These days, I’m putting a lot of work into LinkedIn.

Perhaps it’s a waste of time. I don’t know yet. But here’s what I do know: The more people I meet, the more interesting my life gets and the more opportunities I come across. So I’m up for a bit of exploration.

I can and do enjoy the process for its own sake. What interferes, in the midst of spending seven minutes typing out a three-paragraph comment on a stranger’s post, is the thought that maybe this is pointless.

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I spent ten years exploring the possibilities of slowness in learning.

As a musician, the surest route to mastery was through mindful, deliberate motion from one note or chord to the next, fully present in the process and letting go of what the finished product would sound like.

I helped my students to do this. We extended the length of a beat from a fraction of a second to several, swimming in the space like we had become microscopic organisms in its ecosystem.

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When I was a kid, my cousin's girlfriend taught me how to play solitaire at a family gathering.

That Christmas, I received a book of solitaire games and a whole world opened up. There wasn’t just one kind of solitaire—there were many! (That seven-pile game on every Windows computer is called Klondike).

For each game, the authors listed the chance of winning, the level of strategy involved (as opposed to pure chance), the time to play, and so on.

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When I started designing a school curriculum, my intent was to make things fun whenever possible.

After all, learning is fun. Why shouldn’t school be fun?

I added brain teasers, puzzles, and games to the menu — and discovered that they did nothing to entice reluctant students. They felt just the same way about the supposedly “fun” activities as they did about the straightforward “read this chapter and answer the questions” assignments. They inspired dread, mostly.

I had overlooked a basic paradox of education: The puzzles designed to make learning fun are only fun for the learners who are already having fun.

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Some of my students recently faced an interesting problem on a placement test for the brilliant Beast Academy math curriculum.

It went like this:

Ella begins at 9 and skip-counts by 7’s. Jack begins at 9 and skip-counts by 8’s. What is the next number that both Ella and Jack will say?

The thing about this problem, which several students struggled with enough to involve their parents (some of whom also struggled with it), is that it it’s more of a puzzle than a problem. “I haven’t been taught to solve these,” said one, as though this is was just some procedure to be memorized.

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