 |
| You are always the smartest kid your age in home-school |
The isolation
or the lack of comparison of home schooling engendered in me a sense of intellectual superiority. I always assumed that my
completely unstructured homeschooling somehow made me more
intelligent than my peers. When I went back to school, every other
year, there was a transition period where I realized that there
were other smart kids in my classes. I then had to hate them. Hate
is maybe too strong a word, but it was definitely on the angry side of
jealousy.
I was only good at one thing, being smart, and I felt like anyone else that was also smart took away from my glory. I may have been massively misinformed about the amount of glory that was on the table to be divided up. If I would have known, I may have tried harder at sports. As it was my pride was on the line in all academic endeavors, I had to be the first to finish assignments, the first done with worksheets and test. I would have to always get 100% on tests or my day was ruined. If anyone else ever got praise for getting a question right, I would try and get in on it by expanding upon and correcting the original answer. Yes, I was that kid, actually not 'I was', It should read 'I am'.
I was only good at one thing, being smart, and I felt like anyone else that was also smart took away from my glory. I may have been massively misinformed about the amount of glory that was on the table to be divided up. If I would have known, I may have tried harder at sports. As it was my pride was on the line in all academic endeavors, I had to be the first to finish assignments, the first done with worksheets and test. I would have to always get 100% on tests or my day was ruined. If anyone else ever got praise for getting a question right, I would try and get in on it by expanding upon and correcting the original answer. Yes, I was that kid, actually not 'I was', It should read 'I am'.
There were two areas in which I took particular interest in doing
mental battle, speed math and creative writing. A girl named Shelly
was amazing at math and once a week we would get a 100 problem speed
math worksheet with addition, subtraction, multiplication or
division problems on it. The goal was to try and answer all of them
as fast as we could. The problem was Shelly's faster was much faster
than mine. It killed me, I would be in the 60's when she slapped down
her pencil and raised her hand. I tried to be practice being faster, but she was
just so much better than me that it was not even close. This is where I should have worked harder got better and learned good
sportsmanship. What I did was cheat.
The teacher handed out the papers and we were supposed to wait until everyone had one and then flip them over and start. I would flip mine over early and covered it with a plain piece of paper that I could read through and solve the first twenty questions before Shelly even got started. The sad thing is, half of the time I would still lose to her. When I would win I would think that my cheating just proved that I was smarter to have thought of that trick.
The teacher handed out the papers and we were supposed to wait until everyone had one and then flip them over and start. I would flip mine over early and covered it with a plain piece of paper that I could read through and solve the first twenty questions before Shelly even got started. The sad thing is, half of the time I would still lose to her. When I would win I would think that my cheating just proved that I was smarter to have thought of that trick.
In creative writing, there was no cheating so I had to resort to fan service. In writing my arch nemesis was named Ben. On Thursday's everyone was supposed to write a story and anyone who wanted to could read it in front of the class and have it voted on to see who's was best. There were pretenders, but week in and week out it would come down to Ben and I in the final. I discovered early on that third graders loved only one thing and that was humor and the closer you could get to the potty variety the better. We couldn't come right out and hit them with our 'A' material it was a little blue for a Thursday afternoon, so we trafficked in euphemism, name dropping and innuendo. For example, the principal would fall into some misfortune that almost, but not quite, crossed the line of scatological decency. We would weave popular kids into the narrative as protagonists and have their powers be the hyperbolically best-er-est ever, pandering the vote was never so easy. The winner would get a piece of candy. The loser got the satisfaction of of all rejected writers, having the better story, but just being misunderstood by those idiots.
