Flat Heads Make Good Students

I had a flat head when I was a kid — I think it made me who I am.

True story. My parents left me in a booster seat too long on a road trip to California when I was 8 weeks old, and my fat, malleable, baby head didn’t stand a chance.

My mom worried she broke me permanently, so she put me into a Seattle Children’s research study of flat-headed kids (the official name of the study probably).

Here’s why I think it molded me into a better student.

Year after year, I came back to the hospital where they’d put a fucking pantyhose on my head covered in solenoids and studied me as I bombed their tests. I was terrible at math and English as a kid — horrid; I went to a Waldorf School where academics and college plans weren’t the priority for 5-year-olds.

It felt like a bad spy movie; the room was cold, with white walls and a one-way mirror that the scientists went behind to supposedly study why I was so stupid and how, or more likely, if it related to my flat head.

I knew early on that my role wasn’t to be the “smart kid”. (Another short, bleach blond Finnish boy named Christopher had me beat in that department.) To survive the play yard at recess, I had to come up with something else special about me.

That’s how I became THE flatheaded chubby boy with THE big imagination (I never looked back). I had the best pretend worlds and games to play at recess. If you wanted to have fun, I was the person to talk to. Christopher didn’t stand a chance in my house.

I’m still the kid with the big imagination, minus the flat head (mostly), also a bit less chubby. While AI bots like Claude and ChatGPT have powerful uses for good, they also destructively rampage through the halls of higher education. Being the “smart kid” or the kid that’s good with patterns won’t cut it alone anymore. AI can do it faster and better for less. We need to be more.

But even as Claude-driven giant robots beam down the Space Needle with big laser eyes, one truth will always be: AI can’t be left in a booster seat for too long. It can’t be the chubby kid who found its identity. It can’t have my imagination.