I have been mussing all morning about what direction to go with this blog post. There is so much that happened in the way of quirky this weekend, that I feel scattered in my thoughts. So if I appear to be rambling, I am.
Let, me start with yesterday's documentary debacle. John and I received word a few weeks ago that we had been selected to be part of a documentary featuring creative and innovative small businesses in the South. Pretty cool we think. A few days ago, they give us a call, and say, we will be at your place around 2pm to film and do interviews. Great, we think.
Then we spend a lot of time cleaning up the property, the house, the gardens. John tells 4 clients they need to wait because he has a group coming to film on Sunday, so he can't deliver on Sunday (one of our busiest days.) We slightly ignore the kids as we frantically try to get ready.
Then at 1:53, they call and ask for our address. When they see that we are not downtown, they panic and say, well we were going to meet with y'all from 2:00-3:00 and then we have another appointment at 3:00 so I guess we just can't do it. Really! John talks to them, does a little creative problem solving and we manage to work it out where we will wake our boys up from a nap, take them to my mom's (Thank You), then race downtown to meet these folks.
We manage all this, meet them on a porch downtown where they ask questions on the fly, clearly without having done much homework on who we are and what we do, while lamenting about their very busy schedule. Don't get me wrong, they were nice people, but very reflective of the "I just got out of college and now I get to hit the road running and the world is waiting on me to make a difference" sort of generation.
They were young, and in Eastern Oregon, we would have called them Green Broke (AKA inexperienced.) All this is OK as long as people learn from the journey. Heck, how else can we really learn. Basically they started off with a good premise. Go to 13 cities throughout the SE and interview a set list of people along the way. Then they decided to start calling and setting up interviews with the people that the people they were interviewing mentioned. This quickly spiraled them into doing 10-15 1 hour interviews a day. Sadly, if there were all as in-depth (insert sarcasm here) as our, then they are heading for a world of quick sound bites and no depth.
Here is where I am struggling. I, as a teacher, in a public school, feel like I am contributing to this young generations, sound bite, do it quick and easy attitude. Our students think they can set the stage however they want, and what many of them want is easy and no homework. I will say, if these folks had done their homework, a lot of time and effort could have been better spent for them and for us. Spontaneity is fun, but not necessarily productive or inspiring for anyone else. I also feel like I am contributing to this quick and dirty approach of more is more. This just isn't true. You can't really get to any level of depth in 45 min to an hour, especially when you take the idea (raised bed gardens) out of context (to a front porch in downtown Birmingham.) But, as teachers we do this to our kids for 13 years. No wonder they thought it was Ok.
When I ask my students about the units I teach or the projects we do, every time the two things they consistently want are : 1. More time 2. More depth. I have never had a student tell me they wish we went quicker or shallower, that they wanted to know less. Yet, I watched this young film crew, scramble to find creativity and innovation quickly through many people. As if the masaija of creativity would appear to them and make a great film, if they just interviewed enough people.
I wanted to take them aside, and kindly tell them to slow it down. Look at things for more than a quick glance, be present with each person, business, work of art. I know this pace typically comes with age, but it was hard to watch them scramble, and not know why they were flailing. Hopefully there spirits will be resilient and they will try again, and next time with more depth and time and less, so that they might truly see, that the biggest stifler of creativity and innovation is our society's longing for "moreness."
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