I spend an inordinate amount of time these days doing word puzzles. As the solutions can be computer generated, one might wonder why the puzzles have such a hold over me. My favorite puzzle these days is Letter Boxed, which I try to solve in two words, making it more of a challenge to find such a solution. In this puzzle, consecutive letters within a word must be on different sides of the box, so words with double letters are not allowed, but more importantly many other letter combinations that seem natural also are not allowed. I will use today's puzzle, depicted below, to try to illustrate why solving this puzzle has such a hold on me.
Experience with this puzzle suggests the first step, which is to note the vowels, in this case there are all 5 of them, and then to note the challenging letters, which I would say are the "x" and the "v" though some of the other consonants might prove challenging as well. At this point, the aim is to find a long word, using as many different letters as possible, which includes all of or at least most of the challenging letters.
Now, here is the thing. Intuition is a key bit in coming up with a word to try. And it is that intuition plays such an important role for me, which makes me want to come back and try the puzzle again the next day. But intuition doesn't work in one big Gestalt. Instead, there is an initial guess of a plausible solution. After an entire life of the mind doing this sort of thing in various contexts, it remains a mystery to me how I come up with that initial guess, whether it is transparent or shows some insight into the matter at hand. In this case, the initial word I tried was "extensive" which has 9 letters but the "e" appears three times, so there are 7 distinct letters, not bad but not great either. Plus the consonants that are missing, "b" and "h" are moderately difficult to match with the remaining vowels, "a", "o", and "u". If this is the solution then I either need to find a word that starts with "e" and which includes the remaining 5 letters or a word that ends in "e" that includes those remaining 5 letters. I try it for a while but I don't make any progress with it. This suggests I need a different long word, perhaps one that includes a "b" or an "h".
Now a bit of an aside. If this was teaching a class rather than solving a puzzle for fun, I would make a point that failure as intermediate product is necessary for learning, and that getting a wrong answer that seemed possible in advance offers clues as to the direction one should take to find the right answer. I believe this is a key lesson as to how people think, but most students don't master this lesson because they want to get to the right answer straight away and they're too impatient to let the full process play out. Frankly, I believe that students using AI as a tool only makes this worse, though I'll admit that is purely intuition on my part and is not based on experience, as I stopped teaching after fall 2019, well before the AI tools became generally available. In any event, one gets better as a thinker with practice of the sort I'm describing here and the guess as to what to try next gets more well honed.
The next word I tried was "exhaustive", which swaps the "h" for the "n" in "intensive", and then includes both the "a" and the "u". Those added vowels were a bonus for me as I was focused on the consonants. The remaining letters then are "b", "o", and "n" with the "o" and "n" on the same side of the box so they can't be used consecutively. So, as much as my brain wants to use "bone" as the other word, that just won't work. And for a few minutes that fact becomes frustrating to me. But then a possibility emerges and eventually I find a longer word that does work, "bovine". Further, since "bovine" contains "ive" (though not in that order) it is now possible to use "exhaust" rather than "exhaustive" as the second word.
I have found a Website that generates solutions by computer to Letter Boxed and every once in a while it says there are no two-word solutions. If I've tried the puzzle for more than an hour and haven't made any progress, I want to know whether I should stop or not. Obviously, if there is no solution I should stop. (And once, I found a two-word solution when it said there was none.) But if there is a solution, I might very well persist for quite a while longer. With learning situations other than word puzzles, over time one develops a sense of whether a solution can be found via persistence or if, to the contrary, the problem is just too hard for me to solve. If the former holds then there is still the matter of putting in the time that's needed to find that solution. This, I'm afraid, isn't nearly as much fun as is coming up with the spark of an intuition. But having the required patience is an important lesson too.
Not quite 30 years ago, I attended a workshop for WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum) instructors, which I thought was the best workshop I ever attended regarding pedagogy. If memory serves, part of that workshop was getting those in attendance to make their own personal writing process explicit. Writing the first draft of something, I've found, shares these bits about sparks of intuition and about persistence to produce a full narrative. I wonder if others describing their thinking process would be of value, especially to make it less of a mystery to younger people.
And I wonder whether the process I've described in this post makes me part of a breed that is going extinct. I hope not, but I'm afraid otherwise.
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