Surprising fact? A major, unmet need of students is for access to useless ideas.

Successful completion of many kinds of homework, such as essay writing and problem solving, often proceeds in two parts.

Part One: Generate various overall plans or ideas, discarding some as soon as they are generated, and discarding others after making some initial efforts to implement or apply them. If all the ideas have been discarded, then you aren't ready to move beyond part one.

Part Two: Implement a plan or apply an idea, possibly modifying the original plan or idea.

With ebooks, there's space to provide lots of examples of the "Part One" process described above. In the past, for every page approved for inclusion in the final draft of a textbook, hundreds of thousands of copies of the textbook contained that page, teachers would assign that page as required reading, and that page would add to the thickness and weight of the textbook. One additional page wouldn't have been a big problem, but eventually one would reach the straw that breaks the camel's back. Knowing this, writers and publishers didn't wait for the unacceptable scenario to arise, but took steps to prevent it from arising. Examples or case studies of "Part One" thinking were usually not included in textbooks, giving students no way to access that kind of material.

Everything seemed simple that way. There was no messy, trial-and-error process. However, standard textbooks omitted a big part of the historical process through which ideas were actually conceived, and also omitted a big part of the actual thought processes that successful students use to get their homework done. Just as apprenticeship can be an effective approach to learning, seeing how successful students get their homework done can be an effective approach to learning.

As students make progress through the grades, they need to think of increasingly sophisticated ideas for Part One. If they believe that there isn't supposed to be any Part One, and if they are clever enough to succeed in school up to some grade without spending much time on the Part One process, then they might suddenly hit a wall. Instead of generating a variety of ideas of various degrees of quality, they have a habit of going directly to a single idea that works. When this is no longer possible, they might simply be stuck, unable to generate any ideas. Of all students who drop out of school before completing whatever diploma or degree they have been pursuing, what percentage drop out because they find themselves in this situation?

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Just as stretching and running on the spot provide no direct benefit if you are trying to arrive at some destination, the process of generating ideas doesn't directly help you solve a particular problem until you have generated an idea that can be used to solve the particular problem you are facing.

However, it's often impossible to evaluate the quality of an idea until after the whole idea has been generated and formulated. If your methods guarantee that you never generate any useless ideas, then your methods might prevent you from generating a lot of useful ideas.

There is potentially a big difference between what is useful for solving one particular problem and what is useful for learning how to solve problems. What is useless for doing the task at hand may be useful for learning to do a broad range of tasks.