There is
another study
that has been released that shows that the students in our schools
find their schoolwork too easy. I wish that I could launch into a
paragraph or two that would decry the shameful decline in education,
but my experience was that going to school was boring and definitely
not difficult. Those moments in school that offered real stretching
for my interests and abilities were few and far between, enough so
that I remember those incidents clearly.
When I think of boredom and school,
what I really remember was the long summer when I was 14 spent in bed
recovering from mononucleosis.
In a matter of weeks, I lost a quarter of my body weight and did not
have the strength to climb the stairs to my bedroom without stopping
to rest halfway there. About all that I could do was lie in bed and
read or play solitaire, when I could keep my eyes open. That was
boring! Boredom is its own challenge for even the least inquisitive
of souls, and for one with a restless curiosity was an opportunity to
overcome the ennui of my existence.
It did not take long to calculate the
odds of winning a variety of different solitaire games even without a
computer to keep track of hands I dealt. What became interesting was
to try to calculate ways to increase the odds of finishing any
particular deal of the cards. I made a most interesting discovery
while convalescing that summer; how you played the first card could
change the entire game. I had been very happy ignoring math classes
with linear systems, but now I was looking at math that predicted
dynamic systems that changed with the most subtle of influences. Now
a simple deal of the cards provided a sense of wonder at the levels
of complexity that were hidden with the cards dealt face down.
The first thing I discovered was that
you cannot “cheat” at solitaire. Each deal is a puzzle to be
solved, to find a solution that allows you to clear the table. The
linear, binary notion of winning or losing offers no mental
challenge. Instead, I played solitaire to find the sequence of
actions that would solve the puzzle in the hope that there was some
formula that could be applied to raising the odds of finishing any
given deal.
The second discovery was more amazing.
Card games were interesting when the dynamic system was the focus of
play. For example, I became very interested in duplicate bridge
because it was a text book for how complex the system was for playing
the 52 cards. But card games are child's play compared the games that
we play day to day. Which led to the knowledge that most of the
stories we tell about our lives were stories that describe the
multiple outcomes possible in the same set of starting points
following a set of dynamic rules. I dealt games of solitaire until I
began to see that my interactions with people were not about cause
and effects at all. No; our level of complexity goes way beyond that.
The last discovery I made while
shuffling cards and trying to gain enough strength to climb the
stairs, was that school was cheating me again. I
was a geek. Math was fun, but math in school was a pedantic and
repetitive mantra of solving ten practice problems is good so solving
1000 must be heaven. I had stumbled on a elementary differential
equations when the curriculum could not move beyond linear
progression.
I recovered in time to resume school in
the fall, but my interest in attending classes suffered a relapse.
Imagine a teenager thirsting for knowledge entering a building that
was the intellectual equivalent of the Sahara. I would return to
those equations more than thirty years later to find that they were
still fascinating in every detail because they helped me understand
my world and the people who live in it.
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