Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track (2 of 5 free samples)

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Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track by Richard P. Feynman. Copyright 2005 by Michelle Feynman and Carl Feynman.
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INTRODUCTION: GENIUS TO YOU, FATHER TO ME (CONT'D)

Prior to her arrival, my father had written to her, saying, "IÂ'm managing poorly without you. Come quick." Upon her arrival my mother cooked, cleaned, and once she obtained her driverÂ's license, even drove him to Caltech while he sat in the back seat. Though they were friendly, there was as yet no romance--both were dating other people. A lightbulb had gone off in my fatherÂ's head, however, the day he took her to pick up a study manual for the driverÂ's test. They found themselves in the wrong line, and Gweneth ended up taking the test with no preparation. Impressively, she passed. He realized soon after that he was falling in love with her and that he wanted to propose. Then he faulted himself for being too impulsive. He proceeded to mark a day on the calendar a few months ahead and thought, "If I still feel the same way then, IÂ'll ask her." The night before that day arrived, he could not stand the wait and kept her up until midnight. They were married a few months later.

The household I grew up in was similarly unusual. We played many games. On camping trips, we would go to great lengths to put ourselves in the middle of nowhere. At every fork in the road, we took the road in the worse condition, the one that looked the most interesting to us. On Sunday mornings, my father would often forego reading the newspaper in favor of a wild hour of loud, often discordant, music, drumming, and storytelling with my brother and me. When it was his turn to drive the car pool to elementary school, he would pretend to get lost, or start to drive himself to work at Caltech. "No, not that way!" the kids would scream. "Oh, all right. Is it this way?" and he would turn the wrong way again. "Nooooooo!" we would yell in utter panic, convinced we were going to be late (we always arrived just in the nick of time, of course).
Of my fatherÂ's many skills, this willingness to play the fool--and to let me think he could be completely outfoxed by my clever thinking--was the one that shaped my childhood more than any other.

I was simply unaware for many years that he was revered as a supreme intellect. In fact, he encouraged a certain amount of irreverence toward himself. Most of the stories he told us were ones that highlighted his ineptitude. Our dinner conversations were full of animated stories about mistakes he made during the day: losing his sweater, forgetting something terribly important, having complete conversations with people and not remembering their names. He would talk about his experiences away from home as well, as in the time he was so disgusted with the fancy hotel hosting a conference he was attending that he took his suitcase and slept outside in the woods. "Oh, Richard," was the invariable refrain from my motherÂ's end of the table. Yet he always laughed at himself, and so we laughed along with him.

This is the key, in my mind, to his success as a teacher. Never condescending when he explained things, he had a knack for breaking problems down to a small, comprehensible scale. "O.K., say the earth is this apple," he would begin, holding one up to illustrate his point. The simplicity of his illustrations brought the theretofore incomprehensible down to a level more readily grasped. In the early 1960s, his love of teaching and sense of civic duty led him to the California Curriculum Commission, where he devoted countless hours to evaluating math textbooks for elementary school students. Being awarded the Oersted Medal in 1972 for his contributions to the teaching of physics gave him tremendous satisfaction. Ten years later, the Associated Students of Caltech presented him with an award for excellence in teaching, to which he responded, "I was very pleased to be honored for doing something I so thoroughly enjoy."

He was a staunch believer in public education but invariably had his frustrations with the bureaucracy and its inflexible thinking. When I was in high school, he started showing me shortcuts in my math homework that diverged from the teacherÂ's methods. I was subsequently scolded by my Algebra II teacher for not solving the problem in the right way. My father found this ridiculous, as I had nonetheless arrived at the correct answer, and he dropped by the school to discuss the matter. The teacher did not know who he was and treated him as a bumbling idiot trying to make his life more difficult. The teacher finally accused him of knowing nothing about math. My father, biting his tongue the whole time, finally could not stand it any longer, and spoke his mind. The next day I was transferred to another class.
The next year, solving problems without using the prescribed methods yielded similar results, and so I ended up studying the material at home with my father and taking the exams at school.

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