It's Just a Theory

A very long time ago, when I was a junior high and high school language arts teacher, I used a common exercise that many teachers of language arts use to encourage their students to write creatively and imaginatively. In this exercise, the emphasis was not on grammar, spelling, punctuation--the mechanical things that bog student writers down--but on allowing ideas to flow from brain to paper with ease. Usually on one day of the week, I would provide my students with some type of writing prompt that they were to respond to in a journal. Topics were things like, "What was your favorite birthday gift?" Or "Write about your favorite vacation." One subject that comes up in nearly every teacher resource book is this: "What would you do if you were the principal of your school?"

Students would inevitably write things like: "Have pizza and candy for lunch every day." "Get rid of math class." "Have recess for four hours every day." "Let students sit wherever they want in their classrooms." Students usually responded impulsively and really didn't give much thought to what the consequences of their policies would be if they ever actually were put in place. It wasn't the point.

At the end of the year, I'd send their journals home with them, and if the journal even made it home, it was probably stuffed in a drawer or thrown in a closet. (I know this because this is what my children did when they brought their journals home.) Years later, probably during spring cleaning, the journal emerges from the crowded drawers or the back of the closet. Now an adult, the journal writer reads through his childish notions and laughs at his immature ideas about what would have made a good school to a junior high student. The adult realizes that it wouldn't have been nutritionally healthy to eat pizza and candy everyday; that in fact it was important to learn math skills; that having recess for four hours wouldn't leave enough time to learn what was really essential; that sitting next to his friends in class probably would have made it even more difficult to pay attention to lessons. He realizes that the consequences of his childish policies would have had a devastating impact on his life.

So I'm imagining a young Barack Obama journaling away on the topic of what he'd do if he were to become president of the United States: "I'd take over the auto, banking, and heathcare industries"; "I'd make abortion as accessible as possible to anyone who wants one"; "I'd spend more taxpayer dollars than all the previous administrations before me"; I'd say whatever I wanted whether I had all the information I needed to comment intelligently." "I'd have the best, most expensive vacations ever, and I wouldn't care about what anyone else thought." "I'll appoint justices to the Supreme Court who think the Constitution is an antiquated document that has nothing to say about law in the twenty-first century, who will create legislation from the bench that will benefit minorities in the interest of fairness."

At the end of the school year, instead of throwing his journal away, shoving it in a drawer, or pitching it to the back of his closet, young Barack left it open on his desk, and he read his policy ideas over and over and thought they were good, but he never quite made it to the maturing part that allowed him to understand that silly policies have terrible consequences. And so years later, he implements what he believes are great policies and doesn't really care about the consequences. The consequences are beside the point.

And somewhere, a language arts prep school teacher in Hawaii is kicking herself for using "What would you do if you were president?" as a writing prompt.