When I was in the 8th grade, I worked for an electronics manufacturer, cleaning the floors and taking out the trash. I worked a few nights per week from 6-10. During this time, the engineers had already left for the day. I remember going over to their drafting tables and staring in awe at their blueprints, which were really blue for reasons I never understood. I drooled over their T-Squares, 30-60-90 triangles, compasses, gum erasers, French curves and pencil leads. But the item I coveted the most, was a fancy slide rule that was tucked into the top drawer of one table. It came complete with a leather box case and a manual. I opened that drawer every day and practiced adding and subtracting with this most amazing device. Their was no way I was going to master the logarithms and trig functions as I did not even know what logs and sines were. In my mind, there can be no more beautiful work of art in the world.
Once in high school, I fully expected to purchase one of these for Mr Manos’ physics class. But when we showed up on the first day, he wrote on the board “Texas Instruments TI-30.” He told us that was the name of the calculator we were expected to purchase. Apparently, this was one of the first years that calculators would be allowed. I remember going home and telling my father that we needed to buy one. Imagine the look on his face when I told him that! He just assumed that a calculator was a form of cheating.
We went to the department store; I wish I could remember which one, and purchased the TI-30 calculator. I brought it home and opened the box and there was a 100 page manual, a blue plastic zippered case and the calculator. What a beautiful thing this was in all its LED goodness. The buttons held an electronic world of numbers, not unlike the slide rule. I can remember the square root and cubed functions as well as parenthesis and memory recall. But what I remember the most was the button that had a solitary symbol on it, pi.
I had no idea what pi stood for, but I remember being fascinated by the symbol, the Greek letter pi. All I knew is that when I pushed the button, the same numbers appeared; 3.14159267. I was so fascinated by this number, that I actually remember going to the library to research what it meant. The librarian happily helped. She soon left me amidst a stack of geometry books. I read with fervor as much as I could and remember being dumbfounded when I found out that the number pi never ends. To this day, I still don’t understand how a number never ends.
Over the years, this number never left my brain. I could recite pi to 8 decimal places since 1978. In the big cosmic picture, so effing what?!
But fast forward this story to 6 months ago. Despite the fact that my oldest is in an advanced work program because of his academic abilities, he was struggling in the fifth grade. Every single night was a disaster of tantrums (his), rage (mine) and even some not-so-nice words (ours). I was completely disgusted at Michael’s apparent lack of enthusiasm or even his inability to simply get his homework over with as quickly as possible. Various techniques to motivate him failed miserably. I even (stupidly) said to Michael: “hey, buddy, if you finish this homework in the next hour, I will give you 5 dollars.” He looked me in the eyes and said: “No thanks.”
Then I had a brainstorm I just wanted to see if ANYTHING would motivate him. So this is what I did: I wanted to offer him a challenge that was an academic challenge, but not tied to any of his current schoolwork. So, what I took out a dry erase marker and began writing out the first 30 digits to the number pi. I the copied it onto index cards and stuck them everywhere; from his school bag, to the bathroom wall. I told him that he would have 2 weeks from that day to learn those 30 digits. Simply memorize them. He could try as many times as he wanted. If he made a mistake, just try again later. The reward at the end of this exercise would be the Nintendo Wii (this was before I realized that these consoles were something like a million dollars and impossible to find). The reality was that all I wanted him to do was get close enough and to just show a sincere effort. I actually PLANNED on buying the Wii anyway.
Two weeks to the day and I went to Michael and asked if he wanted to take a shot at it. His answer: “I didn’t memorize ALL of it.” I told him that was OK and asked him what he had already memorized. He said: “3 point something?”
I know full well that bribery really does not have a lot of staying power, but I would have thought if I simply presented this as challenge outside of school, he would look at it the right way. BUT HE MADE NO EFFORT WHATSOEVER! Why is that?