Being Stupid

It’s Off Topic Friday! This week, I ramble about being bad at number stuff.

For reasons to be revealed, I’m currently playing with that Brain Training game from Nintendo, the “How Old is Your Brain” one.

Apparently, my brain is 20. Or 64, depending. It’s all a bit silly, frankly.

One of the exercises is doing simple calculations quickly.

5×7=
11-4=
0+6=

That kind of thing. And although I’m very good with most of the exercises in the game, I fail at this one on an almost epic level. I rarely get above the minimum level score. I’m neither fast nor accurate. I do not doubt there are 6-year-olds who beat me.

I take this in fairly good humour. I’m not good with numbers, I know this. I say “page seventy-four” when it’s page 47. I ask Google what a certain amount of pounds is in dollars, and go “wow, that much?” every time. I was once asked what my pay was and my estimate was off by a factor of 10 or so.

It’s led to a handful of embarrassing moments, but in general it’s not really caused me any trouble since I left primary school. It’s a weakness I’m aware of and compensate for (I am ninja with spreadsheets, for instance) and so it really not been a problem for me since I got out of primary school.

Stupid Child

Back then, it was a huge problem. I could not do sums as well or even nearly as fast as all the other kids. I’m not sure this problem was ever specifically diagnosed or that I was ever given additional teaching. As I remember it, they just gave me more sums to do.

Or, more likely, the same number of sums anyone else did, but they took me at least twice as long. I did sums in the breaks while others played outside. I did sums at home, after school. Or, often, I didn’t do sums, I just sat and stared at them and coloured in the zeroes and cried because I had been tasked with the impossible.

Aside: trying to tackle a challenging, brainy task by sitting and working at it continually without a break is kind of… stupid. Your brain works much better if it’s allowed regular breaks and your body gets a chance to move around sometimes. I guess that wasn’t as widely known in the 80s. Or maybe they really did make me work through the breaks as punishment for being slow, as I suspected at the time. Either way, didn’t help.

Learning the multiplication tables drove me and my mother frantic and turned into a domestic drama that only ended when I managed to almost pass a test and my teachers decided to drop it. Now, when the Nintendo game asks me 4×7, I count up the sevens. No lie.

I want to be careful here. I don’t think anyone ever told me, or even implied, that this meant I was stupid. However, because I was not stupid, I looked at the evidence and drew my own conclusions. It was obvious what was going on. I was an idiot.

I wish someone could have convinced me at the time that my inability to do sums did not mean I was dumb. Or that many writers suffer from dyscalculia, if that is a real condition, or just crappy arithmetic skills if it is not. I wanted to be a writer, and this would have been some comfort.

Also, as it turned out, I was dead wrong to assume I was stupid. I’m actually pretty clever.* I just can’t do mental arithmetic.

*Clever in terms of academic achievement, that is. My emotional intelligence, for instance, is not nearly as fierce.

Not Knowing and Being Wrong

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and I’ve put it up on my mental wall as an example of me being completely wrong about myself. Obviously, my judgement was somewhat impaired by being seven years old and hence not knowing the first thing. But with all the knowledge I’ve since acquired, there remain oceans of stuff I do not know.

Mad science (as well as real science) and self discovery are fuelled by curiosity. Curiosity comes from a state of not knowing. One of the best things I can do to keep myself curious is to remember the oceans of stuff I don’t know, and keep in mind that what I think I know may just be an assumption. I have been wrong before. What seems like undeniable fact may fall apart once I learn more about the underlying categories.

The really clever thing to do is to assume I don’t know Jack.

***

Cultivate my curiosity is actually one of my high-falutin’ goals for this year, but until now, I’ve not had many good ideas about how to go about that. I’d love to have your input, if you have ideas.

Tagged as: curiosity, stories