Sense, Nonsense, & Nosenseatall

Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
No Sense At All: the Imagination

........Non-Sense
Sense NoSenseatAll

These 3: and the greatest of these makes
no sense at all; and yet we salute Sense
as if it were Black Mt College without
the mess: retro-spectively tidy and all
done, shrink-wrapped pre-packaged
holy smokes over the shelf at some
Shell Convenience Pump & Run &
any one can buy what they want if not
always what they need.

To sense the DIFFERENCE between
a BLACK MOUNTAIN COLLEGE
and those doing a retrospectives

Take This Brief
“Divergence Test”

Write down as many different uses that
you can think of for the following objects.

1. a brick
2. a blanket

With a divergence test (as opposed to
a convergence test where you sort through
a list of possibilities and converge on the
right answer), there isn't a single right
response and what is measured, assessed,
evaluated isn't analytical intelligence or
capstone closure, but something profoundly
different --something much closer to creativity.

[[Strategic Planning: it's not what we
know that counts any more, but
whether we can put IT in play, yes?]]

Answer I (from Florence, a prodigy with one
of the highest IQs in his school:

Brick: building things, throwing.

Blanket: keeping warm, smothering fire,
tying to trees and sleeping in (as a
hammock), improvised stretcher.

Answer II. (From Poole, student at a
top British high school)

Brick: To use in smash-and-grab raids.
To help hold a house together.
To use in a game of Russian
roulette if you want to keep
fit at the same time (bricks
at ten paces, turn and
throw—no evasive
action allowed).

To hold the eiderdown on a bed,
tie a brick at each corner.
As a breaker of empty
Coca-Cola bottles.

Blanket. To use on a bed.
As a cover for illicit sex in the woods.
As a tent. To make smoke signals with.
As a sail for a boat, cart, or sled. As a
substitute for a towel. As a target for
shooting practice for short-sighted people.
As a thing to catch people jumping out of
burning skyscrapers.

From the “Uses of Objects” test collected by Liam
Hudson from “The Trouble with Geniuses, Part I,”
from : OUTLIERS: The Story of Success, by Malcolm
Gladwell, Little Brown & Co 2008. considerably
reformatted to fit my screed.

An Environmental Issue

From Keith Sawyer on “Collaborative Genius”
2 necessities:
1) an environment that encourages failure
2) a shared suspicion regarding “clarity.”

See how incommensurate:
Convergence and Divergence?
And why they can't Just Get Along?

Gary Hawkins calls them ‘The 2 Economies”
A Creative Righter: He knows what I'm saying.

Not to say they don't relate. “It's ALL relative, Sam.”
my students assure me, and they are correct:
S'all related.

But HOW?
That's the Liberal Arts question.
The business of the academy
if not the conservatory.

xxxooo, Sam