Have Your Pep Rallies Ever Lacked?

I agree with you that an event can suffer because of the efforts of the people in charge or the ones coming up with the ideas. However, my school's pep rallies were great because we tried to do something new and exciting at each one. I was cheer captain and in charge of a few pep rallies, but they tried to spread around the leadership to offer new ideas. With different people in charge it is definitely easier to develop a variety of mental sets.

We never had mental set problems with the pep rallies or events at my school. We would be asked to come to meetings with ideas, so we could google ideas or ask other people what they might want before the meeting. This helped us a lot. We also had a smaller student counsel, and we were all familiar with each other. I think this helped us, too.

I definitely agree that some of our school events suffered because it was hard to think "out of the box". Once you get into a mental set, it is extremely hard to get out of, especially when you sometimes don’t even know you’re in one. I have found that this occurs when I am trying to think of an idea for a project. The teacher always shows examples and for some reason the only idea I can think of is the example! In order to get around this, it is best just to take a break and let the ideas flow to you naturally instead of sitting for hours, forcing yourself to come up with an idea.

I agree that a way to overcome a mental set is to simply step away from the situation and let ideas flow naturally rather than force them, but at least personally this is much easier said than done. Though I've never been in charge of creating new ideas for a pep rally, I believe I wouldn't be too far left-field to compare it to developing an essay. When I'm at the creative phase of the essay, where I have to think about my theme and what I'll say, it's nearly impossible to not obsess over what you'll write, especially if a deadline is looming ominously over your head. The only way to find relief when the ideas aren't coming is to completely remove myself from the thought process through a powerful distraction so my creative juices can flow anew, and perhaps a fragment of an idea will come and I can begin to shape the idea.
As they say in chapter 9 of the text, even though we're smart people, there is little to no correlation between intelligence and creativity. It just takes time and a bit of luck to come up with a brilliant idea.

Everything you said within this post is eerily true. When you talked about how it's usually four different main themes that are used every other year for all of those different events, that was definitely true because all schools go through that same dilemma of trying to think outside of the box. I decided to comment on this though because the part of the "3 or 4 cornerstone themes" reminded me of how our senior slogan was "On a scale of 1-10, Seniors are an '11." It just so happens, one day this year I saw another kid with the exact same slogan on a different shirt walk by my room! Great post though!