Thought Picnic: Problem Solving or Providing Solutions

Tyres and travel

Problem-solving can be interesting, you find yourself in the middle of some difficultly and caught in the maelstrom of something not going right that you need to right.

Problems however have a small sphere of choices to tackling the issue. A problem can be a punctured tyre, you fix it by changing the tyre.

You probably cannot stop a problem from happening, but if you had the greater scope of tackling a problem with providing a solution, you might get better tyres, ply a different route than one riddled with nails or sharp objects that could puncture tyres, have the road swept or even travel by other means of transport, by rail, by water or by air.

Time of travel, route and destination being factors and variables of that solution beyond the risk of a flat tyre.

Nailing the problem

Solutions have the latitude of choice because you are free from being tied to a particular problem to looking at all the issues and circumstances that present that type of problem.

Then again, a problem can be a nail that for whatever reason cannot be hammered in properly to complete some furniture. Obviously, you could hit the nail harder, maybe try to prise the nail out and try to hammer in another nail and still end up with the same problem.

If you decided to use joinery you have a solution without the need of nails, you could adopt a flat pack method that uses screws, joinery also does not require nails, maybe mould the furniture piece or forge it.

Beyond the nail, when one is abstracted from the problem, you have the opportunity to think up solutions, you move from immediacy of the particular to the appreciation of the general. You elevate the craft from the bubble of problem solving that a technician is saddled with to providing a solution that an expert is engaged for.

Stirring the solution

Providing a solution allows new thinking, resourceful thinking, allows for new approaches to a thorny issue and gives options to jettison whatever had been done before where things have been stuck in a rut.

It is the difference between fighting the politics of the way things were done before and a new way of doing things and doing those things differently and better. That is the spirit of progress and the joy of engineering solutions.

There are situations where the circumstances require that the presumptions of the resident geek be challenged, they having framed issues in their concept of what they think the problem is.

One can understand the difficulty if that becomes what solutions are being crafted for but it restricts the focus of the solution provider to that perspective resulting in a frustrating conflict of ideas, as a preponderance is being given to a situation over another quite unfairly.

Not on my rope

At which point the debate has to shift radically, let them down easily but not on my rope, one is here to provide solutions not solve problems, it can personal and one is presented with feeding the egos of geniuses who should be seriously preoccupied with something else.

Now, how do you present this in a meeting? Wisdom and tact with English reserve does not seem to be hitting the nail on the head of this conundrum, yet if we must pass the test of reasonableness, it must not be centred on solving the problem but on providing a solution. I have to get this across, assertively, aggressively and conclusively.

Even more memories of a child

Home school hell

It was horrific, probably bordering on abuse and torture; however, parents do not seem to know any better especially if you are the first or the first of a particular sex.

They all seem to have this notion that their precious pickanniny is a budding genius about to take on the world and become richer than they can ever imagine, taking them into a life of untold opulence in their old age.

How better to achieve that than to encourage the child with a slap and a whip because at 4 he cannot tell the time and he is not already reciting the 13 times table to 99.

I dreaded those lesson times with mother, surely, it could have been done better and that is my beef with home-schooling, neither the rod nor the child was spared.

Learning amongst your peers

My experience reflects on the fact that you cannot gauge the aptitude of a child against its peers if the child is not taught amongst its peers. The home lessons might expose the child to aspects of knowledge that could give the child some advantage but it is usually without structure, pace or proper assessment parameters.

For a prematurely born child, there might be some learning difficulties which are never factored into the problems the child might have in development, I was blessed and lucky, but I know others who have suffered needlessly on the premise that they needed to be tutored like mules before they became like men – the whip was the path to the brain.

Army Children’s School

This episode did not last 2 months, as we were soon to move to Jos from Kaduna, it was the Army Children’s School.

The headmistress was a terrifying woman who could easily have been the witch in Hansel and Gretel [Source: Wikipedia], she went around the kids having asked us to stretch our hands out facing downwards.

Anyone that as much as had the whites of a nail showing at the end of their fingers was as bad as a bird of prey with talons so long that they were demonic, she brought her ruler down fiercely on the poor child’s fingers and it wailed with a shrieking caterwaul.

How you would expect a 5 year old to do his nails escapes me, that is the job of the parent and it should be the teachers warning to the parents to do something about it, not the headmistress playing out her sado-masochistic tendencies on hapless little children.

That is how we learnt to bite our nails, not out of nervousness but to prevent the wicked witch from having her rotten way with us – it became a habit and every once in a while, the nail clipper is really in the mouth – what you learn at 6 you probably may not forget for life.

First and last day at school

On the first day at school, no one really told me what it was about, I was taken to school by my mother and aunt with my toddler sister in tow. I was put in a class and told to stay there till they returned to get me.

She returned probably an hour before school closed, when I saw her from afar off, I got all my things and ran out to meet her – the clash of familiarity with the discipline of school – I must have marks somewhere to show.

On the last day of school, my father did not arrive on time so I got on the school bus and sat at back, I could not tell if the bus would get me home or not.

No fuss bus

Just as the bus began to move, my father’s car came up behind us, I did not fuss or clamour, we probably did the rounds of Kaduna before my father was able to flag the bus down and get me off the vehicle – my memory fails me about what happened next.

However, I know that I never fuss about public transport, I would not run to catch anything and if I miss my stop, I patiently wait for the next then make my way back – I try to be alert enough to get off where I should and try to be at stops on time to catch whatever I need to; that is one other thing that has stuck with me from childhood.

I am glad I did not spend much time in that school, I would have been regimented into a sameness that would have robbed me of my precocious disposition, my imagination and the boldness to ask questions – even between the slaps at home school, there was always the opportunity to ask and get answers to “what”, not always for “why”.