I made my own entertainment.
I took this quote from a post I wrote a week ago called Finding Rest. In the post, I was alluding to the fact that when I was young, I didn't have access to a lot of the entertainment that kids do today. That I needed to find ways to make my own entertainment. Televisions were not a necessity item - they were a luxury, and if you had one then your family was often seen as rich. And if you had two, well then, you must've been born to billionaires. When teachers set homework tasks, they couldn't assume that every student had access to a television. I recall, every now and then, we'd be asked to watch the news and pick one of the reports to write on, when a student would put up their hand and advise the teacher that they didn't have a television at home. Crazy, right! However, this wasn't all that long ago. (Well, at least, not in the scheme of things!)
A great deal of my younger years were spent living in a semi-rural environment. At the time, we would've been between an hour to an hour and a half from the city (most likely, closer to an hour and a half) - half an hour from the nearest major shopping centre. Today that suburb wouldn't be classified as anywhere near to semi-rural, and thanks to road and car improvements, I think that you'd make it to the city in under an hour, depending on traffic conditions. My point here, is that growing up, I had the world at my fingertips. Cars seldom travelled the roads, and most of the blocks of land around where we lived were empty. I'd guess that on average, only every third block had a house on it, meaning that most of the land, for as far as a young kid would want to travel, was open for adventure seeking.
And boy, did we create some adventures!
Now, to put this in perspective a little, I'm talking the 80's and early 90's in a little town, called Sellicks Beach, South Australia. Granted, not the 50's or 60's, but we still had enough freedom that the days could be ours without being required to check in with our parents every hour or so. On weekends, or during school holidays, we (we being a group of kids who lived around the neighbourhood) would basically be out of the house at the crack of dawn, and not be back until the sun set. That was the collective general rule of the parents. Which, during the peak of summer, meant that we had about fifteen hours to do our thing.
This was back in the times when you could freely carry a knife without being seen as a terrorist for having one, because it wasn't a weapon, but a necessity. We lived in a semi rural area, meaning snakes, and having something to defend yourself with was a smart idea. On occasion, we would come up with a hair-brained scheme of actually seeking snake nests, and on these trips, we would spend an hour or so, using our knives, to whittle spears from fallen tree branches, so even if our knives were not likely to be our primary method of defence, they were still a required piece of equipment on any trip. One day, we spent hours looking for holes that we thought were perfect for snakes to live in and would then slowly and methodically dismantle them, looking for the serpent inside. We never managed to unearth one (pardon the pun!), and it's probably a good thing, because I'm not entirely sure we actually knew what we were planning on doing if we did actually find what it was we were seeking.
Around our houses, there were a couple of fairly steep streets, and what young boy doesn't look at a street like that and ponder how to gather as much speed as possible? My friend and I decided that building a go-kart would be in our best interest and with lofty ambition and great ideas, we set about building ourselves a kart that would take us to the next Grand Prix. We had no idea how to build one, or where we were going to get our supplies from, so we ventured into our cubby house - another building attempt from a few months previous when the wind had been blowing and we decided that the neighbourhood needed a shelter for us to quickly and easily get to that was equal distance from both our houses. We had tied up fallen branches between a grove of trees and then spent days gathering lots of other branches and coverings from around the place. In some instances, we would ride for over ten minutes to find the best branches for the job. We ended up with a log cabin type structure, that was pretty sturdy, and cost us a few whollops from our fathers when we kept losing their tools. However, it managed to keep my dry on a couple of occasions.
Anyway, I digress. Aside from shelter, we set up the cubby to have places where we could store 'supplies', so we got some paper and pencils from our stash and began designing our kart. It was fairly simple, yet we didn't have all of the materials we were going to need in order to construct what we had planned for. Being resourceful, we figured that we'd be able to scrounge what we needed from our houses, houses of our friends, and whatever else we needed, we could get from local building sites (remember we were young, and didn't realise at the time that taking wood from construction sites was wrong).
We found everything we needed, but wheels. At the time, my Mum had a wheeled washing trolley where she could stand the clothes basket. They're pretty common now, but I think back then they were a little harder to come by. Anyway, we figured that we could 'borrow' the wheels and say that someone must've stolen them. Which, in reality, wasn't exactly fibbing, because someone had stolen them, we just weren't going to tell her that the 'someone' had been us! What we neglected to consider in our young eagerness, was that Mum would recognise the wheels we had liberated from her clothes trolley on our go-kart, and, also, why in the world would some random person jump our fence and take the wheels from her trolley?
Regardless, we got our wheels and now, with everything we required, we got to building. My friends Dad had a few power tools, but we weren't allowed to use them, however, when he was at work, we were able to run an extension lead onto the empty block next door and get some drilling and other quick fixes organised while there were no adults around. Happily, there were no serious injuries, and over the next day or two, our vehicle started to come together. We meticulously packed up the power tools after we had finished with each one. We knew that to get caught with one of these would have been game over. We finally completed our project and the time came for testing our contraption. I wasn't too sure about it to be honest. I kept looking at the wheels we had taken, and they just looked too small for what we had built.
