This is why teachers ought to make sure that their students take notes on paper, and teachers should not police those notes. The doodles and vagaries of paper ostensibly devoted to notes are the nesting-grounds of creativity.

This is why boredom is so valuable. Boredom is usually a consequence of an oppressive combination of physical constraint, social constraint, temporal constraint, and cognitive constraint, like sitting in a 2-3 hour faculty meeting, a boring high school class, or a superfluous but mandatory training workshop. The mind, thus confined, suddenly begins to produce truly astonishing imaginations and scenarios in a desperate bid to entertain itself.

If necessity is the mother of invention, then boredom is the mother of imagination.