Quirk Theory = “Full of it”?

Recently I posted on a book about quirk theory, namely, the theory that what makes some high school students less than attractive to the social matrix of power is also what makes them “successful” as adults. Now a new study by John Volkmer suggests that college students who are “full of it” might be the ones who are balled up with creativity and capacity.

In other words, as a college freshman, J.D. Salinger was full of it.

If that’s insulting, the insult is borne as well by us, as teachers, when the most maddening of our students turn in the most egregious excuses for assignments. I am talking about students who we know are capable of a much better effort, and about “work” that will take far longer to grade than it took to write.

Upon being presented with such dreck, the teacher has a range of responses from which to choose. I want to make the case for mercy. I want to argue that incoherence, distraction, and defiance are necessary precursors to originality. Many students, not just the geniuses, need the time and space and freedom to be full of it.

My thesis is not new, but it seems especially urgent right now, because it flies in the face of two powerful prevailing winds. On the one hand, there is the current crude reductionism of education to a financial transaction, masked by the pseudoscientific jargon of “outcomes assessment” and “value added.” On the other hand, faculty are obliged to have a heightened reactivity to any whiffs of crazy—the hard-won lesson of incidents like the Virginia Tech rampage.

Makes me wonder if we might have to factor in obnoxiousness or arrogance into the grading scale. 🙂