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I had two computers in my room (one a Mac, the other an old PC that I’d converted to Linux) and a total of four monitors. I powered them all on and prepared to dig in. The school website didn’t have him listed, but I found a notice on the Superintendent’s site mentioning he’d been hired to take over Mr. Higgs’ trigonometry class for the rest of the year. That was odd; I assumed he’d take over all of Mr. Higgs’ classes, but it was just ours. More importantly, I got the piece of information I’d been looking for: his first name. It is far easier to search for people with unusual names—you don’t get so many false positives. So when I saw that his first name was Mark, I knew I was out of luck.
I pulled up a digital notepad and typed in all I knew. It wasn’t much. His name was far too common to be of much use. He was only part-time at the school and had just started teaching there, so he likely hadn’t even updated his LinkedIn profile with the school name yet—if he even had one. He was teaching math, but this bizarre first day made me doubt he’d ever taught before, much less have a teaching degree. The one thing I felt confident about was location. He wouldn’t commute more than 30 miles to get to some part-time teaching job. There were no more than ten towns within that radius, so I’d start by searching his name followed by each of the town names until I found all of the Mark Griffins living in this part of the state.
I dragged my notepad to my secondary monitor and opened a browser on my main one. Though I knew it was pointless, I started off with just the most general search, typing only his name into the search bar.
And there he was. Just like that. First page, first result. I knew it was the same Mark Griffin because Google posted a picture of him in the right column, along with a link to his Wikipedia page. His Wikipedia page? He must be the first teacher in the history of our school, perhaps the first teacher of any school, with his own Wikipedia page.
Ding. It was Darnell on chat.
“Hey,” he wrote. “Some first day of math, eh?”
“No kidding. How are you doing?”
“Still reeling from last night’s game. I can’t believe I didn’t start Gurley.”
I didn’t share Darnell’s love of football, but I nonetheless let him talk me into joining his fantasy league. I hadn’t even checked the scores yet this week. “He had a good game?”
“198 yards and two touchdowns. Man, I wish I could run like that.”
As the fattest, slowest kid I knew, Darnell could barely run down the hall, much less a football field. I ignored his comment, and typed, “BTW, Mr. Griffin has his own Wikipedia page.”
“No way!!!!” Darnell wrote. “Send me the link.”
I copied and pasted it over, then dived into the article. Turns out he studied machine learning and artificial intelligence at MIT, the same school I was hoping to attend. Then he went to work building high-volume stock market trading machines for some investment bank I’d never heard of. He left after three years and began a data mining startup, apparently self-funding it with earnings from his banking job. Last year he sold the company to Oracle.
“It says he sold his business for some undisclosed amount,” Darnell wrote. “How much do you think that is?”
“No clue, but enough that he doesn’t need the salary from a part-time teaching job.”
“So what’s he doing here?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” I sent the link to Christy and Jarod, who despite not having much to do with me in school were still my Facebook “friends.” I pulled out the “test” from math class where I’d written that my goal was “To learn how to think better.” It was such an obvious answer at the time, though Mr. Griffin had been unimpressed.
As much as he seemed like a kook in class, everything I’d just learned about Mr. Griffin made me wonder, what should my answer be?
The Power of Incentives
“You’re staring.” Wally elbowed my arm.
I’d just finished my sandwich, and my eyes had wandered over to Christy’s table. Where Monica Gray sat. My attention quickly found its way back to the apple in my hand. “No, I’m not.”
“Kelvin, who do you think you’re kidding? She doesn’t even know your name.”
“Sure she does. We had lab together last year.”
“You had lab with who?”
“Monica.”
“You mean the girl you weren’t staring at?” Wally slapped his leg and chortled. He was the only kid in school who could program as well as I could, and he always looked for opportunities to outsmart me.
“Ha ha,” I said, wanting to bring the conversation to an end as quickly as I could. I also enjoyed one-upping Wally, and of the two of us, I had the sharper wit. But Monica was turning in our direction now. It was bad enough that my face was breaking out worse than ever today. Being seen hanging out with Wally Hoster, whose hair was so greasy he could shape it without gel, was enough to earn social exile. Mind, I was already sitting next to him, but that was just because it beat sitting alone. Barely.
“There’s no point anyway.” Bits of egg salad sprayed out of Wally’s mouth as he spoke. “It’s not like she’s gonna follow you to MIT.”
* * *
When Jarod sat down in the second to last row, I knew my message about Mr. Griffin had piqued his interest. Christy sat in the desk in front of him. Even Darnell made a special effort to get to class before the bell, which left him sweatier than usual.
Mr. Griffin sat at his desk reading his notecards. When the bell rang, he put them down and stepped to the front of the class.
