Stuck on Tethered -The Danger of a Pole Skill (A Must Read)

My colleague Tunde Balogun once told of a primary school classmate, a Mathematics wizard at the time. There was no Maths problem this fellow couldn’t solve, constantly challenging his colleagues to solve even more complex problems up to secondary school standards. His dexterity in Mathematics problem solving only matched his disdain for and scant knowledge in other subjects, particularly English.
School Certificate Maths examination day dawned with students spawning tales of how this fellow’s Maths solving wizardry would force WAEC to set even more difficult problems for students.
The first exam question was “If a goat is tethered to graze on a pole by a rope 1.5 meters long, what is the area of grass the goat can possibly eat within the confines of its tether, assuming Pi is 3.14?
You will assume that the nature of the problem is straightforward enough, right? But our poor fellow was stuck on tethered, and spent the rest of the exam duration exhausting his entire Maths wizardry goat-skin bag of tricks, muttering ‘tethered, tethered, tethered’, trying to decipher its meaning.
From time to time we see this problem in our choice of leaders when we choose someone with a pronounced pole skill (the skill we assume that is required to solve what we think is our major challenge), to handle an assignment that actually requires a multidisciplinary approach.








Jekwu Ozoemene

Picture credit : Rose-Kim Knits