Color Outside The Lines

Someone familiar with the book of the same name might like to say something here. Basically I think that to color outside the lines is a metaphor for breaking rigid and needless rules and thereby freeing up our creativity. Anyone have more ... ? -- RaySchneider

When I was in early grade school, my family moved from one town to the other in between semesters. In the new class, the teacher handed out a coloring sheet with little animals, rabbits and whatnot. We were to color the sheet.

All the other kids colored the animals to look like animals. I colored clothes onto them. I don't remember anything that was said, only that I was very embarrassed by all the laughter and abuse over my way of coloring.

Probably I could have become terribly repressed and a major rule-follower after this. Instead I've always challenged every form of authority. In later years, I found that the best strategy was to KnowTheRule well, then decide how it helps me down my own path. I still think the animals were better my way. -- RonJeffries

I remember something like that! I remember putting down a lot of dots. -- artoo detoo

My version was in 5th grade when we had our lesson on bases. The teacher taught us how to do base 12 using the letters A and B. For my assignment, I did base 19, and I used periods between the places, so it went 00 to 18, then 01.00 to 01.18 up to 18.18 then 01.00.00 etc. The teacher failed my paper because she said I was still using base ten. That burned me up, because I knew I hadn't. It took another 20 years before I figured out how to refute her. -- AlistairCockburn (I like your clothing idea, Ron)

But how did you refute her? I must know and yes your system has merit but you don't need me to tell you that. The chlothes on animals reminds me of a commercial they show before some movies. -- AndrewRicketts

I coloured inside the lines that I drew, not someone else's.

Curious: Did all of you guys get report cards that said, "So-and-so seems very bright, but can't seem to pay attention in class. He would do well if only he would apply himself." I've got a whole stack. I think it translates to "So-and-so is no good at sitting in neat little rows and doing exactly as he is told without thinking. And dammit, he colours outside the lines." --AnthonyLander

Yes. They were thrown out long ago, I suspect, but my parents had a stack of primary school reports very much like that, if not stronger. Not only was I "disorganized" and a "daydreamer", I commited (committed) the ultimate sins: couldn't (can't) spell, couldn't (can't) handle mental arithmetic.

For a while, I kept my secondary school reports, which said much the same. When I got to university, they amused me greatly. Recently, a competent professional gave me an informal diagnosis of high-functioning Asperger's syndrome, which would seem almost exactly to mean (amongst other things) what "seems very bright, but can't seem to pay attention in class. He would do well if only he would apply himself" meant twenty years ago. Only now it's a condition to be treated, rather than a moral lapse to be punished. -- KeithBraithwaite

I HaveThisPattern. I used to use the quote "Robert must learn to sit still" from my kindergarten report as my Usenet sig. The joke being, of course, that I still can't. -- RobertAtkins

Sounds just like me. In fact, while I'm not proud of it, I actually failed too many subjects in my junior and senior years of high-school and had to make them up in summer school. It wasn't that I didn't understand the subjects, it's actually because I refused to do work that was deemed required in order to graduate. For example, I had to write a term paper in English class and all I wanted to write about was science fiction or computer technology. Unfortunately I got stuck with KurtVonnegut.

Personally, I can't wait for my first high-school reunion. ;)

-- DrewMarsh

FormLiberates. Creativity often comes from dealing with arbitrary constraints - such as the rule that poetry must rhyme.

The XP rule ("TheyreJustRules") does not give you permission to break the rules, only to change them. DaveHarris

During my last school years, I must have had the highest variance in grades in the class, that is, my grades sometimes varied from the best grade to the worst and back, in one and the same subject, according to how interested I was. Anyone else HaveThisPattern?

(BTW, some of Vonnegut is SciFi, and good one, too. I remember CatsCradle fondly.). --FalkBruegmann

If I remember correctly, I was supposed to read SlaughterhouseFive, but it just wasn't the type of SciFi I was into. *shrug* ;) -- DrewMarsh

In the late 80's, in an EDS education program, I turned in two similar programs at about the same time, to be graded by two different professors. I put about the same amount of effort into each, and got similar results. One instructor gave me an "A", the other, an "F". The "A" instructor said that my program was "creative and original" and glossed over its failures when given invalid inputs. The "F" instructor said that my program was "strange and unusual" and "did not do things the way the instructor recommended," and he hit on the "failure on bad input data" part very hard. I would say that just about everything good or bad that could be said about each one of the programs could also be said about the other. Go figure. -- JeffGrigg

Of course, we cannot color outside the lines unless someone has drawn the lines. Boundaries are useful, if only to mark where we wish to break them. -- PeteHardie

Of course, not all rules are possible to break. Sometimes you have to study an area for a while before you can understand which rules are. I was once in a meeting with most of upper management at mumble corp, presenting a new architecture. The head of marketing, who was proud of his ability to do back-of-the-envelope figuring, stopped me during discussion about a compressed video stream we were to provide. His figures showed that financial constraints dictated transmission hardware A, but his marketing studies suggested that his customers wanted throughput (e.g. performance) of N. Here I was, postulating performance significantly less than that. He decided that the we (the research) group simply needed to design a better algorithm. When I told him it could not be done, he went into a 10 minute speil about positive attitudes, thinking "outside-the-box", etc. After he finished, I suggested that we solve another problem we had, this conference room was too small, by putting chairs on the ceiling. BY this point, the CTO is visibly struggling not to laugh....

My 6-year-old says he prefers to do "abstract" art, but I've figured out that what he really means is that it's too much trouble to try to draw something recognizable. It reminds me of a scene from WaitingForGod. Diana is painting a picture of the gardener, except you can't see the gardener - only his rake leaning against a tree. "The rake represents the presence of the gardener," Diana says, to which Jane says, "Oh, you mean you can't do people!" -- DavidBrantley

Here's a link to a poem about this subject: http://www.colorforth.com/coloring.html