That Damn Essay Again

Oh Groupthink…how great it is to write about you again.  It seems like yesterday I was sitting at my desk in July, agonizing about having to write an essay about you.  It seems somewhat ironic that here I sit in November, two weeks before the end of the semester, sitting in the same exact situation. 

One of the main things I noticed when re-reading the article were the similarities between the M.I.T. building and the L.H.S.P. program.  One of the main points of the program is to have students work together and live together.  I think they hope that by having students living here taking classes together, they will spontaneously run into each other and expand academic or social issues that they learned in class.  I don’t know how times I’ve randomly started talking about Salvage the Bones with somebody from class that I bumped into, but the two ideas I thought interestingly paralleled each other.

The first time I read the essay, I thought the narrative induced the reader to be somewhat confused as to what the main point of Lehrer was.  I do not think Lehrer himself is confused on the topic; I think he wants to convey how brainstorming is not as effective as the M.I.T. model of thinking.  However, after re-reading the essay, I still think he spends way too much time talking about why brainstorming is good.  Instead, he simply should have explained the basic foundation of brainstorming and possibly some detail about why people thought it was a good idea.  When he spends the first three pages of the article making the reader think his argument is favoring brainstorming, it is extremely confusing when he makes his dramatic statement that brainstorming “doesn’t work.”  Once again, I found Lehrer’s findings and argument to be interesting, but still do not think he presented them in a clear, logical way.