For some unknown reason, in the 1970’s the Stanford campus blossomed with dogs. It became “cool” for students to own dogs, and they became somewhat of a plague, especially in areas such as the outdoor eating area at the student union, where they were guaranteed scraps of food.
I was at that time thinking a lot about creativity, teaching courses in it, and emphasizing it in design courses that I was teaching. In particular I was trying to get students to interact more with each other and with me on the early stages of design, so I was asking to see their work perhaps before they thought it was finished enough to show to me, the teacher.
On one fateful day, a student claimed to not be able to show me his work, and when I asked why, he explained that he had been working on his project at the union while eating a hamburger, the hamburger had come apart and spilled upon his papers, and a large dog had jumped on the table and eaten his homework. As he said, “a dog ate my homework”. I thought this an amazing use of imagination to explain his lack of carrying out the assignment.
I was then beginning to give large numbers (hundreds) of talks, conduct workshops, and consult to groups of people from companies and other organizations outside of Stanford, as well as to Stanford alumni, and often told this story, because it always resulted in laughter, and I think made my point. But then I drifted off to other stories. And imagine my amazement when “a dog ate my homework” and derivatives appeared all over the media. I thought of this, because there it was again in this Sunday’s New York Times. And if you put “a dog ate my homework” into Google Images, you will get lots of pictures.
This is important whether this phenomenon of dogs eating homework and usually related items originated from the talks I gave or not. The only reason I think it might have, is that it is such a daffy statement, and I have never seen any context to it. In that case, I have to believe that of all the things I have done in my life, the most visibility came to perhaps the least important.
If it happened independently, it is yet more evidence that with 7 billion people in the world, weird ideas occur independently, a situation that we tend to downplay in our feverish attempt to heap the awards on whoever is first. I remember the shock in Silicon Valley, when people had to recognize that Jack Kilby, of Texas Instruments, quietly invented the integrated circuit at the same time as Bob Noyce, who was much more flamboyant and somewhat of a local hero. In fact, I recently talked to an elder of the Valley that thought that the Nobel committee should make an exception to their rule that the winners of their prize should be alive at the time they receive the award, and posthumously give a Nobel prize to Bob Noyce, since Jack Kilby had won one.
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