Kids who think outside the box are the most challenging ones to raise but they can also be the most rewarding. Galileo thought outside the box; Einstein; Picasso…the list is truly endless. Every major development in human history was brought about by someone who was once a kid who thought a little differently. But Galileo in fifth grade? Perhaps he wasn’t the easiest boy to teach in science class.

Here’s a story: a fifth grader at a progressive school was taking an art class with a new teacher. The kids in the class were painting with watercolors and this boy was happily painting away. Until his teacher looked at his work and told him he was “using too much green.” When I first heard the story, I thought of the scene in the movie Amadeus where the Emperor hears a Mozart composition for the first time and his response to this work of genius is “Too many notes!” It is one thing to hear this kind of comment from a buffoonish monarch, but to hear it from an art teacher (of all subjects!), in a progressive school no less, was a little surprising.

Duly chastened, the young artist, finished the painting that had been deemed excessively green and the class gathered around to discuss the day’s results. The teacher held up a representational painting one of the boy’s classmates had done that featured a human figure with hands in the air. She asked the kids what they thought the person was reaching for. One child said the sky, another said the stars, another said the figure was reaching for her dreams. But the boy who painted with a lot of green said “He’s reaching for a sandwich.” All the kids laughed and the boy was then sent to the principal’s office. The sky, the stars, are clichés in this context. Dreams, slightly less so, but hardly original. The boy who said the figure was reaching for a sandwich was the only one who said something that may have been accurate (and since that is how he saw it, it was certainly accurate to him) and also had the virtue of complete originality. This boy demonstrated that he was an outside the box thinker and the teacher’s wholly inappropriate reaction was to become angry.

To conclude the story, the boy walked down to the principal’s office worried about the lecture he had coming, but here’s the happy ending: the principal, true to the mission of progressive education, took the side of the young artist who used too much green. Why wouldn’t that figure be reaching for a sandwich? A kid like that can help his parents see things in a new way. A kid like that is a gift. And here’s the real kicker to the story: that boy is my son.

Seth Greenland is a writer and co-founder of the InnerKids Foundation. His second novel Shining City is coming out in July.

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