Month: February 2019

You’ve put yourself in the correct mental and emotional state.   You’ve identified and clarified the actual problem.  You’ve broken it down into smaller and easier to handle pieces.  You’ve gathered the necessary tools and resources and you’ve consulted your storehouse of previous solutions.  The next (and almost final) step is to send in the Wolf, just as Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) did in Pulp Fiction in order to help Jules (Samuel L. Jackson). In other words, it’s to find the solution to the problem.  You have enough information at this point, it’s time to act.  That’s all I’ll have to say–for now. 

How to Solve Any Problem:
Step 1: Get Your Mind Right 
Step 2: Identify and Clarify the Problem 
Step 3: Break It Down    
Step 4: Identify and Gather Your Resources
Step 5: Send in the Wolf

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It is President’s Day in the United States, the day that Americans celebrate the birthdays of two of the greatest presidents in American history: George Washington, born February 22, 1732, the father of the nation and Abraham Lincoln, born February 12, 1809, the Great Emancipator and Rail Splitter.

There are many reasons each one has been deemed by history to be the two greatest (depending on the list, they often trade first and second place) but surely the scale of the problem each one faced contributed to these assessments.  Washington had to bring forth a nation and a type of government that hadn’t existed on earth for nearly two thousand years. Lincoln had to keep that nation intact in the face of massive armed opposition.  In other words, each President faced existential level threats.  

Given the massive scale of he problems each one faced, what is of interest to me is how each man solved it.  Entire volumes have been written about their respective solutions, of course (see The Glorious Cause and Battle Cry of Freedom).   But for the sake of my study of problem solving a key step each man engaged is what interests me today on President’s Day: identifying and gathering your resources.

It should go without saying that neither man solved their respective existential level problems by themselves.  Washington had to raise an army, train it, arm it and clothe it.  Lincoln had so supply his army, identify how much of his army even remained after his inauguration, unify his allies, and gain support for the fundamental changes to the country and government his predecessor, Washington, had birthed.  In other words, each man had to identify what resources he had available, gather them together, and bring them to bear.

On a much smaller scale, this is often the step we all tend to forget when we are faced with a crisis or a problem.  In a moment of panic we might actually forget what we know.  We might not remember what we actually have or who is actually on our side because we are so wrapped up in the scale of the problem instead in the promise of the opportunity.  Hell, that just happened to me today.  And it tends to happen to my students when faced when a seemingly inscrutable problem on a test.  They forget how much they know.  They forget just how smart and how talented they actually are, just as you (and I) often do when under pressure and confronted with a threat.

So that’s the next step in problem solving: Identify and Gather Your Resources.

How to Solve Any Problem:
Step 1: Get Your Mind Right
Step 2: Identify and Clarify the Problem
Step 3: Break It Down   
Step 4: Identify and Gather Your Resources

Barely four months into his presidency, the youngest elected president in American history gave a speech to a special joint session of congress exhorting the United States to send a man safely to the moon and bring him home, all before the end of the decade of the sixties.  The audacity of this challenge needs to be put into perspective.  At that point in history, May 25, 1961, the United States hadn’t even put a man in orbit—though the Soviets had.  American Alan Shepherd had only reached a mere 116 miles from the surface of the earth.  Now John F. Kennedy was challenging the country to send a man on a trip of over 450,000 miles.  This was an enormous problem to solve.  How did they do it?

They didn’t.  In 1961 it was an impossible task to send a man to the moon. Instead, James Webb and the rest of NASA broke down the problem into a series of steps.  Build a powerful rocket.  Get a man into orbit (John Glenn). Build a more powerful rocket.  Put two men into orbit.  Get a man to walk in space (Ed White).  Execute a rendezvous of two different spacecraft (Gemini VI and Gemini VII ).  Build a command craft and a landing craft.  Put three men into space.  Build the most powerful rocket ever known to humanity (Saturn V).  Orbit the moon (Apollo 8). Land on July 20, 1969, before the decade ends, fulfilling the promise of the young president.

Once my students encounter the sixty or so words in a math problem, they have fifty seconds to find the correct answer.  After getting their minds right and clarifying the problem, they will to need break down the big problem into its constituent parts, solve each of those parts and then put it all back together to find the answer.

How to Solve Any Problem
Step 1: Get Your Mind Right
Step 2: Identify and Clarify the Problem
Step 3: Break It Down   

And, now, we’re back to problem solving…

The NASA spaceship Odyssey was 205,000 miles away from earth when astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert heard what they described as a “pretty large bang”.  This was accompanied by electrical fluctuations onboard and the momentary loss of communication with Earth.  Their second oxygen tank reading was zero.  When they looked out the window, they saw that the Odyssey was venting gas.  Clearly, they had a problem—but what?  They didn’t even know if what they heard was an explosion or the impact of a meteorite.  And if it were an explosion, what caused it and which parts of the Odyssey did it affect?  The specific answers to all these questions marked the difference between the success and failure of the mission, with “success” meaning that Lovell and Haise would land on the moon in the Aquarius and then plant the flag.

In the latter parts of the math section of the SAT the questions get harder. The questions have fifty words or so and the student has less than fifty seconds to read it and solve it.  If they get past their intimidation—which they often do—as they read the question they will recognize many elements, realize that they know all the necessary math, start executing the steps they know and then get an answer.   

Only later on do they find out they got wrong answer because they solved the wrong problem.  They hadn’t read all the way to the end of the question so they didn’t actually know what the real problem was.  Or they simply misunderstood the question because the excitement of recognition drew them away from complete understanding and, therefore, the correct solution.

After the accident on the Odyssey, it wasn’t immediately obvious that the astronauts’ survival was at stake. After all, they were still breathing and they were still moving towards their original target—the moon.  Only after an examination of the all the monitors on the Odyssey and a long series of physics calculations run by the NASA engineers on earth did the gravity of the situation become clear.  Only then did they understand the true nature of the problem.   Not only were Lovell and Haise not going to be able to take the Lunar Module and land on the moon, it wasn’t even clear that they were necessarily going to survive.  The problem to be solved wasn’t a lunar landing.  It was whether they were going to live and land back on earth. Their supply of breathable oxygen was now severely limited and they were hurtling away at thousands of miles per hour from the nearest known source of oxygen in the universe—talk about time pressure!

You know how this movie ends, of course.  Lovell, Haise and Swigert returned home, their mission hailed as a “successful failure.”  The movie Apollo 13 was largely accurate, down to the lines in the script taken directly from actual NASA communication transcripts (a bit of trivia: unlike Tom Hanks in the movie, what Jim Lovell actually said was, “Houston, we’ve had a problem”, not, “Houston, we have a problem”.  Impress someone with that at your next party).  But for all the excitement in the movie of solving the problem, most of the movie was really spent trying to understand the problem in the first place.  Most of the movie was spent problem identifying instead of problem solving: identifying the real problem (survival) and clarifying the problem (the constraints imposed by a limited supply of oxygen and Newton’s Laws of Motion).

So this is step two of solving any problem, what my students have to do in less than fifty seconds.

How to Solve Any Problem

Step 1: Get your mind right

Step 2: Identify and clarify the problem