Asked by MTV how he maintains a creative state, Lil Wayne issues a response that’s perfect for rappers and teachers alike:

MTV: You go everywhere with your music. What are some of the zones that you been going into while making your new album?

Lil Wayne: I go wherever my creativity takes me. I ain’t gotta be in no zone, ’cause if I was in a zone, I ain’t never fall out. I ain’t never out of the zone, so I don’t know what the zone look like or smell like. I’m always creative.

I aim at the same. My best ideas for lessons and movies hit me during some of the least expected or appropriate times. Like now, scribbling a rough draft of this post on yellow legal during a staff meeting on WASC accreditation. [and a second draft during a school board meeting -ed.]

I think your ability to maintain a creative state hinges on this question: what do you do with an idea once it strikes. Your answer, I think, determines the quantity and quality of future ideas.

Here’s my advice, for whatever it’s worth: don’t use your brain to store ideas.

Using your brain to store a good idea for that post or lesson is like using a fancy schmancy laser cutter to chop wood when an ax suffices fine.

Your brain is good for creating ideas. Paper is great for storing ideas.

If I hadn’t wimped out of that Secret of My Success meme awhile back, I would’ve submitted the fact that I’m always packing paper and pen. When I can’t use paper, I use Jott.

I drove an hour last week and left myself seventeen Jotts all relating to the same opener question (the one about Hawaii) all evenly dispersed over the drive, each of which flew from my cell to my gmail box in time for my arrival.

The thing is: Jotts beget more Jotts.

I use the drafts feature of WordPress to store post ideas. Writing down a new idea plus a few supporting notes as they strike costs me nothing. More ideas come.

Making that slideshow, I stored the shot list in GoogleDocs, refreshing it constantly. My brain fully accustomed to the filling/emptying cycle, more shot ideas came.

This is, of course, a founding principle of my trademarked pedagogy, Method Teaching™, which has been optioned for immediate textbook adoption by McDougal-Littel: stay receptive to interesting things and you can’t help but become interesting yourself. Method Teaching and Method Rapping both derive from the same strategies.And any similarity to David Allen’s Getting Things Done system is, I swear, purely coincidental.

True, sometimes it gets out of control.

But I think Young Wheezy would agree with me that a surplus of creativity is always preferable to its absence.

Related:

1. Method Teaching
2. Vic Mackey: Teacher of the Year

Peter Rock comes closest to how this actually went down.

First, despite my fragmented description of the video, everyone seems to have found it, which is a good first step. Personally, I found it on MySpace video.

But what are you gonna do for two days? Keep that browser window open, hope for no crashes, no accidental closes, no speed issues, no district filter issues?

It’s all too much for a pessimist like me to hope for, frankly. In every case like this, I can’t sleep easy unless I have a copy tucked into my hard drive, which is what I meant by that extra credit prompt.

Fella named Tim Best who plays for Team Philly e-mailed me, said he tried to use the venerable KeepVid to save the video to his hard drive but that the utility balked. The same happened to me. (Ann suggests Zamzar which is great but requires that you’ve already got the file.) I also used Firefox’s Video Downloader plug-in but that returned the ‘net equivalent of a blank stare.

Crud.

So, in what was certainly the most graceful pas de deux between my teaching and technology so far, I headed to Mininova, downloaded a torrent file, pulled the file down overnight, and in the morning had the video I wanted at around three times the resolution of anything you can find streaming online.

Awesome. Legally, morally, and ethically questionable, but awesome.

[Updated: The Infamous J points out that his link offers a Windows Media download, which could then be thrown into Zamzar and converted into something else if you’re on a Mac.]

To all y’all digitally-literate teachers:

Let’s say you’re planning a lesson on exponents at your usual spot at your usual time (which is to say, ten hours before showtime) and you realize you really want to show this one movie, agh, what the hell’s it called, it’s the one IBM made back in the ’80s that zooms back from a picnicking couple all the way into space, showing you the effect of exponential increase.

What’s your solution?

Caveats:

1. To all y’all digitally-literate intensely-concerned teachers out there, don’t fret on my account. This teaser’s coming out of my recent past, where it’s already been resolved.
2. Any solutions which lean heavily on the resources of your colleagues or your library (eg. “I think someone’s got it somewhere on VHS … “) won’t, um, exactly stir our confidence.

Extra Credit: Extract the Video

[updated] On account of your district’s low bandwidth, you need to extract the video to your hard drive. How?