My Thoughts on Golden Ideas
The sound of textbooks closing and zippers zipping interrupts my mid-morning nap. As the bell sounds, I rub my eyes and stretch my arms towards the artificial lighting above. I stroll towards the classroom door slowly, trying to place myself. What next…not Algebra yet…not Art…FORSSMAN! YES, FORSMANN! My legs turn gleefully now as I dodge swarms of students blocking the halls and run upstairs to room 208. I walk in eagerly and take my seat. Overstuffed bookshelves line the back and side walls, working vigorously with posters to cover up the plain white paint. The desks are arranged in a wide U pattern just inside the bookshelves. In the open area at the top of the U, John Forssman sits on a tall, wooden barstool, smiling. The round frames of his glasses rest on his long nose, his bald head catches the florescent lights above. I smile and take my seat at the beginning of the upswing of the U. I love this class. Mr. Forssman starts every day the same way, with yesterday’s “golden ideas,” and I can’t wait.
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The concept and magic of “golden ideas” is not easy to explain today, five years after I last walked out of Mr. Forssman’s class. For the first few weeks of my semester with him, I was convinced Mr. Forssman was an ex-hippie who dropped two much acid and was living with holes in his brain. I couldn’t wrap my mind around his crazy fabrication of “golden ideas,” even if I thought the words coming out of his mouth were brilliant. He told us that “golden ideas” must be captivating, enlightened realizations, a sentence or two long at most to ensure their precision. Make sense? Not really, right? Here’s the only way I’ve been able to explain them to people who were never lucky enough to sit in Mr. Forssman’s classroom: start by imagining the mass-produced posters of famous people that have meaningful quotes printed on them. For example, the poster of Ghandi’s suffering body with the words, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.” The Bob Marley poster with the lyrics, “You just can’t live in that negative way…make way for the positive day.” These quotes are both “golden ideas.” Think of the quotes from authors about the challenges of writing that are copy-pasted into every writing course syllabi- they are “golden ideas.” In the syllabus for this class, my favorite golden idea comes from Stephen King. “You must not come lightly to the blank page,” he commands. Think of Don Murray’s Some Things I Wish I had Known About Writing When I Was 21- they are all “golden ideas.” My favorite is, “Your standards must be low enough to allow a draft.” All these are simple, short thoughts, but they are powerful, and they must be realized and recorded before they become truths. Mr. Forssman’s class was all about generating these types of ideas for myself.
Before sitting down in that class, most of my English teachers’ expectations started with the ability to memorize grammar rules or literary devices and ended with providing one example of the rule/device. I enjoyed showing I knew how to answer those questions. I had few a more challenging teachers that asked questions like, “Why did Twain use dialect in Huck Finn?” This type of question made me think beyond rote memorization, but I always felt like I knew the answer I was supposed to arrive at. Other teachers preached creativity in assignments, but not many took the time to dig for genuine creativity. Picking up on other people’s creativity was more common than developing my own; that is, I understood other people’s “golden ideas,” but I was not challenged to create a “golden idea” for myself. When teachers wanted to “let our creativity shine,” they would assign a simple project that put the same information in a different context. For example, I remember transforming an empty Cabernet bottle into a bottle of “dandelion wine” by gluing images from the Bradbury novel all over the bottle. I even threw on some of my own summer memories. Even though this was more “outside the box” (and way, way more fun) than explaining the metaphor through a lecture, my thinking was still inside the box. Really, I came up with the same product, just packaged a little differently. I was still thinking about the prompt the way I thought the teacher wanted me to think, not exploring the way I actually thought. Why give time to the second thought that popped into my head if the first thought was what the teacher was looking for? I had been trained year after year into thinking it was better to take the safe route and do it well than dare to really explore something and challenge my thinking. With each “A” that got scribbled in red pen at the top of the assignments, this realization became further cemented into my mind. I knew I could get good grades saying what I thought teachers wanted me to say, and that was enough for me before Mr. Forssman’s class. Had Mr. Forssman taught that Dandelion Wine unit, I would have been prodded to write powerful phrases about the pseudo-comfort of nostalgia, the complexities of small-town living, or the difference between seeing dandelions as weeds or flowers.
