TEXT FOR THE DAY (see below)

He'd been having trouble with students who had nothing to say. At first he thought it was laziness but later it became apparent that it wasn't. They just couldn't think of anything to say.

One of them, a girl with strong-lensed glasses, wanted to write a five-hundred-word essay about the United States. He was used to the sinking feeling that comes from statements like this, and suggested without disparagement that she narrow it down to just Bozeman.

When the paper came due she didn't have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn't think of anything to say.

He had already discussed her with her previous instructors and they'd confirmed his impressions of her. She was very serious, disciplined and hard working, but extremely dull. Not a spark of creativity in her anywhere. Her eyes, behind thick-lensed glasses, were the eyes of a drudge. She wasn't bluffing him, she really couldn't think of anything to say, and was upset by her inability to do as she was told.

It just stumped him. Now he couldn't think of anything to say. A silence occurred and then a peculiar answer: "Narrow it down to the main street of Bozeman." It was a stroke of insight.
She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn't think of anything to say, and couldn't understand why, if she couldn't think of anything about all of Bozeman, she should be able to think of something about just one street.

He was furious. "You're not looking!" he said. A memory came back of his own dismissal from the University for have too much to say. For every fact there is an infinity of hypotheses. The more you look the more you see. She really wasn't looking and yet somehow didn't understand this.

He told her angrily, "Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street of Bozeman. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick."

Her eyes, behind the thick-lensed glasses, opened wide.

She came in the next class with a puzzled look and handed him a five-thousand-word essay on the front of the Opera House on the main street of Bozeman, Montana. "I sat in the hamburger stand across the street," she said, "and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn't stop writing. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don't understand it."

Neither did he, but on long walks through the streets of town he thought about it and concluded she was evidently stopped with the same kind of blockage that had paralyzed him on his first day of teaching. She was blocked because she was trying to repeat, in her writing, things she had already heard, just as on the first day he had tried to repeat things he had already decided to say. She couldn't think of anything to write about Bozeman because she couldn't recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

He...concluded that imitation was the real evil that had to be broken before real rhetoric teaching could begin. This imitation seemed to be an external compulsion. Little children didn't have it. It seemed to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself.

That sounded right, and the more he thought about it the more right it sounded. Schools teach you to imitate. If you don't imitate what the teacher wants you get a bad grade.

• Robert Persig, The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, 1974

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Write your thoughts and experiences related to the situation Persig describes:
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I recall hearing this recently.  I'm pretty sure it was from ewrt 1A, or at least sometime within the last 6 months. 

And, I can certainly relate to the girl.  Sometimes I can think of nothing to say, despite brainstorming.  But more often than not, I think of too many things to say and don't know how to get them all out.  I jump from 1/2 sentence on one thought to 1/4 of a sentence on another thought.  It's frustrating.

At any rate, I agree with the idea that we rework the same material over and over again.  I think between home and school, we are unconsciously programmed into doing what others do.  By imitation we learn languages, we learn etiquette, and we learn what is accepted and what is not accepted.   This is reinforced in our schoolwork and in our grades.  In classes, we share what others have done, we form study groups, we are encouraged (most of the time) to work together.  When we give teachers what they want, we get good grades.  When we don't, we get bad grades.  Along with comments insinuating we didn't listen or read the directions and that if we had things would have turned out differently.  

But, I don't blame teachers, as they were programmed as well.  It's simply too much to ask that each student be given a dissimilar assignment from the others and be graded on it.  And, how would they grade original work?  Guidelines aren't determined in order to ensure fair grading with respect to the other students.  Teaching and grading is already subjective enough without adding more layers of complexity.   Besides, I doubt it would solve the problem.  I think that our natural tendency to imitate others is too strong to counter.

-n.