“It’s not like you need to be great at math or literature or art. “And honestly, anyone could learn this,” he adds. I guess you could be quick with your hands - so PE! It’s just maneuvering and being able to memorize,” says Elijah, who aspires to be a scientist, a traveling photographer, or an apothecary. Not so, says Elijah, who likes art, science, and writing. You might think speedcuber, common parlance for a Rubik’s Cube expert, would be synonymous with math genius. There’s so much required, and it’s so complex. His best time to date: one minute and two seconds.įrom months to a minute? No small achievement - and a testament to Elijah’s work ethic: “To be able to do something that people thought was insane and extremely hard - like a pro skill level.
I could mess it up, and I would just know how to solve it.” “Months, actually! I would look up a cool trick, and I would try it, and it would take me two hours to solve it. “It took a long time to solve it,” Elijah says emphatically. He learned a naming method and “wrote it down and would always keep practicing and doing it over. I wrote down some codes I found - like a language.” And, he says, he labeled certain moves as “r” or “r prime” for the right or “l” for the left, for instance. “There’s an entire notation and a bunch codes. Solving the classic puzzle, which sold its first unit 40 years ago, didn’t come easy for Elijah.
I did a lot of research online.” And what followed was a process and a lesson at the heart of SA’s creed of joyful rigor. I always wanted to try it because it seemed so hard, and I wanted to be able to do it,” says Elijah, a sixth-grader at Success Academy Bed-Stuy Middle School. “I thought it was cool, and I liked puzzles a lot. Elijah Mayers got his first Rubik’s Cube from his aunt.