Interesting. I also found this article extremely personally relevant. While not as big a contrast as your case, in 8th grade I got a D- in geometry and honors on the California Golden State Exam for geometry—that last much to the amazement of my teacher, who was forced to present the award to me at assembly.
I also identify with the duality from the article of being an average thinker in the moment, but having very strong reasoning skills. It seems half the smart people I know are sharper than I am, but people regard my reasoning and verbal debate skills to be very good. I’ve never quite known how to reconcile this with how g seems to work.
Geometry award notwithstanding, I’ve never been good at math, though I was always put in the gifted math classes. Everyone knows kids who didn’t study and still aced the exams—some here are those kids. Whether I studied or didn’t study, I would always get Cs and Ds. I never had enough time to finish the tests. When I took physics, the professor had a rule that you could take as long as you liked on exams; this let me get the highest grade in the class on every one.
I would love to be better at math, because it’s important, but it’s not intrinsically interesting to me. Today I’m a software developer and I learn whatever math I need, but what interests me is tools and efficiency through design and I prefer to work at the functional layer where the math I learned in high school and college isn’t the longest lever.
Recently, due to articles on Less Wrong and such, I’ve come to realize that there are math subjects I probably do have an interest in, but they weren’t the math foundations we grow up with, at least in the US. Continuous math is boring to me, but discrete math—starting with probabilities—I can find lots of programming and everyday uses for, so much so that I’m considering going back and finishing a probability and statistics degree.
Looking forward to the rest of this series.
...or like women’s suffrage or abolition!
Not all poetry is equally valid or has equally defensible aims.