On the first Friday in January 1991, Vanessa Hess
sat in her seventh-grade science classroom at Stonybrook Junior High and
heard her teacher, Mrs. Maurice Marchani, announce that each kid had to
do a new project. They had to invent something. “There are only two
ways you can avoid this,” Mrs. Marchani said. “You can die, or you can
move.” As Mrs. Marchani continued, she made it clear that this was not a
science-fair type project. “I never want to see another papier-mache
volcano,” she said.
Mrs.
Marchani wanted to see original inventions. There must be any number of
school across the United State where science teachers encourage students
to be creative by saying, “Maybe someday you will grow up to be a
famous inventor.” To Vanessa’s dismay, Mrs. Marchani had different
advice. Why not try to become a famous inventor right now?
In the Indianapolis area, Maurine Marchani has made a name for herself
by inspiring her kids to become inventors. One of her students, Steve
Prater, has been featured in national magazines. Twice, he won prizes in
competition for his inventions. One invention was something called a
Hand Stabilizer. A device that enabled a friend of his with cerebral
palsy to hold a pencil and write responses on true or false or
multiple-choice tests. It worked so well patented, the Hand Stabilizer
and began developing it commercially. In his honor, the mayor of
Indianapolis proclaimed August 23, 1989, Steve Prater Day.
“But me?” Vanessa asked herself. Once, Mrs. Marchani had instructed her
students to figure out ways to drop an egg from the school roof without
the egg breaking as it landed. When the teacher, dressed in a bunny
suit, tried Vanessa’s idea, the result weren’t so great. “Mine crushed,”
says Vanessa.
In spite of her
doubts, however, this hesitant inventor had her idea after only a few
weeks. In the classroom, Mrs. Marchani had said that when inventors hit
upon a great idea, they sometimes shout a loud and victorious “Ah-hah!”
But Vanessa? Her idea came as a soft “Hmmm…” It all started on the last
weekend in January, when spring-like weather visited Indianapolis. The
warm sunny day found Vanessa and her dad in the driveway, washing and
waxing the family car.
The
maroon Old gleamed as if new. But Vanessa noticed that each scratch in
the paint showed up as a white mark, the white being wax left in the
scratch. “You ought to cover these scratches,” she said. “Don’t know how
to,” her father replied. “Unless I go to an auto parts store and get
some touch-up paint. And even then, it may not match.”
“There ought to be a wax with color in it.”
“There isn’t one.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know.”
And
she had her idea. She stored it away inside her head and kept hoping a
better one would come along. For a while, she thought of developing
something to keep apples from turning brown after paring. But every
Friday afternoon when Mrs. Marchani checked on her students’ progress,
Vanessa shrugged and didn’t say much.
As the February due date drew near, Vanessa realized she was running
out of time. A few calls to auto-supply stores and a quick check through
an auto magazine indicated that no one else seemed to have produced a
colored car wax. So far, so good. Vanessa bought a blue Matchbox car and
added blue food coloring to some car wax. She scratched up the toy car,
then waxed the thing- and it worked!
That Thursday night, with some encouragement from her mother, Vanessa
printed up a poster board and readied her display. “It wasn’t real nice,”
she admits, “just a quick job.” The next day in the classroom she
started uneasily at more attractive presentations. But, Mrs. Marchani,
moving from student to student, had an eye for true ingenuity. When she
poked her face over Vanessa’s shoulder, she started at the display for a
moment, taking it in. then in a level tone she prophesied, “You are
going to make money from this.”
Vanessa’s colored car wax won first place in her classroom, and then
swept the field in competition against inventions from other classes at Stony brook. A panel of judges picked Vanessa’s project to represent Stony brook in the annual contest sponsored by Invent America!, a
national organization that works with school to encourage young people
to invent. Her display won that summer at the state level.
That October, a newspaper article about Vanessa resulted in a phone
call to the Hess home. An auto-products company had already been
developing colored car wax with an industrial chemist-by coincidence, it
was an Indianapolis firm.
The
annals of invention are strewn with better disputes between inventors
claiming the same product. But this story has a happy ending. The owners
of the auto-products company, two brothers named Dan and Don Huffman,
were charmed by Vanessa’s story and decided to ask her to appear in an
“infomercial” for Magic Shine, their colored car wax. Contracts were
signed, and Vanessa and her mom were well paid to fly to California to
help make a Magic Shine promotional movie that was later broadcast on TV
all over the country.
How did
the young inventor like movie-making? Vanessa ponders the days in
Hollywood rehearsing and shooting and taking instructions from the
British director. “It was kind a nice,” is all she says.
The success of Vanessa Hess also belongs to her teacher. Maurine
Marchani seems to provide classroom experiences that lead to creative
thinking. In fact, entering Mrs. Marchani’s classroom is itself an
experience. Visitor must find their way past a whole zoo of floppy
sculptures that dangle from the wall. A live rabbit hops up and down the
rows between the desks. A rabbit? “If you don’t pet her,” says Mrs.
Marchani, “she eats your shoelaces.”
The science teacher has a theory that junior high school kids need more
physical attention than they admit. A kid who enters the school from a
stressed-out home may need to have a rabbit on his lap the whole period.
And she also believes that this is just the kind of place that
encourage kids to risk having original thoughts. “In a setting that’s
offbeat, its OK to make a mistake,” says Mrs. Marchani. “Kids are afraid
of being foolish. If the teacher is sort of silly, then its OK for
them. Its OK to risk.”
She also
notes that the students with the highest grade-point averages aren’t
always the best inventors. “I find that kids who do not do well on
paper-and-pencil tests do wonderful things with ideas.” Some people view
kid inventions as flukes. But, Maurine Marchani disagrees. “Nobody’s
told seventh-graders they aren’t creative yet,” she says. To her mind,
when it comes to inventing, twelve is the perfect age.
