Odyssey and Me

Source: www.scientificamerican.com

A contractor came to our house today to give us an estimate on refinishing our wood floors. During the post-measurement chit-chat he asked about our kid--well, first he asked whether we had a dog or a kid, because he knew we had at least one of those from the gate across our stairs. When I verified that it was a kid, he asked the typical questions: boy or girl, how old, siblings or no, walking yet, etc. When I told him how old  Harper was, he said, "Oh, so you're not having to decide on schools yet." I thought it was funny given how many times school selection has come up in the past few weeks, but then I realized he was talking about college. My god, I thought. How about we figure out elementary school first?!

All this talk of schools had me thinking over the past week about my own experience. As far as I know, my town didn't have a gifted and talented program. Or at least, I wasn't invited to join it, which maybe shouldn't be used as criteria for its existence. At any rate, I never knew about one. You were assigned to a classroom in elementary school and that's where you stayed. Eventually we switched teachers for math, but that was it. When I was in 5th grade, however, someone told me (or my parents) that I should consider joining Odyssey of the Mind, which I somehow equated with the closest thing we had to a gifted and talented program. I didn't really know what Odyssey of the Mind was, and as the following story will illustrate, I still don't.

I think there was an informational meeting first, and then about 10 kids were invited back for a tryout. We were told there were only a few spots open on the team, and the teacher/leader lady would select the kids based on this meeting. "So show your best creativity," she said. Even at that age I struggled with the "Be creative!" command. At least for me, time and a clear need are required for creative problem solving. Demand immediate creativity and you're pretty much guaranteed to get boring and lame.

I remember feeling nervous and slightly confused throughout the meeting. Nervous because I wanted to be selected because whatever this was I wanted to "win," but also confused because I didn't really get what I would be winning, and I thought the questions the lady was asking were really weird. The one I remember clearly was, "Tell me some different ways you could make peanut butter."

I wasn't really sure where peanut butter came from in the first place, much less how to "creatively" make peanut butter. Did the peanuts have to be cooked somehow? Was there actually butter in it? Immediately after the lady asked the question we had to go around the circle and tell her our ideas. I was one of the first kids and I said something about combining peanuts and butter (I told you, boring and lame). Then a kid opposite me in the circle said something about crushing peanuts, and from then on everyone in the circle just made up a way to crush peanuts.

"Rollerskate over them!" I remember saying.

"Make an elephant walk on them!" someone else said.

"Jumprope over them!" I said (you can see where my interests lay at the time).

Around and around the circle we went, and while I was playing along I remember thinking, "How much longer are we going to have to come up with ways to crush peanuts? Doesn't the lady see we're just ripping off that kid's idea? And doesn't she know that stomping on a peanut will just give you a broken peanut?

Wait, should I be trying to come up with a completely different method?" I wondered. At this point I think I interjected something about combining butter and peanuts again ("Use a cement truck to mix butter and peanuts!"), but the rest of the circle continued with the peanut-crushing theme so the next time I did too. The obvious things like elephants, cars, trucks and stomping had all been said, so since I had dance class after this meeting I halfheartedly offered "Crush a peanut with a toe-shoe while doing a spin on top of it."

When the suggestions got so outlandish that people started offering them as questions ("Put a peanut under a skyscaper?") the lady finally moved on to a new topic. When we left the meeting I kept wondering if anyone else thought this had been a strange experience, and whether seeing the futility of our peanut crushing efforts meant that I had passed or failed. Twenty years later I'm still not sure.

I must have said something right, because the next week my parents were notified that I had been selected to be on the team. However, the team met on Thursdays, which happened to be the night of my dance class. I was an awkward, graceless and slightly overweight smart kid, so I'm not sure why I thought dance class would be a better use of my time than Odyssey of the Mind, but that's what I chose to do with my Thursday nights and my parents went with it.

Later in the year the Odyssey team put on their production for the school as practice for their competition and I found it utterly confusing. My biggest takeaway from the production was that the central actor had a large fake nose that was supposed to grow a big fake zit but instead just kept falling off during the performance. Though I'd later rue the lineup of dance photos of me in too-tight leotards and sparkly tutus, maybe I was right to choose dance after all. At least I knew what was going on, even if I wasn't any good at it.