A Brain Game

I've recently spent a lot of time trying to catch up with all the great blogs I read, and a number of entries really pushed me back in my office chair and made me say, "Hmmmm..."

Two of them were written by Punkn. One was titled, "How To Stay Young!" which offered "3. Keep learning", something my Mother, a lifelong educator and Montessorian advocates strongly every day.

Punkn also took my breath away with the vividness of "You Can't Build a View" which demonstrates not only the power of the human language - but the power of some of our memories and their ability overwhelm us emotionally and spiritually.

I then read f8hasit's recent experience on the education system. After I left my badly worded comment, memory of a brain game I had played with my Mom and Dad one rainy weekend day a couple years ago, percolated through my mind, undoubtedly prodded to the surface by what I had just read.

I recalled sitting around a table and the discussion being about what our public schools should be teaching, and I said "They ought to teach the ability to think critically and to think things through," to which my Mom replied, "How would you do that?"

I thought about that for a few minutes and said, "Okay, here would be a homework assignment..."

Imagine that you are transported via a Star Trek-like transporter beam to a completely random place in your country. You are not told where you are going and you find yourself on the side of a deserted two-lane back country road with only the following:

Shoes, socks, underwear, pants, belt and shirt. Glasses and/or hearing aid if you wear them and absolutely nothing else. No cellphone, no wallet, nothing else.

Your mission is to "get home as quickly as you can". How would you do it? List the steps you would take and explain the rationale for each of them.

After some spirited discussion and brainstorming, we further refined the assignment. You could be "beamed" into the spot at any time of the day or night. The weather would be whatever it was - sun or rain, wind or none, cold or warm...

You would find in your back pocket your driver's license only if you have one and only if you were beamed to a place more than 300 miles from home.

You would also find a bottle of water in your hand if you were beamed somewhere more than 4 hours walking from the nearest place to get a (free) drink.

My dad totally surprised me. He said, "Aha!" and then rattled off a number with 23 seemly arbitrary digits. After I heard his explanation and did a quick check, I told him I thought he was a genius.

So what would you do? Where would you start? Why the driver's license? What was the number my Dad rattled off?