Thursday, January 10, 2008

I'm an Idiot Savant

Well, maybe just an idiot! Here's the deal...I go through life with people thinking I am smart. I have good vocabulary, I am well read. I have what I call "my superpower" People ask me to come help with a problem~the computer doesn't work, they need to find something~I stand next to them as they work it out, and then I look good. I have a small capacity for remembering weird trivia~like song lyrics, historical events, movie/book plots. Some people mistake it for intelligence. I live in fear someone will find out it is all a charade. "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain" ~~
The jig might be up with my kids tonite. Despite the fact that I have an AA and BS (how appropriate!) degrees in Business Admin and have started work on my Master's degree in Library Science, I was stymied by Algebra I tonight!! 15 comes and shows me this problem: [-(-7)] +1=......I dunno! Now, in the deepest darkest recess of my overcrowded mind, I know work from the inside out, 2 negatives make a positive...but all I can think of is "NOOOOOOOO!! Not Math!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" In high school I made it through Algebra I, Algebra II, Geometry, charmed my way to a D in Trig and Analytical Geometry and then walked away~I thought ! In college, it took 3 tries to pass Calculus I-then only because we had to work in a "group". I was in charge of sharpening the pencils! Now I have a freshman and 8th grader both taking Algebra I Honors and all my leverage as a parent is tossed out the door by [-(-7)] +1= Oh, the inhumanity!
Give me words over numbers any day! My new favorite thing is free rice.com. You play a vocabulary game and for each word you get right, 20 grains of rice are donated to feed hungry people~win-win! 50 is the highest score, I have gotten as high as 47...but I keep trying! I love words. They are at the heart of who I am~part of my identity. Nothing moves, excites, thrills like words . Words can cheer you up, push you down, make you love or hate a person~now that's power! So I will keep using big words and if that fools people into thinking I am smart, great! And as for Algebra...there is always the Internet !

1 comment:

Bonnie Jacobs said...

I discovered something interesting: numbers are words. Oh, yeah, I know that doesn't sound like much, but NUMBERS are WORDS. It really sank in when I thought "numbers are words!"

Way way down in this long post (7th section, near the end) is a section entitles: "Numbers are also words."

http://wordsfromawordsmith.blogspot.com/2007/03/my-life-laid-out.html

And recently I wrote this, illustrated with some numbers fun:

http://bonniesbooks.blogspot.com/2008/01/book-report-day-to-read.html

The whole point of this comment is that it may be easier to deal with numbers if you think of them as words. I consider myself a wordsmith, as you may have noticed. And not merely a Weekend Wordsmith, either:

http://weekendwordsmith.blogspot.com/2008/02/ask-not.html