You Must Remember This

Chapter 40: As Time Goes By

Mr. T signaled the orchestra, and at once they began the opening bars of "Pomp and Circumstance". All the students, arranged in alphabetical order, walked ten at a time down the aisle, their shoes sinking into the artificial turf. The somber procession turned to the right, tracing the edge of the track, up the few steps to the water fountain, then back to the left, before settling in the bleachers. The sun had not chosen to bless their ceremony, and the students shivered on the cold metal benches. Mr. Mudd walked down from the bleachers to the podium, cleared his throat, and began:

"First, I would like to once again offer my warm congratulations to Heller's 50th graduating class! Typically, as superintendent, I'm shuttled between schools to deliver long, boilerplate, impersonal speeches about bright futures and maturity and you know, the 'land of hope and glory' rhetoric that makes all of you fall asleep. You're fortunate today that I've had a bit more personal involvement with your class than others due to the, shall I say, political circumstances of this year. You've all heard plenty about those from your kids, I hope, and as much as there's an interesting story to be told there I'll save it for their memoirs.

As a former teacher myself, and someone who by virtue of my job description spends a lot of time talking to other teachers, one lesson we always talk about teaching is problem solving. Sounds simple, right? All of you solve problems every day, from the mundane—how do I decide what to eat for lunch today?—to the truly earth-shattering, problems completely beyond my comprehension. For us, who've been around the block a few times, problem solving comes by instinct. Unfortunately, that intellectual independence I'm really getting at doesn't come naturally to students. It's sad, I know: somewhere along the line, in your children's thirteen years before they've come to Heller, none but a precocious few were taught how to solve problems. All they were taught is a rigid set of rules, a flowchart—divide both sides of the equation by the coefficient, subtract the constant, solve—but not why that flowchart exists, or how some bright mathematician years ago came up with that procedure!

If there is one lesson I want your students to take away from their time at Heller, it's the importance of this skill. Many of the people on-stage have taken calculus. Fewer will use it. But that does not mean we should stop teaching calculus, even if the few going into engineering or economics would clamor not to be left behind. Part of why we teach it, and really encourage everyone who can to take it, is so they learn how to tackle new problems, unlike any they've seen before. How they can use sheer force of will to dominate what's on the page. How to cope when intuition, that unreliable compass, fails.

You may think this is a strange time to bring up problem-solving, but I promise there is a point here. What do people do in the course of solving problems? They innovate. They find ways out of whichever ruts they're stuck in at the present moment. That is what takes us to the future and brings us out of the nasty, ugly, backward past: being able to identify problems, and instead of moping, solve them. The Great Gatsby ends 'So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.'—great book, by the way, I'm sure your kids can tell you all about it. How I choose to interpret that quote is that it's saying something about human nature, how society is wont to rise and fall. And without doing something about it, that's exactly what we do: we go back into the past, cascading down waterfalls and damn near shipwrecking ourselves!

So in closing, I personally don't care if your students forget how to do physics, calculus, or whatever else—their teachers here may feel a bit sad, but that's not my concern. If they've learned a more efficient way of tackling the world, a more effective one, then your students did not waste their time. Thank you."

Mr. Mudd stepped to the side and gestured for Frank to descend, who gingerly stepped over his classmates' feet and nearly slipped down the steps. None the worse for wear, he came to the podium and pulled out a neatly stacked sheaf of index cards from his pocket.