For the past 12 days, I’ve been at our summer condo by beautiful Gull Lake, near Nisswa, MN. It’s always a learning experience for this granddad. My teachers are my two grandsons and granddaughter. I’ve had a number of lessons this summer, the most important being how to learn creative problem solving from a 15 year-old.
Evan, who merits my blogging a strangely diverse set of topics (lying, civil action, laptops as serialized interruption, American mythology, etc.) detailed with (amusing) frustration his honors class in Algebra II. First, a bit of context: Though an avid reader and superb scholar, my grandson Evan is not a nerd, his parents are not helicopter parents, he has a passel of friends, and he’s nuts about ski-boarding [32 days this past winter], golf, skateboarding, his kid-brother (a real piece of work) and investing. He attends one of the top prep schools in Massachusetts, a school that emphasizes not only academics, but also leadership and social justice.
The algebra class took up 2/3 of the year. His teacher like all of his teachers is “awesome.” This teacher made a pot of money on Wall Street and turned to education in his retirement years. (He also advises students on investment strategy. Intriguing . . .) Evan and his classmates took about 10 or 12 tests over the two semesters. The tests were typically 5 or 6 questions, each very complex, demanding and time consuming. The first 5 questions covered material from the class and the 6th was always about material the students had not discussed in class nor covered in the syllabus or book.
Evan tells me that you try to figure it out for yourself, based on prior learning. He assumed that his familiarity with all previous material would make it possible to be figured out. Typically, he said, you look for patterns. The sixth question was “really, really hard.” Over time, they began to think like the teacher, using his mental techniques for solutions. Of course, they put their assumptions and conclusions on paper, getting partial credit for their thinking. But at the end of the semester, no one had gotten more than half of those questions correct.
Evan received his lowest grade in that class, a B+, but since it was honors, the grade was figured in as an A-. Neither he nor his classmates is shy, so on several occasions they went to their teacher and complained of the process and the lack of preparation for that last question on each test.
The message from their teacher was four simple words: “Get used to it.” On several occasions he explained to the students that when he was in college he had to teach himself a lot. And when he went to Wall Street, he also had to teach himself a lot.
More significantly, the teacher said, the world is like that. You won’t always have a teacher around. The problem may be nearly insurmountable. And you’ll have to use every resource imaginable to solve problems. And . . . some problems won’t be solvable.
Evan told me that he strongly disliked the results at the time. But since he’d had a couple months to think about it, he decided that he learned an awful lot. He thought that the lessons were very valuable, but that “he should have gotten a higher grade.” Ha!
We talked over the lessons learned from his experience.
- Expect that you will inevitably face difficult, even insurmountable problems in life and work.
- Resolution will require every possible resource from the past, including techniques and thinking that you’ve never used before.
- Joint problem solving offers keys that are unavailable to the individual. Collaboration is a must for success.
- Part of your responsibility as an adult is to take on very difficult problems.
- “Get used to it.” Reality presents us with complex, difficult problems, and may not readily—sometimes never—bend to our desires or hopes.
We now know that the teen-aged brain develops the executive functions between 13 and 18 years of age. As the prefrontal cortex matures, teenagers learn to reason better, develop more control over impulses and make better judgments. Intriguingly, this part of the teenage brain has been dubbed “the area of sober second thought.” It strikes me that Evan’s math teacher was approaching brain growth in brilliant fashion and with exact timing, forcing his students to reason about the difficulties of problem solving and adult reality. He was also forcing the students to develop neuronic patterns in their gray matter, patterns that would be functional over their lifetime.
The research also shows that adolescence is a supremely important time to learn to deal constructively and innovatively with reality. It leads me to think that a major reason that many have great difficulty with adaptability, innovation and creativity is at least partially because few experienced opportunities like Evan. Just yesterday, a Gen-Y acquaintance called me with a very difficult problem he faced on a small professional board of musical leaders. Although we talked for more than a half-hour, it was rather clear that he had a great deal of difficulty dealing with the realities of the group. He seemed unable to understand a basic fact: The world is not a just place.
Failure to learn about complexity and social and physical reality has two big negative effects. First, it hinders our ability to learn from all situations, including those whom we don’t like or respect. Second, it anesthetizes us to the need to be proactive in building the kind of thinking skills and intelligence network that are of ultimate value.