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Rise of the PHX

Struggling students take note

Posted by gturnbul on October 7, 2009 in Inspiration |

Al started school late due to childhood illness. His mind often wandered and his teacher Alexander Crawford often called him “addled”, which meant “confused or stupid.”. He was kicked out of school three months after starting. He attended three different schools between the ages of seven to nine, and none of his teachers had the patience to deal with his apparent inability to sit still, his lack of focus on the matter at hand, and his talkativeness. Al like to talk but not listen!
Al was then home-schooled by his mother, who was previously a teacher. She encouraged and taught him to read and experiment.

Though his mother may have worried, Al turned out to be ok.

By the end of his career, Thomas ‘Al’va Edison had received 1,093 patents and was credited for inventing the electric light bulb, the central power generating station, the phonograph, the flexible celluloid film and movie projector, and alkaline storage battery, and the microphone.

~~~

When asked ‘Is it true that you were bad at math as a kid?’
Roger said “I was unbelievably slow. I lived in Canada for a while, for about six years, during the war. When I was 8, sitting in class, we had to do this mental arithmetic very fast, or what seemed to me very fast. I always got lost. And the teacher, who didn’t like me very much, moved me down a class. There was one rather insightful teacher who decided, after I’d done so badly on these tests, that he would have timeless tests. You could just take as long as you’d like. We all had the same test. I was allowed to take the entire next period to continue, which was a play period. Everyone was always out and enjoying themselves, and I was struggling away to do these tests. And even then sometimes it would stretch into the period beyond that. So I was at least twice as slow as anybody else. Eventually I would do very well. You see, if I could do it that way, I would get very high marks.”

Now known as Sir Roger Penrose, OM, FRS, Roger is an English mathematical physicist and Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. He has received a number of prizes and awards, including the 1988 Wolf Prize for physics which he shared with Stephen Hawking for their contribution to our understanding of the universe[4]. He is renowned for his work in mathematical physics, in particular his contributions to general relativity and cosmology.