How One Physics Tutoring Session Completely Changed How I Solve Problems
I was a very good student in school. Like I was one of those annoyingly good students. Grades were my life. So when my honors physics class started tripping me up a bit, I went looking for help QUICK. Luckily, I was (and still am) friends with one of the smartest people in my year. She’s currently getting her PhD at MIT if that gives you any context to the matter. I turned to her for some help since physics was a particularly strong subject for her and the things she told me during this mini lesson stuck with me, and have helped me solve problems way beyond physics.
First thing my friend did, was ask me was why I was trying to do everything in my head. Physics involved a lot of word problems. You know the type- “If this object moves this way with these parameters and this object moves this other way with those parameters, will they collide?” Well I was trying to figure out what formulas I needed in my head before ever starting to write anything down.
My friend recommended that I, instead, start every and any problem I came across by writing out all the known entities the problem gave me, and then also writing down the entities the problem asked for. The simple act of writing these variables down right away made the rest of the problem so simple because I could now visually see which formulas I needed to use and which variables to solve for.
This is such a simple thing to do, but it can add mental clarity to ANY problem. Don’t know what decision to make next on a project at work? Write down everything you already know first. The visual recognition of the known variables is huge. It reinforces your confidence that there’s a lot of the equation you already know, and helps build momentum in discovering the solution.
The second technique recommendation she gave me was to TAKE UP SPACE. I had been trying to create these pretty, dainty lines of equations that took up the least amount of lines in my notebook, and when she started going at the problem, she took up the whole page, sometimes more! And her work was kind of messy! She explained this away by saying having more space let her brain have more room to think and the more I used this technique I could see why. By limiting the space I was taking up on the page, I was limiting my thinking. I was forcing myself to fit an arbitrary template for solving the problem, when all that mattered was that I came to the solution in the end.
This has been a great strategy that I’ve used over the years with all different kinds of problems. There just is no need to limit problem solving into pre-determined templates* or to make it look pretty. The solution can be pretty, but all the work to get there doesn’t have to be. So when approaching a problem - give yourself room to breathe. Give yourself room to work through different paths, or make seemingly random notes, or doodle, or fall into a brainstorming pit. There’s no true right way to solve most problems and even though multiple paths can lead you to the same conclusion, the exercise of exploring and breathing through a problem is valuable in and of itself.
The ability to look at a problem, analyze it, and come to a solution is a crucial skill and it’s a process we complete more times than we realize each and every day. Every time I get stuck on something - I check in with myself and usually I’m stuck because I either haven’t written everything out or I haven’t given myself space to think creatively and clearly. These may seem so so simple, but try them out next time you hit a wall, and tell me they don’t help.
*Just wanted to add the note that the public school system in America doesn’t do a great job at encouraging out of the box thinking and more often than not, does encourage cookie-cutter problem solving. But this doesn’t work in life since everyone’s brains operate differently and there is almost always more than one way to arrive at the solution.
Photo Cred: Kiki Moussetis