A Bedtime Story for Marnie and Michelle

By Daddy

Dear Marnie and Michelle,

I wrote a little story especially for you. Perhaps Michelle could read it to Marnie, or perhaps Mommy would like to read it to both of you. (I feel a little embarrassed to read you my own story, but I will if you ask me.) I hope you will like my story. After you have heard the story, I want to know how you liked it. I very much want to know if there was anything in the story you didn’t like, and how I might be able to change the story to make it better. Now, here’s my little story for you to enjoy.

Once upon a time there was a young man who wanted to grow up to be a Schmegeggy Engineer. So he went to school at the University of Schmegeggy Engineering where he learned how to solve problems that came up in Schmegeggy Engineering. Pretty soon, the young man had learned how to solve dozens and dozens of problems. There were green problems and blue problems, big problems and little problems, funny problems and sad problems, stupid problems and cute problems, every kind of problem you could think of.

After a while, the young man noticed that for every problem that came up, somebody had already seen the problem before and had figured out a way to solve it. But nobody ever talked about problems than no one knew how to solve. So the young man wondered, "Do you suppose that for every problem imaginable, there can always be found a way to solve it?" The young man didn’t know the answer to this question, so he looked around to see if anyone else had asked the same question before. Sure enough, a long time ago, a Greek Philosopher named Socrates had posed this same question. What was even more amazing, Socrates discovered that every problem had a method of solution, and it was not that hard to work out the method that went with every problem.

The young man was so excited by the idea that every problem could be solved, that he decided to take up a career in problem-solving. Pretty soon, he was getting people to bring him their problems and sure enough he would come up with a solution. Well, there were a lot of people with a lot of problems and pretty soon the young man had so many people coming to him that he didn’t have time to solve all their problems. The young man began to feel bad that he didn’t have enough time to work on everybody’s problems, so he began to work nights and weekends to keep up with the workload.

After a while, the young man (who was becoming middle-aged by now), decided there was more to life than problem-solving, so he got married so that he could have a family to spend time with. But pretty soon, problems started popping up here and there around the house, and the middle-aged man found that he was still spending a lot of time solving problems. In fact, he was spending so much time solving problems that he had hardly any time left to enjoy his family.

One day the middle-aged man got to thinking about his problem of having too many problems to solve. Now this was the hardest problem of all. He couldn’t figure out what to do. Then one day, his little girl showed her Daddy a problem, and Daddy said, "Here, I’ll solve it for you."

"No!, said the little girl. I want to solve this one on my own!"

"Do you know how?" asked Daddy.

"I’ll figure it out," she said.

Sure enough, the little girl was able to find a way to solve the problem.

"How did you do it?" asked Daddy.

"Mommy showed me how," replied the girl.

"What would you have done if Mommy didn’t know how?" asked Daddy.

"I don’t know," said the little girl, "That’s her problem."

After a little while, the middle-aged man wondered if Mommy also knew about the general method of problem solving developed by Socrates. (After all, it was just an accident that he had learned about it at all.) All of a sudden, the middle-aged Schmegeggy Engineer realized that he had stumbled on to the solution to his problem of having too many problems to solve. Why not take up a new career of teaching people how to solve their own problems the way he had learned once before!

There was only one problem with that idea. If you want to teach people, you have to learn how to be a teacher, and he didn’t know beans about teaching. So he thought it would be good if he learned how to teach the method before making any decisions about changing jobs. And so he asked his family if they would pretend to be his students so he could practice his teaching skill at showing people how to solve problems. His wife, who was a teacher, offered to critique his teaching ability, and she and the children offered to bring their own problems with them so they could solve them on their own while Daddy learned how to teach the Socratic Method.

What do you think happened next?