My mate wanted to try it first and I was happy enough for him to have first crack. We lugged it to the top of the hill and my mate put on a bike helmet and some washing gloves from his Mum's kitchen. We used cling wrap to attach rolled up newspapers to his elbows and knees to act as makeshift pads, and then he was ready to go. There was a bend in the road, part way down, and I was to be stationed there to let him know if any cars were coming so he could get out of the way and not become road kill. Once in position, I gave him the thumbs up and he lifted his feet onto the cross bar. The kart began to roll and I was kind of amazed that it had actually worked!
Everything went well, until he got to the bend. There were no cars, but our grand steering mechanism failed. It was pretty complex - a length of rope tied to either side of a pivoting arm! I mean, c'mon - it was a work of art! As he used the rope to turn, it managed to dislodge itself and steering became impossible. Back in the 80's at Sellicks Beach, there were no curbs, just asphalt that ran into soft gravel on the side of the road. My friend exhibited some quick thinking, and he just drove the kart straight, right into the empty block of land where I was standing, looking for traffic. As soon as the wheels left the hard asphalt and bit into the softer gravel on the verge, the kart came to an abrupt stop, launching my friend into the tall grass on the side of the road.
He lay there, in the grass that was slowly drying as the summer sun began heating it more each day, for a second or two, and I wondered if he had actually injured himself when suddenly, he roared with victory. I joined in the cheering and he told me that I had to give it a go, and you bet it, I was eager to have my shot! As we carried the kart back to the top of the hill, we made some adjustments on the fly: steering (as much as possible) was now done by our feet, also, we needed to grip the edge of the seat to stabilise ourselves - both of these modifications were necessary because of the rope detaching, but they were adjustments that were easily implemented.
At the top of the hill, I was given the same safety treatment we had given my friend, and my mate walked to the bend in the road. He gave me the all clear, and away I went. The new end of the course was now at the bend, right were my friend had intentionally veered onto the side of the road. Now, we were both purposefully aiming for that area. My ride came to the same end as did my friends - me being flung off the kart as it came to a sudden stop in the soft gravel. I was an abrupt end, but so much fun! Despite the kart breaking on its inaugural run, we continued to make runs, adjusting the ending each time. We tried to compact the earth so we could travel further into the grass. After a few days, we even tried to build jumps to see if we could get airborne.
I was recently remembering some of the things we got up to back then, the entertainment we made for ourselves, and I noticed that we were doing, without even realising it, what is being taught in so many schools right now. We had been working through the design process. We had planned that kart out, thinking of how we wanted it to look, based upon things we'd seen on television and in books, and comics. We'd then sourced our materials and built it according to our plans. Then, during our testing, we discovered a flaw, but rather than scrap the entire idea, we had iterated through the problem and found a solution (albeit a simple one) for it. We had also evaluated and found ways to improve our experience, by trying to better the end of the track, first by making the earth firmer and then by building jumps.
You see, we were doing, what is likely already ingrained in a lot of our students. We were doing a lot of what is now termed 21st Century Learning back in the 20th Century. However, we weren't being taught it - it was just coming naturally. I wonder how many of our students would find that this comes naturally to them today? And why or why not? I'd hypothesise that they likely would struggle to be as creative and problem solve the way we did, and I'd say that this is through no fault of their own. I wonder whether the entertainment that is so readily provided for them is killing their creativity? Muting their ability to find solutions to problems.
If that's the case, it's a real shame. We had so much fun working through the various dilemmas that came our way, and as a result, we constructed some pretty awesome stuff! So now, I wonder, how do we encourage this type of experimentation, creativity and problem-solving in our students? It's almost like they see design process and innovation as something that should be constrained within the boundaries of the classroom, and I wonder if encouraging them to get back outdoors and to try something like our go-kart would enable them to run through the process while all of the formalities are removed. Whether this would see them experiment, test, find problems and create solutions. Whether this would build perseverance.
It wasn't long, only a couple of days, I think (shortly after we made the jump, actually), before we trashed the kart and left it in the field. I did remove the wheels and return them to my Mum's washing trolley, but they were never the same again. We'd used them for an activity that they'd never been designed for, and wrecked them in the process. They were all pitted and messed up. I was never asked how they got back on the trolley. I think my Mum knew I'd taken them, but she obviously wasn't all that fussed, and I guess she didn't want to embarrass me by asking how they'd made a triumphant return!
She knew. I'm sure of it. But I hadn't hurt anyone, and I think in a way, she was happy that I was making my own entertainment.
