Jigsaw Puzzles

One can learn a lot from jigsaw puzzles. They are a microcosm of problem solving, or are they a macrocosm? In fact, since problem solving is immaterial, they are neither! Solving a jigsaw puzzle is as close as we can come to literally building order out of chaos in the real world. Nowhere is there more complete order than in a completed jigsaw puzzle, and nowhere is there more complete chaos than in the jumble of pieces we begin with.

Many people begin with the edges of the jigsaw puzzle, in a bid to establish the context for the rest of the problem. Then they start looking for distinctive features that they can group together, to build islands of sense inside that context, while building in from the edge wherever it seems logical. Such is the way of order, that it builds from a seed. It's an intriguing process. Watching people work on jigsaws is fascinating. Anyone watching me, for example, would see a rather eccentric method. The edges do get built first, but then chunks start building out organically, as the box is shuffled through almost entirely randomly. How it works is not entirely clear, but the puzzle does eventually get solved. It's an accretion process in action, and highly non-linear.

As a fully functional, and only partly delusional, maths tutor you really have to work at your diagnostic techniques and not be afraid to step off the path of traditional teaching. A quick game of 'Forbidden Island' after a session can do wonders to see how someone's mind works and how confident they are, and an idea of how they do puzzles is just as important. Mathematics is fundamentally a puzzle, after all! Diagnostic tests can often be more fun than the teaching but you can deploy them very often.

Away from puzzles and the endless teaching, life continues much as usual here, with studies sharing time evenly with teaching and reading. It's a nice and happy medium, before the great year of visiting people comes fully into force. The visitations will occur...

Life is like a jigsaw puzzle. Don't get lost in the details, but keep your eye on the bigger picture.

O.