“Darnell, tell us about your homework.”
Darnell was still huffing when he said, “I asked my folks what math they used, and the only things they could think of were addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions, all of which they learned by the 5th grade.”
“Interesting. What do—?”
“Wait,” he put up his hand, “there’s more. Then I called my uncle. He couldn’t think of any time he used advanced math either, but my aunt said she uses it in her job every day.”
“And what does she do?”
Darnell grinned. “She’s a high school math teacher.”
Mr. Griffin raised an eyebrow. “So what do you take away from all of this?” Darnell huffed out one final breath. “I’m mostly confused. Usually, teachers try to get us more interested in their subjects, you seem to want us to be less interested.”
“Not at all. I just want you to understand the limitations of the curriculum alone.”
I broke in. “The school must consider the curriculum valuable. Otherwise, they wouldn’t require it.”
Jarod scoffed. “The curriculum is like a hundred years old. It’s not like they update it for the times.”
“Don’t discard something just because it’s old,” Mr. Griffin said. “The techniques I use every day are more than a hundred years old, and I’ve still never found anything more potent. Nonetheless, I agree that mastering the material in your classes is no longer the ticket to success or even employment that it once was.”
“Does this mean you’re not going to teach us math?” Christy asked.
“I’ve been hired to be your math teacher. Despite what others may think of my techniques, I always live up to my obligations. Speaking of which, I’d like hear how all of you expanded on yesterday’s assignment.”
I bit my lip. Despite my late-night efforts, I hadn’t added a word to my page. Judging from the silence in the room, I wasn’t alone.
After a painfully long delay, Mr. Griffin said, “I see.” He slowly paced down one of the empty aisles of the classroom, rolling a pen between his fingers. When he reached the last desk, he punctured the air with the pen. “I’ve got it. I know why you’re all struggling to put effort into yesterday’s assignment.”
“Because it’s ridiculously easy?” Jarod suggested.
“No, because it’s ridiculously hard. It was unfair of me to give you such a task on day one. Indeed, I see now that I violated one of my core principles.”
“Which is what?” Christy asked.
“To always start with vision. I tried, but I defined my question far too narrowly to get you there.”
Jarod stretched his hands out before him and moved them around an imaginary orb. Speaking with the thick accent of a fortune teller at a fair, he said, “I envision passing trigonometry so I can get out of this school.”
“Precisely,” Mr. Griffin said. “All you want to do is leave school because you have no compelling vision of what you want to get from school.”
Jarod’s hands dropped. He stared back, silent.
“Does that mean,” Darnell said, “that you want to change the question from what we hope to get out of trigonometry to what we hope to get out of school?”
“No, no, no Darnell, it’s still too narrow. How can you know what you want to get out of school without first knowing what you want out of life?”
Mr. Griffin was practically bouncing, but I couldn’t share his enthusiasm.
“I totally know what I want to do,” Christy said. “I want to become a physical therapist.”
“Very good. If you know what you want to do for a living, you’re already ahead of most. But I don’t just want a vision for your job—I want a vision for your life. That includes a vision for your home, family, and community. For how you spend time outside of work, not just in it.”
“Ugh.” Christy rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. “Why is it that whenever a woman brings up career, the automatic response is that she has to think about family?”
“As a woman, it’s more likely that you’ve at least given it some thought,” Mr. Griffin said. “Most men never give family a moment’s consideration until it’s too late.”
“How’s it ever too late?” Darnell asked.
Mr. Griffin sighed. “I can’t tell you how many of my peers spent a fortune in tuition and years of their lives pursuing careers that only lasted two or three years because they suddenly had a family and found their jobs incompatible.”
Christy’s arms unclenched.
I thought about my own plans. I always dreamed of working for some hard-core start-up. The programmers I met who’d gone down that path didn’t just work 80 hour weeks, they bragged about it. Somehow, I’d never given any thought to having a family at the same time. Did I really want to have kids but never see them?
“So how am I supposed to get a vision for my life?” Darnell asked.
“Here’s a very simple exercise. Close your eyes. Go on Jarod—I’m not going to throw anything at you. Good. Take three slow, deep breaths.”
My body sank deeper into my seat.
Mr. Griffin’s voice grew softer. “Now, imagine yourself twenty years in the future. You’re happy. Life has been good to you. You feel tremendously grateful that everything has fallen into place. Look around you.”
“All I see is an empty math class,” Jarod said.
“Eyes closed, Jarod. I want you to visualize your future. What does your life look like?” He paused. I immediately saw an image of working at a startup. “Are you married?”
My initial thought was yes, but I couldn’t envision that.
“Do you have
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