Einstein Puzzles

Posted: April 08, 2022

By: Wesley - Nomadic Polymath

Once upon a time, in the 5th grade a boy meets a teacher. This teacher was no ordinary teacher and this boy was no ordinary boy. The teacher brought to bare the purest form of education imaginable, it started with inspiration and kicked off a life long journey, incepting knowledge along the way. The boy had bounced around from place to place and never connected with any figure in the institutions that usurped his focus during government mandated learning hours. It was an unlikely pairing given the boy's winding road through the system that attempts to be educational. Yet, their paths through life crossed for a brief window that fateful year in elementary school. This is the story about why my passion is teaching and often find myself up late doing logic puzzles.

By this time in my career in the education main quest, I had been registered in five different schools across four different school districts and I was not but nine years old. Part of the interesting twist to moving around so often is that you get really good at packing up everything you own and trekking across the country… More on my current Vanlife later. A child whose home gets uprooted every so often, friends left behind, and school system swapped out with a new quest line tends to dissociate with any of what happens at school really mattering. Consider this, if you knew that the next move was never more than two years away even before you started unpacking how attached would you be to the new group of teachers trying to aid in your growth?

As luck would have it, a highly motivated and engaged educator took an interest in my abilities almost immediately after arriving at yet another new school. The year before in the 4th grade was particularly exciting because there wasn't any room in the 4th grade Math classes and the test for the 5th grade class was long past due so they placed me in the 3rd grade class that happened to be covering material I went over in 1st grade… Yup, I'm sticking to exciting… Mixing boredom, intelligence, youth, and dissociation yields some dangerous results. Thankfully, I managed to survive elementary school with my life and freedom, unfortunately being the little shit that I was means myself and others were not left unharmed.

So back to the serendipitous connection, a new teacher in a new school proved to be the nexus at which my destiny started down a new path. Up to this point, people just saw a trouble maker, because I was one, they just saw loud mouth, because I was one, they identified the symptoms to my woes and treated me as you would an obnoxious little kid. This person took the time to see the person I was, rather than see my behaviour at face value. They recognized the boredom slamming into intelligence and causing havoc around the collision.

I went from third grade Math to my first LEAP program. My mind was being challenged. My spirit was being lifted. My path forward was becoming bright. It was during this magical time the foundation of how I continue to navigate the world was formed. Thinking back to this era of my life I can ignore the bullying I experienced, the loneliness I tolerated, or even the beginnings of my battle with depression, if I so choose. Instead, I acknowledge my formative years such as they are. Those brief 18 months I spent in that town changed me forever.

You could almost say it was the best of times and it was the worst of times. Like how can reading The Hobbit for the first time be so bad? Couple it with almost no friends your own age and yet another impending move. This was the time I first got into Magic: The Gathering. It was the time all those loving kids on the bus called me Weasley with such wonderous affection. My first introduction to Logic Puzzles happened around the time I took my first I.Q. test. I played my first game of Bingo. The first timed mile I ever ran was out at the fields behind the Portables. The mind that writes these words truly started to take shape about the same time that a remarkable teacher saw it's potential and nurtured it rather than subjugated it.

Teachers often make the mistake of demanding respect because they obviously must know more than you, I mean why else are they the teacher and you the student. Arrogance is not an effective leadership style so why would it be an effective place to start your teaching style from? There's a level headed neutral that a classroom should start with, in my opinion. It's not a matter of earning or losing respect, it's about fostering an environment that puts knowledge on show for all to see no matter who channels the energy. The teacher should be more a sherpa guiding and nudging the students towards enlightenment, and less authoritarian ruler dictating the information students should retain. There is so much cognitive dissonance in the education I received over the years that my youthful mind challenged just about everything that wasn't support by logic and reason. "Repec my authoratay" didn't really fly with me and still doesn't.

A good teacher will identify the information inside the student's mind, add some more, mix in their own understanding and hopefully create some knowledge. There is an inherent need for connection in the education process, being able to simply absorb information and intuit knowledge from it takes a bit of practice and is damned near impossible without someone early on showing you how to do it. The saying of monkey see monkey do stems from the idea that teaching requires connection. The teacher I encountered in 5th grade was the first one I remember forming a connection with, to them I wasn't a number in the system, I was a person with experiences, thoughts, and feeling all my own.

Fast forward to the here and now of my present day, several excellent educators later. I've been a teacher and desire strongly to return to the classroom. I live out my van and get to pick the river down by which I park. I relax by reading, still can run a pretty quick mile and exercise my mind by completing Logic Puzzles. There are a handful of experiences in life that utterly reshape it in ways that might take years to actualize with. From my time in the 5th I'm left with a ever growing garden of ideas and dreams all thanks to a not so ordinary teacher.