In 1957, Theodore Geisel published one of the best selling children’s book of all time. His publisher challenged him to write his next children's book using only 50 or fewer distinct words. Geisel agonized over this challenge, according to his biographer, “putting maps on the wall, vocabulary words, and flow charts.” Three years later, he prevailed. Theodore Seuss Geisel, or "Dr. Seuss" as he was more popularly known, published “Green Eggs and Ham” in 1960. It turned out to be his most successful book, outselling “The Cat in the Hat” by several million copies.
“The Green Eggs and Ham hypothesis,” so named by psychologist Catrinol Crump of Rider University, holds that when we face a completely open ended problem—a blank page or empty canvas—we reach for associations that come first to mind, gravitating to the solutions that have worked well for us in the past. Constraints, on the other hand, force us to look deeper and further to satisfy the demands placed on us. We tap into knowledge that was previously underdeveloped and re-organize and re-structure the information to make connections we otherwise wouldn’t have considered. Constraints, according to Crump and supported by the research of many others, ENHANCE creativity.
I find that to be true in my professional career. I’ve been principal or president of four different schools. By far the school with the least amount of resources was my first school, Montgomery Catholic High. We ran a very tight ship out of necessity—a “good year” for us financially meant we broke even. And yet, we were truly a laboratory of innovation, due partly to the genius of the school’s president, Dr. Thomas Doyle, but also because necessity required it for us to remain competitive with schools that were far wealthier.
Every other year, we’d host a “Legislative Convention,” whereby the parents and faculty comprised the “Senate” and the students comprised the “House of Representatives.” Any “Senator” or “Congressman” could propose any bill he or she wanted about any rule in the school, and if it passed both chambers, it would become instant school law. “Anything we want ?” a wide-eyed freshman once asked me, with a huge smile on his face. “Suppose I introduced a bill saying we will abolish uniforms?" “Yes, you can write a bill that says that,” I said, “but remember, for a bill to become law, you also have to get it through the Senate.” I saw him a few days later. "It died in a Senate committee," he said, flustered. "The Senate never even voted on it." It was a fabulous learning opportunity for the kids, and the whole process created real ownership across all levels of our community.
We had a unique grading system, where every test was tiered into three parts: a “C level” portion, a “B level,” and an “A level,” all based upon Blooms Taxonomy, with each level requiring a successively higher form of thinking. To get the A, a student had to first pass the “C” and “B” levels. It had a profoundly positive effect on our students' ability to think. We did a “January Interim” semester, whereby students went to school for just 3 1/2 hours in January, taking just one class, which allowed them to take field trips, do extended science experiments, and really dive deeply into the subject area. One year we tried a four day week, with each day lasting 10 hours, taking off Fridays. We hated it almost right away and ditched it at the end of the year. We required “performance assessments” as 50% of the final exam in each core class. In the early 2000’s, we changed our governance structure, taking two parish K-8 schools and making them into K-6 schools, building a new middle school on the high school campus, and renaming them all as “Montgomery Catholic Preparatory School,” explaining it as “one school on three campuses,” led by a single president and Board. Twenty years later, MCPS is thriving. Every other year or so, we did something brand new. Some ideas flopped, like the 4 day week, but we regarded these as “noble failures.” Some ideas were fantastic! The net effect was we were very highly regarded, able to "punch above our weight class" with area private schools that charged two or three times what we charged.
It’s easy to let pessimism creep into our language when our resources are limited. “Our hands are tied,” we might say. Or “If we had the same money as school X down the street, we would…” or “We can ask that of our families—but they can’t afford it.” But each time we say these things, we communicate to our families that we are puny, sowing doubt that we are able to deliver on our mission. And when we start communicating our powerlessness, we will find ourselves in a death spiral that is hard to pull out of.
Instead, let us accept the “givens” of our situation and work creatively to do great things within these givens! If we lean into our constraints rather than curse them, there’s a kind of liberation that can inspire us to act boldly. May God give us the boldness to do his will!
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