Wicked problem solving skills

When I was in grade school I was a cheater. Not a good one, but a frequent one. Particularly in the eighth grade. Here’s the irony of the whole thing — I was one of the smart kids back then. I don’t mean that in a braggart way, but I was in the honors English group and the honors math (!) group and was in general a straight A / occasional B student.

In English we had this hard core grammar teacher who I really struggled with. (The year before the English teacher had focused on nothing but creative writing, which I loved. In fact, I was on a creative writing TEAM. Get more geeky than that — I challenge you. The downside to the creative writing stint was that we learned nothing about grammar, and so eighth grade English was hard.)

In class we were split into groups of five or six desks pushed together. I sat with the smartest boy in class, the smartest girl in class and the hottest boy in class. I am sure others sat in our group, but I was distracted by the whole hottest boy thing. One day we had this quiz or test on some grammar stuff that was very hard and required memorization. Often that year we all copied off each other – the perks of sitting next to the smartest boy and girl. For this test I think I just made a cheat sheet of the table we had to memorize. Unfortunately, I inverted a column and a row or something and missed just about EVERY ANSWER on the test.

In social studies we used to pass notes — not the same as cheating, but teachers at my school reacted to it the same way — by putting the note inside of an ink pen. Here’s how you do it. You take you garden variety Bic® pen and take out the ink. Then you take a note and roll it up tightly and insert it where the ink was. Cap the pen up and pass it off to your friend like they need to borrow a pen. Note successfully passed.

Last eighth grade cheating story… I wore uniforms to school. I would write out notes onto a note card and tape it to the hem of my school skirt. Then while having to write, oh, say the fifty presidents in order for a test, I would flip up the hem of my skirt under my desk and sneak glances down. Really, I was just trying to appreciate my Catholic school skirt to the best of my ability and make the nuns proud.

In high school — and no, I did not cheat in high school … I merely utilized available technologies — I used take out my TI-81 calculators and type in all sorts of formulas and notes for math and science classes. Then when I was pretending to calculate something, I was actually finding out the formula I needed to solve a problem.

You might be reading this and thinking, “You were such a cheater!” And that is true. Or, “I can’t believe you are admitting what a cheater you used to be.” Also true. But, another way to look at it is, “You were such a creative problem solver!”

Kids today have it pretty easy. They don’t even have to be creative about they solve difficult school situations. They have all sorts of technology available to them and are encouraged to use them so they can “utilize their technology skills.” Nice.