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Alexandra K. Trenfor / John Galt
Daily Clothes – Alexandra K. Trenfor
Other great quotes by Alexandra K. Trenfor here and here)
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About a month ago I saw a post on a friend’s blog with a quote by Alexandra K. Trenfor:
The best teachers are those who show you where to look, but don’t tell you what to see.
I liked it, so I posted it as a quote. There were some clicks on it and then, a few days in, the post fell into blog hibernation.
But then about two weeks later the strangest thing started to happen. I started to notice it showing up on web searches keywords for my site. All different search engines were suddenly routing keywords “Alexandra K. Trenfor” traffic to my site. For whatever reason, if you wanted information about Alexandra K. Trenfor, then here you came.
As it happens, I didn’t have a clue who Alexandra K. Trenfor is, but I began to be curious. I thought maybe it was even Alexandra K. Trenfor who was searching for herself. I have chased Adam Nathan around the web a bit, so it seemed plausible. And then the hits started really coming (let’s just say relative to my other wildly under-appreciated posts). So I decided to figure out who the woman was or is.
The problem is that her quote has obscured her identity online. There are pages of Google hits on this quote, but nothing about HER. Who is Alexandra K. Trenfor? There’s a kind of who is John Galt mystery to her now. Does she even exist? Did her name appear in the universe simply to underline the point of her quotation?
Does anybody know? Alexandra K. Trenfor are you out there? Does anybody know her? Any leads? Have you met her? Seen her once on a subway platform? Heard her speak at Barnard College? And more importantly: will this post move adamnathan.com from seventh position in the search list for “Alexandra K. Trenfor” to, say, number one with a bullet? Can adamnathan.com become the world’s number one reference point for all things Alexandra K. Trenfor? Did I mention this post is about Alexandra K. Trenfor?
Can somebody show me where to look? Tell me what to see?
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adamnathan.com 
Hi Adam: I looked around a bit, and did not find Alexandra. I looked on Switchboard.com, and there doesn’t appear to be anyone in the US with that name (at least with a phone), but then that doesn’t exclude other places. I’m suspecting the name could, very likely, be misspelled. I did find variations on the name: Trentor, Tremlor, and so on. It is very possible that the first name could be Alexander, I didn’t try that. Oddly, searching on just the quote, books.google.com, pops up with a book by Frank Lloyd Wright. Perhaps that book originally had the quote in it and the Trenfor person quoted it and, well, you know the rest of the story.
I guess you could now add to your byline: “He’s hunted for Alexandra K. Trenfor.”
@K1pp: I am charmed and delighted with your research, and now determined to get to the bottom of this. The byline will remain static until “he found” Alexandra can be appended. Stay tuned!
I was curious in the sam way…but who is Alexandra K. Trenfor, i still dont have any answer?
yeah who is Alexandra K Trenfor?
After hours of searching, the only family name record for Trenfor is found here … http://www.ancestry.com/1940-census/usa/North-Dakota/Agnes-Trenfor_3h7rjv Oddly, no other information can be found. Not even on any of the WIKI sites.
@BMAVERICKDDCPUMPS. Well, you’ve gotten further than I have. It looks like you’re at least approaching the right DNA. I’m pretty convinced the name is a pseudonym at this point, although I’ll admit that is mostly a hunch. Do let me know if you learn anything else and I’ll add it to the mystery…
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Hi Adam, I too, am now on the trail of the this most elusive pimpernel – Alexandra K. Trenfor 🙂 Will report back if I find anything more.
Just a heads up – in google.com.au your site comes up at #3
Well done 🙂
I too was directed to this site in my search for an answer to “Who is Alexandra K Trenfor?” And like everyone else, I have no answer. But I do now find the whole thing especially ironic considering the attributed quote most “widely circulated on the internet” (Wiki-teacher) is “A good teacher shows you where to look but doesn’t tell you what to see.” And yet, we see “her” on the internet, but can find nothing about her….
It has to be on purpose, a little anonymous wink at him/herself. I’m actually kind of delighted by it and secretly hoping, just a little, to get an email someday from the Real Alexandra K. 😉
Greetings from Caracas, Venezuela. I followed this interesting research about the existence of a “real” Alexandra K. Trenfor. The only contribution I can make about this subject is this FB profile: https://www.facebook.com/dominic.santos.9674/photos which seems to belong to her. Stay tuned =) LECR
I dunno… I think this Facebook page is a recent addition. Let me know what you find out. 🙂
That fb link is broken. How marvelous it is to be enthralled by a lesson that was thought by a secret teacher. I too wanted to know of her. The society of Alexandrish.
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I too was lead here looking for A.F.T., but only empty leads so far….
Fascinated – love the quotes
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Any news on this? I’ve tried looking for anagrams but no luck.
You are now number one! Lol wanted to use this quote for a paper I am writing on education, but I will have to delete it because I can not cite a pseudonym that I’d love to. I have determined that it is a pseudonym that makes me all sorts of discombobulated I have even linked my fb accout to this page just in case will check back some time
Sorry for the bad news! Good luck with the paper.
Maybe a clue? I came across this link on the web page of my son’s bio-ethics teacher: http://www.drangwenyi.org/biology.html We’ve got parent-teacher conferences soon. I’ll ask him if he knows anything about the original source.
any update on Alexandra!?!?
Over four years later from this original post, and the saga continues! The Chrome extension called “Momentum” plucked this quote from who knows where and showed it for today’s default Chrome background. This thread was the first hit!
Hah! Thanks for sharing. That’s really fun to hear. I wish there was a definitive answer!
Perhaps, the teacher quote rings poetically true here: we’ve been shown where to look (the internet, a library, geneological records?), but no one will tell us what to see (what the answer actually is). HMmm, or it’s just one big misunderstanding, lol.
Interesting! Now several years later and no answer? As an educator the quote resonates with me, as an instructional technologist the fact it can’t be legitimized makes for a great lesson on research and digital citizenship! I’m wondering… what research leads did people follow? Google, then what?
Alexandra K. Trenfor, Alexandra K. Trenfor where art thou? 🙂
This is an interesting thread… seems many of us resonate with Alexandra’s quotes, and curious to find out who she is… I will wait patiently in the wings until she is found :p
Any news on Alexandra?
I selected the quote from a quote site to go in a newsletter I’m writing for a client. I would be satisfied just to know the earliest appearance of the quote. I searched so hard on Google Books, I’m sure it made the lights at Google HQ dim and pop! I searched for sub sections of the quote and excluded any results containing “trenfor.” The earliest publishing date for a book containing the exact quote is May 2013 (several months after your original posting). It’s an obscure book on entrepreneurship written by a New Zealand-based consultant, but published in South Africa. The author pasted the quote at the top of one of the chapters, citing “Alexandra.K.Trenfor” which sent me on a fruitless search for an email address formatted that way.
And yet again Chrome’s Momentum has chosen Alexandra K. Trenfor as its daily quotation–and another person has landed on this blog post trying to validate the source of the quote. Which is, by the way, now the top search result. The mystery endures!
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I, too, ended up here in search of the legitimacy of Alexandra K. Trenfor as the true author of this perfect quote for my classroom board. Since there’s no evidence to the contrary, I think I’ll just cite “attributed to Alexandra K. Trendor.” I have to use it. It’s too good.