My history teacher in seventh grade was always trying to take me down
a peg for some reason. He would always ask me questions that were
beyond my knowledge to stump me and then publicly tell me that I
wasn't as smart as I thought I was. He also told my mom that in my
parent teacher conference. He told he that I was too confident in
my intelligence and that he wanted to bring me down to reality. What
an inspiring teacher and great man. One day he was inexplicably in my
science class and was telling us that we really needed to pay
attention or we would be burried in Jr. High and High School science.
To prove his point he went and wrote a chemistry equation on the
board out of a book that was on the shelf. It was long but a fairly
strait forward problem that I already knew how to solve. He asked,
rhetorically, if any of us thought that we could solve a problem like
that. I said I could and he was skeptical but more than willing to
let me go down in flames and let me come up and try. I started in
quickly and had the problem worked out in about two minutes working
as fast as I could. The funny part was that the teacher didn't know
the correct solution and had to look it up to check that I was right.
Despite himself he was impressed and he went and got a fairly good
stack of baseball cards which he publicly awarded me. I normally
would have made a sassy comment about how I was as smart as I thought
I was but I was too elated by the success to gloat I was just glowing
and solidified my nerd credentials.
