working together on a jigsaw puzzle
- Thread starter sirhugs
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sirhugs
Riding to the Rescue
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- Jan 25, 2002
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how would that work into a story?
LupusDei
curious alien
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As a possible setting, obviously, or more realistically a setting leading to a more private event.
What I have in mind is a class of some dozen adults (who supposedly are patently weird to some extent, as evidenced by them being supposedly unemployable (but actually you wouldn't see that at a glace)) led by a psychologist, in with said people do work on solving (and optionally designing) puzzles and games, raging from seemingly trivial "paint by numbers" sheets (with surprisingly turns out to be challenge for some), solving crosswords and sudoku, playing cards, chess, and indeed solving jigsaw puzzles. Seriously.
After first few standard tests they mostly work alone or in small groups, each doing something else at once, loosely supervised by said psychologist. People come and go, having their appointment times in small subgroups or even individually, and while the supervisor would notice the times up, nobody would be chased out if they're busy in middle of something.
The goals of the workshop are multifaceted. One is psychological assessment, that's the report the psychologist would eventually write. Another is aptitude discovery, and skillsets self-discovery, eventually informing consulting for selection of professional courses offered by the employment agency. (It's a part of of three or four weeks long, voluntary and free course offered to clients meeting certain parameters that include, among others, art and music classes, physical excercise, psychoanalysis, etc, meant to inform strategy to (re)integrate them in job market, and/or can result in a diagnosis.)
Big one is basic communication, socialization, (re-)integration in society. Those people are typically expected to be with their self-esteem deep underwater (unless it's inflated to toxic levels, but that's relatively rare), have (not necessarily obvious) communication and socialization difficulties. Boosting those is part of it, letting them have success, no matter how small, talk with relative strangers in non-forced, informal ways (what some may not have done for years) yet supervised and guided unintrusively, encouraging creativity and initiative, that's all part of the excercise.
The public is extremely diverse (no other diversity metric comes even close to neurodiversity). You can have the twenty year old girl, a potential centerfold blonde, but she's a totally stuttering poetry nerd with zero self presentation skills, a passive aggressive thirty year old guy probably on autism spectrum with no social skills whatsoever, a typical fifty five looking on seventy conspiracy theory nutcase, whatever you can make up and a lot you never could.
While clients mostly would use resources provided in the classroom, they are encouraged to be creative and self challenge, and would occasionally replenish the classroom's resources with their own, including original work.
Thus, someone bringing in that Playboy centerfold jigsaw puzzle isn't at all that farfetched. While it's highly unlikely to lead to anything interesting within the classroom (unless maybe, it's after the end of the day or something) it may trigger some outside events involving, or not anymore, said puzzle.
