4n07h3r (00£-£00|{1n9 h34Ð1n9

If you can figure out what the title says (no cheating!) you deserve a high-five.

I recently saw the film A Beautiful Mind, and I loved every minute of it. In the film, John Nash, a famous mathematician that is troubled by schizophrenia, experiences the trials and tribulations of life without the slightest idea that the most important people and the greatest moments in his life never happened. He does get his doctorate and such, and he's aware that he won a Nobel Prize, but the other awesome stuff never happened. I think you'll just have to watch the film.

Glossing over the specifics of the story, let's talk about Nash as an academic and a professor. Nash's professor at Carnegie Tech wrote a letter of recommendation consisting of a single sentence, "This man is a genius." Nash was accepted to both Princeton and Harvard, but he went to Princeton because they made a more lucrative offer. (The following information is based on the film, which is based on Nash's life, so the following information is probably true but there is no cold, hard facts to prove it.) In the film Nash is a professor at the age of 32. During his first lesson, he throws his textbook in the trash and explains the frivolity of homework and even that of coming to class. He then writes what can can only be an incredibly difficult math problem on the board and adjourns the lesson. Some people would call him a terrible teacher. But, seeing as Nash never went to class himself or believed in studying books, I think he must have been doing something right. Whether or not his methods work for everyone is obviously up for debate. I personally would've loved him as a teacher and enjoyed every minute I was in his class. This was a man that essentially taught himself the inner workings of game theory (look it up if you don't know what it means), and earned several degrees and a Nobel Prize for it. He was not a man that had been taught how to teach, basically given a cookie-cutter method in which to force his students' minds and learning curves.

What am I driving at? I am introducing the topic of the teacher, for this will be a very long discussion. The reason I must end this post is because I'm tired, and my sleep is more important than this blog. More reading will be coming, I assure you. Boom. Roasted again.