Once a man needed a new pair of shoes. This man was very good at math. He knew that in order to get shoes that fit him perfectly, it would be necessary to measure his shoe size.
So before he went to the market, he carefully measured his feet and drew a very detailed picture of his feet on a piece of paper. He wrote the exact size of each foot on the paper so that he would not buy the wrong size. Then before leaving the house, like a good mathematician, he rechecked his picture.
It was a very long way from the man's home to the market where he wanted to buy the shoes. It was afternoon when the man arrived at the market. When he reached a shoe store and was about to get in, the man realized that he had forgotten to bring the paper that he had carefully written on. He turned around and walked all the way back home to get it.
It was nearly sunset when the man arrived back at the market. The market was closing. The shoemaker had packed up all of his shoes in bags and was ready to go home. Seeing this, the man stopped the shoemaker quickly and asked him to unpack his bags to sell shoes.
"Hey! I've never seen a bigger bean brain like you," the shoemaker said, "why didn't you just try on the shoes in my store, but go home and get your paper?"
The man's face turned red, hanging his head down. "I thought there was only one way to solve my problem. I should have thought to check with others if they had better solutions that might be as good as mine, or even better than my own. "
The above short story works well with school students and also teachers. Don't try to solve a problem with a single point of view; there may be many other ways of solving the same problem.