Mr. Forssman was different because he made me realize that I was stifling my potential- eliminating any originality- when I answered a question exactly like a teacher would want me to. I recently heard a “golden idea” by William Carlos Williams. He said, “The major function of the artist is to lift to the imagination and give new currency to the sensual world at our feet.” Every student that took Mr. Forssman’s class was turned into an artist that gave new currency to the world. He resisted both the ease and pressure to grade our work on an A-F scale. Instead, he used a scale of stars to evaluate assignments. A raw idea in its infancy was a “one-star.” A more developed idea that somewhat resonated was a “two-star.” At the top of this scale was the magical “golden idea,” reserved for only the most polished realizations. While this is still a grading scale of sorts, it acknowledges the potential of an idea in its infancy and I was encouraged to put more effort into those “one-star” ideas. Instead of throwing them out as failures, I was determined to craft them into “two-star” ideas or “golden ideas”. We were given the last five minutes at the end of each day’s discussion to write new “golden ideas” from that day, or rework the flaws in past ideas. Then, the next day, he would start the class period by reading the best golden ideas from the day before. Each time, I would half-laugh, half-admire what everyone else had come up with. This was the real magic of his system; I didn’t want to admit it, but I was impressed by the power of others’ words, and we all pushed each other for better and better ideas. A few times during the semester, he asked us to take one of our favorite “golden ideas” and write an essay on it. In the essays, I had to build on my own original idea, not explain the interpretation of some unknown literary critic. I detailed how the idea came to be, what I had seen in the text that had inspired my idea, and gave specific points that demonstrated that my idea was a concrete truth I had discovered, not just an obscure thought I had dreamt up. Mr. Forssman had built an advanced learning community inside his classroom that excited me and broke down the standard classroom format that I had grown so comfortable in.
At the end of that semester, I looked back all the ideas I had submitted. I was embarrassed by a few of my misses, the ideas that got lost somewhere between my head and the page. How did I think, “When you look at the future, the past speaks to you” was the best way of expressing the idea that history repeats itself? That is probably a case of trying too hard, and thus, missing the point of what I actually thought. With that being said, I also saw my “golden ideas” and thought to myself, Wow, you really wrote that. It’s perfect. Those few “golden ideas” explained my thoughts better than anyone else’s words could. I get goosebumps remembering how empowered and intelligent I felt when I stepped into that room; I knew that if I wrote down a million ideas, a chunk of them would be brilliant, even if a bigger chunk were not. So, I mulled over ideas in my head, hashed out my thoughts, wrote down my conclusions, every single day. No longer was I regurgitating the “right” answer, mostly because that “right” answer was too simple, too dry to explain what I had in my head.
In What a Writer Needs, Ralph Fletcher explains that every young writer needs a mentor, and furthermore, explains that a little praise from that mentor can fuel a writer for a long time. Acknowledging my golden ideas gave me the encouragement to keep thinking, to keep exploring new depths of the texts, to take risks that allowed me to outgrow myself. Mediocre, lazy work didn’t receive the same praise as outstanding creativity and thinking, because it was hard to fake the feeling of inspiration. Mr. Forssman certainly believed I had the gold in me though, more so than I myself did.
I recently received a letter from Mr. Forssman. I had written him partly to say hello, partly to thank him for the way he taught, and partly to tell him that I had decided to go into English Education, and he responded with a letter I will cherish for a long time. He relayed a story about a student who told him that he would never have any wealth as a teacher, even if it were an admirable profession. He responded by telling the student that after teaching for over forty years, he felt as wealthy as anyone he had ever met. Lots of people talk about how rewarding teaching is, but he was more genuinely in love with his students’ work than any other teacher I ever had, and he felt lucky to get to read it every day; that is something I hope to keep in mind. After studying books over and over, and learning alongside his students, he felt more content and accomplished than someone with twice his material wealth. He measured people’s wealth based on the gold inside their minds, and he knew that everyone had worth. He admitted in the letter that this was easier to preach than it was to practice, but each time he felt himself being sucked into the material world, he said he was able to find an idea that would pull him out of it. It is not easy to fake passion, and students will know if I am faking it as a teacher, so I challenge myself to come to work every day with the curiosity and passion of Mr. Forssman. I realized I have digressed a bit. It’s easy for me to do that when I start talking about Mr. Forssman because he interests me and inspires me. I also realize that this “essay” is not centered around a single concrete memory like many of the others I have workshopped. Honestly, there are very few concrete instances that still stick with me today. The memories from that semester are more general- the ways he encouraged every student to take a chance, regardless of if they turned out right or wrong, the empowerment felt by everyone in class as we created long lists of golden ideas together, the way he made us stuffed so full of ideas that we would burst if we couldn’t share them. I admire this approach more and more as I get older and am pulled farther from any concrete memories of the classroom. Without question, I will integrate golden ideas into my future classroom, regardless of how they fit into any standardized test preparation or strict curriculum. My students should feel the same empowerment in my class that I felt in his. Students in my class should have the same realization I did: “By answering questions the way others want you to answer, you are becoming a robot, void of the thought processes that make you human- the thought processes that lead to moments of brilliance- the thought processes that lead to “golden ideas.” That might be a golden idea itself…
Thoughts?
