Member-only story
Little Fish
In a big pond
Growing up, my family placed a lot of emphasis on intelligence as a desirable trait. They’d even go so far as to tell me how smart I was and how much smarter I was than the other kids that I went to school with.
Intellect became a competitive sport in elementary school. Statistically, though, in a school of sixty kids my odds were pretty decent. I competed at everything. Spelling bee? I was my school’s champion two years in a row. I even came in eighth place at the county spelling bee once. Standing on my laurels, though, I pretty much peaked in sixth grade if you look at my life that way.
However, there was a darker side to all this competition. My grandmother woke me up at 4am for months as I struggled to master many multiples in multiplication. I was literally the last kid in first grade to figure out subtraction. I didn’t have an “ah-ha” moment. I had an “I’m tired of being stupid about this” moment, and dragged myself to the end of the paper so I could learn anything else. (I still have issues properly subtracting to this day). Word problems never made any sense to me until I took statistics — in my thirties. I jumbled numbers up on paper (and still do).
So, while I was being told I was the smartest kid, I knew better. Just because other things were easy for me, that didn’t make me smart. “Smart” kids never struggled with math.
