In third grade, where all lifelong beliefs are formed, I witnessed a transformative school assembly.
I expected nothing less. Our school assemblies were always a riveting breath of fresh air for me. A chance to peek at what performing adults were up to during the school day. My teachers, I knew, could not be counted upon to represent grownups in the wild. They were a strange, slightly damaged breed of adult, who would choose to spend their day explaining things to children.
But the species of grownup who performed at an assembly, whether it was Ballet Folklórico tying marriage knots with their feet in a traditional folk dance, or a chamber orchestra smiling at us over their shining instruments, declaring, “THIS is an arpeggio,” their singular magic — the assembly people — was that at the end of the assembly: they would leave the school while we, and our teachers, would have to stay.
The man who came that day to our assembly was all alone. He had no puppets. No costumes. No glasses filled with different tuneful quantities of water.
He held a microphone and, in the way that only children can expect, we knew truth and greatness would pour from him because he was a grownup and he was “the assembly.”
He walked through the aisles of the auditorium slowly, pregnant with purpose, making a lot of eye contact. He didn’t use the proscenium stage. (My mind was already blown.) And then he asked us… about our ideas.
Maybe, most likely, his prompt was more specific than that, but in what little I recall lies the salience of this fable.
When asked about their ideas, my fellow 8 year olds called out: “A dinosaur who is a ballerina and goes to the moon!”
“GOOD IDEA!!!!!” the assembly man shouted maniacally at a little girl in an emerald L.L. Bean fleece.
Another child: “A Dalmatian dog who is president and makes candy fall from the sky?”
“GOOD IDEA!!!!” roared the assembly man at a boy in a Spider-Man T-shirt.
“Ninja Turtles eating astronaut ice cream!”
“GOOD IDEA!!!!” he bellowed into the microphone, rolling up his shirtsleeves, like Obama ready to manage a flood zone.
I remember the ideas themselves being especially chaotic and unwieldy — uniquely, what I would have called, BAD.
But his fervor, the assembly man, was captivating and he was barely hearing the ideas themselves. He had worked the crowd of us children into a frenzy.
The most reactive and impressionable of us would have slipped into gurgling ecstatic spasms, seizing into tongues if we were in the humid South and not the less gothic Northeast.
At the sermon’s peak, with an aggressive dew splashed across his ivory brow, the assembly man testified:
“EVERY IDEA THAT IS YOURS IS GOOD. EVERY IDEA CAN BE THE START OF A STORY YOU WRITE.”
(Having seen, two decades later, a friend of mine brainstorming while addicted to meth… I… cannot rule out the possibility.)
The ideas kept coming. Slime. Goblins. Princesses. Nintendo. Power. Immortality. I didn’t offer my own, because I was spellbound. This was almost as good as Ballet Folklórico!
His message was intoxicating. The room erupted in peals of giggles as more and more convoluted ideas poured from the bravest children.
Occasionally, a tender and simple idea would ring out like the silver ding of a triangle: “A horse? A story about a horse?”said Tim, small and feminine with his tight polo shirt and round belly.
“GOOD IDEA!!!!!!!!”
Third grade had been, thus far, about learning the right answer from the wrong one and then, this message, on school grounds, that all ideas that come from you might indeed be: GOOD IDEAS…?
His way of shouting it like prophecy comes back to me today, stuffed up with innumerable ideas, as I find myself all the time now. It is, of course, not true that all ideas are good, but what electrifies me, as I recall him sweating and stalking the aisle, is that my own mind, your own mind — ideas that come from you and are not held by millions or billions of other people, represent your agency and your ability to choose the setting of your scene. Your ability to start, middle, and end the story that you wish to tell.
In the hail of ideas that come at me every day, which are loud, repeated, shiny and enticing, but often not my own, I think my own thoughts and SHOUT them, to be sure assembly man can hear them over the clamor of the ideas that are not mine.
GOOD IDEA, EMMA, GOOD IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
And it does make me sweaty, and excited, and so very relieved to leave school.
GOOOOOD IDEAAAA!!!!!!!!!!!!
Inspired writing from a childhood memory! When I was teaching I hope I was guiding students to life "in the wild".
My new mantra 🕉