Friday
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9/16
Novelty
My third-grader hopped off the bus today and was in what can only be characterized as a great mood. Practically giddy. Pretty unusual for him. It seems that they had been discussing Isabel in class that day. "Ah." I said. "Who?" You know the look I got.
I don’t know how it came up, but apparently they were talking about weather in general and storms in particular. My son thinks that storms are the greatest. But wait a minute, I said to myself, I used think that as well. Not the Andrews and Camilles that destroy lives, of course, but it slowly dawned on me that storms are cool. When I was a kid I loved nothing more than the wind whipping through the trees and sheets of rain running down the street. When else did you get to see your back yard as River? When else were the lights likely to go out, forcing everyone get around in eerie candlelight?
Of course the detached, logical adult that I’ve become tells me that the enjoyment we get from these things is explained by those classic productivity studies done back in the thirties. A group of researchers took a factory environment and changed the lighting. Productivity went up, only to eventually fall back to where it was. Then they painted everything a different color, and again productivity went up, only to level out again. If I remember the story correctly, there was a lot of head scratching and confusion until someone (probably the least over-educated one of the bunch) said, in effect, "Well duh, it’s not about the light or the paint; productivity rises when everyone is perked up by the novelty that any change brings."
So, it’s a pretty short, obvious step to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter if we’re in a factory or the humdrum routine of a school day. Or the grind of keeping a house and family together. Novelty can be good. Big storms are novel. Hell, at the risk of sounding like a certain buffoon other than myself, I say, "Bring ‘em on!"
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9/16
Novelty
My third-grader hopped off the bus today and was in what can only be characterized as a great mood. Practically giddy. Pretty unusual for him. It seems that they had been discussing Isabel in class that day. "Ah." I said. "Who?" You know the look I got.
I don’t know how it came up, but apparently they were talking about weather in general and storms in particular. My son thinks that storms are the greatest. But wait a minute, I said to myself, I used think that as well. Not the Andrews and Camilles that destroy lives, of course, but it slowly dawned on me that storms are cool. When I was a kid I loved nothing more than the wind whipping through the trees and sheets of rain running down the street. When else did you get to see your back yard as River? When else were the lights likely to go out, forcing everyone get around in eerie candlelight?
Of course the detached, logical adult that I’ve become tells me that the enjoyment we get from these things is explained by those classic productivity studies done back in the thirties. A group of researchers took a factory environment and changed the lighting. Productivity went up, only to eventually fall back to where it was. Then they painted everything a different color, and again productivity went up, only to level out again. If I remember the story correctly, there was a lot of head scratching and confusion until someone (probably the least over-educated one of the bunch) said, in effect, "Well duh, it’s not about the light or the paint; productivity rises when everyone is perked up by the novelty that any change brings."
So, it’s a pretty short, obvious step to the conclusion that it doesn’t matter if we’re in a factory or the humdrum routine of a school day. Or the grind of keeping a house and family together. Novelty can be good. Big storms are novel. Hell, at the risk of sounding like a certain buffoon other than myself, I say, "Bring ‘em on!"
