Leif and the "Little Professor"

 

Way back on February 18, 2009, I wrote about Leif and the "Little Professor" as part of my post about me not being tested in the way he was and posted a link to a page about the device. Now I have a photo of it to post, courtesy of Joe Haupt on Flickr, used under Creative Commons License CC BY-SA 2.0 (links at the end of this post).

What I wrote in 2009 was:
" In kindergarten he was referred for testing to find out just how smart he was. The school psychologist was astonished at how high he scored and asked Leif where he learned all that. Leif's reply was that he learned it all from a "silly little game called the 'Little Professor.'"

"This, of course, wasn't true, but what was a five-year-old to say to such a question? The Little Professor was a children's math "trainer" that looked like a calculator with an owl on it. The instrument would give the child a math problem and the kid would have to key in the answer. Leif was quite good at this early on. (For those of you who never saw a Little Professor, I'm posting a link in the links section to a site that has a photo and explains it.)

"Electronic learning toys are much more sophisticated now, but I don't know whether kids learn any more than ours did from the early examples they encountered when we got to Japan."

It still hurts to know how intelligent he was yet found no job that allowed him to make use of his mind. It was always searching, always analyzing, synthesizing, and he could explain complex concepts in simple terms to just about anyone.

This photo was taken in 1981, around the time he was taking the tests and telling the counselor that he had learned everything from the Little Professor. It was taken in Kamakura, Japan and he was six years old.

Link to Joe Haupt's Little Professor photo on Flickr

Link to Creative Commons License for the photo