During the spring of 2011, shortly before moving to Thailand, I had a job as a scorer for the written exams of New Jersey 11th graders that year, who all had to answer in essay form a question involving peanut allergies.  Surprisingly enough (or not), there was a bell-curve shaped distribution for the scores from 0 to 6, with most of the teens scoring either a 3 or a 4 on their essay.  Considering that I was reading and scoring these papers at the pace of hundreds of papers a day, one might think  that I was rather bored of reading about peanut allergies.  That this did not prove entirely the case was due to a few factors.  For one, there were a great many papers that were interesting in a bad where, where I was led to wonder how it was that such and such a person who could not express themselves at all had been passed through school all the way to the 11th grade.  I felt some degree of sympathy for people who could not manage a coherent essay when given such an obvious topic to talk about.  As someone with very serious personal allergies to mangoes, I can certainly understand the way that a peanut allergy can be immensely dangerous given the ubiquity of peanuts, and express a fond hope that children can be raised in such a fashion that allergies are minimized and where present can be handled successfully.

Beyond the terrible essays, though, the ones that reminded me that it is not a skill to be taken for granted to be able to string enough words to make a complete sentence and enough sentences to form paragraphs and enough paragraphs to make for an articulate essay.  The great majority of the essays I read were at least competent, and occasionally there were essays that were enjoyable.  About once a day, though, I would read an essay about the subject of peanut allergies that was so transcendent that it merited the very rare score of six.  These were essays that I would be proud writing, that I would find to be so excellent that I would want them preserved for posterity, to serve as op/ed features in newspapers, and so on and so forth.  These papers were exceedingly rare, as I said, only about one such paper a day.  But when one read such a paper, one recognized that one was dealing with a creative individual.  Even among those who scored a 5, creativity was definitely present, along with a certain artistic flair in saying something that was thoughtful about a subject that I was by now a subject matter expert on simply by reading thousands or tens of thousands of papers on the subject.

I did not go into the job expecting to find a lesson in creativity.  Nor did the vast majority of papers I read demonstrate very much creativity.  The prompt itself was generic to the point of prompting near uniformity in many examples.  It is quite possible that, without cheating, that there were substantially identical papers present from different students just because they had been taught to the prompt and many students had insufficient creativity in their own approach to writing to do more than simply state the same points over and over again in largely the same kind of language.  Yet those students who were unable to learn the rules and those who transcended the mere rote recitation of the standard essays were those who broke the monotony in different ways.  On the low end, we had those who could not reach the standard of mediocrity because their ability to communicate was too limited, their grasp of the English language too unsure, their vocabulary too small, their skills at writing too lacking.  These papers were not creative, but were incoherent.  And there were others who had the grasp of language, the courage to strike inventive ground, and occasionally grasps of genuine insight that would have done a public servant proud even at the age of sixteen or seventeen.  Even among public school students in New Jersey, there was at least some hope for the future in people who were able to provide a striking view of a truly banal problem.

How do we judge creativity?  It is a cliche that everyone is unique and special, and it is likely that all of those New Jersey students felt that.  However, as someone who read a monumental amount of essays on the same topic, it quickly became the case that some people were far better able to express themselves creatively than others.  These people took the prompt in novel directions, were able to add insights from their own experience or from other situations, and had a varied enough vocabulary to delight the reader, even the reader as tired of the subject as I was.  My job, without me knowing it at the time, was an incubation for being able to recognize creativity in the most demanding of circumstances, that of statewide standardized tests where everyone is given the same prompt and where creativity is demonstrated in how one goes about answering that prompt.  To get a passing score it was merely necessary to be competent, and many (perhaps even most) were able to reach that level.  But a much smaller percentage showed any kind of creativity and flair in expressing themselves on such a subject, and very few demonstrated striking originality that could be recognized in the mass of papers that frequently made the same points and suggestions over and over and over again.

What is it that led those fortunate few creative essayists to be so bold and striking in their approach?  To be sure, the people who did the best showed themselves to be well-read, well-practiced in writing essays that were able to move beyond a boring five paragraph setup, and able to bring in outside material from their own reading or personal experience.  In many areas of creativity it may be a benefit to come from a wealthy enough background that someone may be tutored in how to express themselves to their best advantage, and to avoid the sort of cliches that others would fall into.  One had to know what others were going to do and then do it better and differently so as to stand out in a good way.  There was therefore some sort of tension, even if the students were unaware of it, in what the state was asking.  A standardized test with a uniform prompt on the one hand tends to encourage a certain dull uniformity, that of the yellow pencils or the blue or black ballpoint pens.  Yet the students who were equipped to excel on the exam were both knowledgeable enough to know what others were going to do and how others were going to approach the subject, but they knew how to express themselves well enough to go against the grain and to distinguish themselves for originality even in a situation where it was difficult to achieve.  If we want to be creative, it helps to know what is expected of us, and what most other people would do, so that we can zig where others zag, and expand the scope and vary the approach of our efforts enough to surprise an audience that is jaded by their own expectations, and willing to applaud something that is new or different.