Good news, space cadets! Senior analysts and researchers here at bobcrespo.com headquarters in Brooklyn, New York City, U.S.A., Planet Earth have been perusing the latest scientific studies of daydreamers and the big news is just as we’ve suspected all along: DAYDREAMING IS A GOOD THING AND A WANDERING MIND IS A HEALTHY MIND!
What can we say, but… BAM!
Too bad some of our old grammar school teachers are dead or otherwise occupied or we could be telling the old warhorses where to stick it. Not only were we correct in predicting that we would never need algebra again, but that our daydreaming ways are useful and beneficial! Hey teach, I wasn’t distracted, I was exploring (and you were so damned boring)!
There’s a seminal story about daydreaming involving an employee of Henry Ford. It seems that Mr. Ford was showing an efficiency expert around his company headquarters when they came to an office where a man was seated with his feet up on his desk just staring out the window. The expert asks Ford why he doesn’t fire such an obvious slacker. Ford replied; “He was in that same position when he came up with an idea that made me millions.” The feet-on-the-desk guy stayed.
So the next time someone calls you a space cadet, take it a complement, because science is on your friggin’ side! If any of you want the scientific particulars, you wade through those dry scientific journals. Just suffice to say that after all the lab rats, monkeys, test subjects and Latin phrases, the results confirm that daydreaming is a good thing.
Besides, without daydreamers, where would we get games, inventions, poems, music, bikinis, toys, stories, kaleidoscopes, books, statues, recipes, balloons, plays, paintings, motorcycles, architecture, G.I. Joes with the Kung Fu Grip or bold new flavors of ice cream?
Not from those pinched-face, no-frills human tree stumps a child has to endure from time to time during the course of their education. While most teachers are just fine, great teachers are rare, and mostly responsible for any good memories we have of school. The lousy memories are of those soul-crushers who make it their mission to straighten out all the “irresponsible” dreamers that cross their paths.
You just know it was one of those clowns who decided that shaking one leg in class was a disease that needed to be drugged into remission. Which means that over half of every second grade class that ever was anywhere needed to be heavily sedated.
Interesting concept, and one you might enthusiastically embrace if you were a non-leg shaker. What an advantage! You’d be the smartest kid in class and win at every sport! Looks good on the scholastic resume, and in 10 years no one will know you were competing with kids just north of a coma.
Doesn’t work, of course. Not the lectures, the sedatives or the disapproval. Other than annoying the crap out of them, kids shrug this stuff off and continue to think the most appalling things in the privacy of their own little minds, the one place they can be certain where they alone are in charge.
Drives these people nuts and confirms their opinion of humanity in general and children in particular as impractical fools in need of a huge dose of misery. Look for next month’s Letters to The Editor in the science journals to be full of shrill rebuttal letters from these drones. They’ll all sign them; “long-time educator,” maybe even type in one of these dumb-ass frowny-face things just to prove what dorks they are.
There’s not much to be done about them either, except to tell the kiddies that these people happen sometimes, don’t take it personally. Soon enough they’ll be out of your hair and seem pretty funny afterwards. It’s a useful test, too, Junior’s First Excruciating Ordeal. Good life prep there. There’s always next year and a teacher that appreciates your daydreaming butt and doesn’t give a crap if you shake your leg all day long as long as you’re learning.
At least now, at long last, dreamy kids have SCIENCE on their side. And so do the rest of us. Dreamers dream, and nobody can tell them not to.