research tells us as to why people who write Binod become popular.
See the thing is like this. For majority of adults, life is amazingly complicated.
- They go to their research labs (also called office) everyday…
- Brainstorm for hours in a conference room (aptly named “Einstein” OR “Chanakya” OR some such name) …
- With dialogues like “On a second thought… “, while talking about biscuits OR network cables OR cars OR some such amazingly high-tech product…
- All the while keeping a serious face…sometimes while doing so the first 2 fingers are kept on temple and thumb is on their cheek (aka Amitabh Bachchan style)…
- Then write a so-called strategic report whose size will probably put even Noah’s Ark to shame…
- And finally come back home to tell their family (and the world) that it was a pretty intense day.
Now if our work is so “NASAish”, will we not require a break from such intense cerebral stuff?
I think it’s perfectly reasonable to write Binod, sometimes.
The problem is that people like Dr. George Land and Dr. Beth Jarman don’t get it. They don’t understand that hamko rocket nahi udana haine… hamare pass bahut bade issues haine debate ke liye like SSR death, WhiteHat Jr. advertisements, WhatsApp privacy issues, etc. etc… and of course, we also have to decide “biscuit ki packaging ko green color maine kaise kare so that we look like an environmentally conscious organization”…
I hope you are getting the sarcasm. The point is that all of us are born creative geniuses but an abnormally few of us are able to retain that spark with which we are born with (and an abnormally high number of us who have lost that spark continue to think that we have the spark just because we are able to explain the role of a spark plug in vehicles). So, it’s not surprising that people like Michael Grab are classified as not normal.
“The condition of alienation, of being asleep, of being unconscious, of being out of one’s mind, is the condition of the normal man. Society highly values its normal man. It educates children to lose themselves and to become absurd, and thus to be normal.”
― R.D. Laing
I got into teaching in 2016 with the same intention that most of the adults have i.e., “It is our responsibility to teach ignorant children so that they become smart adults”. This pseudo arrogance of mine was also borne out of the fancy entrance exams that I had cleared in the past. As I spent more and more time with children, I was brought to a very humbling realization of what it means to be a teacher,
“A teacher is not an adult who teaches. A teacher is an adult who learns humbly from children.”
Today I can very strongly identify with the findings of the above study. In all of my existence on this planet, the only time when I have learnt meaningfully is in the last 4+ years of spending time with young children. Rest have been just a sheer waste of time and efforts. Children have been my biggest teachers. They are the one who taught me what real life problem solving is all about.
After hearing all this, you may think that I must have now become an amazing teacher. Well, I can only wish that you were right. There is a saying in Hindi, “Kutte ki dum, tedi ki tedi” (A dog’s tail is crooked forever). Today when 10 children join me for my Science course, within 6 months at least 50% of them drop out. There is a painfully long way to go before I will learn how to engage with creative geniuses meaningfully. The journey to become straight is a long one for this dog’s tail :-(
Few days back I saw a movie called “The Imitation Games”. It’s on the life of the English mathematician Alan Turing. In that movie there is the following dialogue,
“Do you know, this morning I was on a train that went through a city that wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for you. I bought a ticket from a man who would likely be dead if it wasn’t for you. I read up, on my work, a whole field of scientific inquiry that only exists because of you. Now, if you wish you could have been normal… I can promise you I do not. The world is an infinitely better place precisely because you weren’t.”
― Joan Clarke (Imitation Game movie)
Like Joan Clarke, I also hope and pray that each and every kid on this planet, never ever becomes a “normal” person, no matter what their teachers/parents/or any adults for that matter desires. Amen!
This brings me to the whole purpose of education and the way we look at the world. We, parents and teachers, need to realize that the purpose of education is not to convert us into a cheap copy, but to let us remain the best of our original self. And to do that, we have to first learn to identify people like Michael Grab as normal people. We adults have to realize that we have to take a step back and stop teaching kids, with our amazingly limited creative potential. Because when we do so the 98% becomes 2%.
Now, let me state something clearly, lest I am misunderstood — I am not trying to say that we adults have no role in education. We do have a role, but that role is a 2% kind of role and not the 98% kind of role that we have forcibly taken up. We can’t be controlling what/how/when/where/etc. a child will learn for that’s the 98% of learning and that job has to be done by the child himself or herself.
“I cannot teach anybody anything, I can only make them think.”
― Socrates
In a mature education system, there is no place for teachers, the way we have defined this profession today. Our children will never learn if we teach them… they will learn only if we stop teaching them and start learning from them. And that does not mean that our 2% role is meaningless. Remember it takes 2 to make 98 into 100. The reason small children are amazingly creative is not only because they are born with it, it’s also because parents (and other adults around them) till then typically do their job the 2% way. We just need to continue doing it the same way.
“The greatest sign of success for a teacher is to be able to say, ‘The children are now working as if I did not exist.”
― Maria Montessori
Now after reading all this you feel that am a idealist/not normal/impractical, then I hope and wish that you are correct. Not only that I also wish Einstein is proven wrong,
“Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.”
― Albert Einstein
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