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Lego laggards

You can do what you want for therapeutic relaxation. I’ll sort Legos. This is fortunate for me, because I have about 20,000 loose Legos in my house. I should say had, because I’m down to about 2,000, as I have, yet again, methodically gone through my boys’ gigantic plastic bin and sorted their Legos by color into gallon-sized Ziploc bags. Those guys are going, yet again, to rebuild their 70+ Lego sets – whether they like it or not.

See, people buy Lego sets and the sets end up in horrible disarray. The pieces slide down heating vents. They cause foot injuries. They lie in drawers and in dusty corners of desks. What’s left, mixed in with crayons, playing cards, and Trouble game pieces, is in some kind of box or bin in the attic. Every once in a while, the kids open the box or bin up and build stuff.

We see this occasional building and marvel at their free play. Who needs the instructions!? Let them build from their imaginations! We see them as if they were plucked straight from the mind of William Blake, proponent of youthful freedom, he of the “Mind-forg’d Manacles [1].”

Well, with apologies to Blake, that’s all a bunch of nonsense when it comes to Legos. My extensive primary observations of Lego building have demonstrated irrefutably to me that the only reason kids don’t build their sets after the initial box-ripping sessions is because they’re simply too lazy to gather the pieces back up. What they end up doing we call imaginative, and perhaps in some ways it is, but the primary driver of their activities is that they are too slothful to plow through a forearm-deep pile of Legos looking for a red angle plate 1×2/2×4.

Too much work to find? A red angle plate 1×2/2×4.

A Lego set is a complicated and fantastic model. It’s a form. The belief that building outside the form is better leads to cultural chaos, the same path that resulted in all these terrible free verse poets who get away with that nonsense. “Hey man, who needs rhyme? Who needs meter?”  You do. You need forms to create control and structure for your language and thus your concepts. Legos work the same way.

My desire to create a world of lovely Lego order in our front room also stems from a new threat. The laggards now have further incentive not to look under the ottoman for loose angular brick 1x1s. You know what I’m talking about: Minecraft. Minecraft is digital Legos. It’s awesome, imaginative, creative. But I’m — as my students in my ed tech grad class have taught me — a digital immigrant, so I cannot resist seeing this as the laggards’ way out of sorting and building with plastic bricks. While you never step on a virtual brick (podiatrists everywhere should unite with me, campaigning in response to a no-doubt sudden dearth of Lego-related injuries), the agony of the brick-in-foot is a small price to pay for the beauty of order.

Yeah, your kid might build incredible houses or marvelous little ships. But hold no illusions: They should be building their sets. All they need is one obsessive, bespectacled adult ruining his social life and marriage by poring through piles and bins of Legos to help them along. They should… wait a second… is that the right shell 2×6 gray bow/angle I see off in the dusty corner of my desk? I’ve been looking for that…

Scott Warnock is a writer and teacher who lives in South Jersey. He is a professor of English at Drexel University, where he is also the Associate Dean of Undergraduate Education in the College of Arts and Sciences. Father of three and husband of one, Scott is president of a local high school education foundation and spent many years coaching youth sports.

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