Intelligence Quotient

When I was in elementary school, I was taken out of class one day and led to a little wood-paneled office. The woman there asked me all sorts of interesting questions, had me look at pictures and read her things from books, and I think had me walk across a little low balance beam, though that part may have been only in my head. After I was there for what seemed like ages in my little mind, the woman asked me if I would like to do something special one afternoon a week, where I would get to leave my class with a couple other kids and play with interesting toys and puzzles and read new books. I thought that sounded great, so I agreed.

They called it Gifted, I believe, and I and a few other kids went to a different classroom on Wednesday afternoons and played with interesting toys. I don’t remember much more about it than that, but I did really enjoy it. It also made me feel very special and smart. That I was picked out of all the students as someone who was worthy of going to Gifted. I remember trying not to act like it was a big deal, but Wednesday afternoon was always my favorite part of the week.

In middle school and high school, I took the “honors” classes, and I thought they were a breeze. I rarely studied and made straight A’s through school, until my senior year when I took a Calculus class and couldn’t keep up (I blamed it on the teacher and the fact that math was boring, and wrote it off as a fluke). I ended up with a B in Calculus and headed off to college.

College was a whole other story. I signed up for Calculus (hey, I had already taken it once, how hard could it be the second time?), Chemistry 2 (since I had taken college level chemistry in high school and passed with flying colors), and some general education classes. The first semester was downhill from day one.

I’m sure part of the problem was that I wasn’t really sleeping, I stayed out late, partied a lot, and tried to do homework at 3 a.m. while slightly intoxicated and not quite awake. I could barely stay awake during the walk to class, let alone lectures. I ended up with a D in chemistry (thanks to a very compassionate professor who would let me come to office hours even though I didn’t pay attention in class) and a C in calculus (yes, a worse grade than the first time I took the EXACT SAME CLASS). And that was after studying MUCH harder than I ever had in high school. My other grades were A’s and B’s, but I had to work hard at them, too.

After considering leaving school after first semester, I found my niche (NOT in math and science, by the way) and, even though I still had to work hard, I managed to bring my GPA up to a respectable number by the time I graduated. That whole experience taught me that I wasn’t as smart as I had once thought I was…in fact, I considered myself to be on the slightly below-average side of the curve for students at my college. After believing myself so special as to be selected for Gifted class, it was hard to handle, but I figured that I had either fooled that woman in elementary school, or that my intelligence had leveled off over time.

Then I became what you might call a “grownup.” (I use this term loosely, as I don’t feel that I have had nearly enough time to grow up to the point where I am an adult…buy I digress.)

In my daily life, whether it is at work or around the city, I think I have discovered that I am smarter than I thought. I hope this doesn’t sound like I’m bragging…it’s just that I think most of the time, people don’t spend enough time on anything to fully understand, and therefore waste everyone else’s time with questions that they could have answered themselves, had they stopped for just a moment.

Additionally, adults never really seem to act like adults…the longer I am one, or am pretending to be one, it seems that people are just the same as they were as teenagers—older but no wiser. It is fascinating to me to listen to a conversation between two people and see just what they were like as children, displaying what they were taught by those older and supposedly wiser than they.

It makes me feel a little smarter (though way less intelligent than some of my friends, who read constantly and absorb information like a sponge, whether it be about literature or history or computer programming and theory or law) to know that I can step back and see this, even if I don’t always act like someone with more than a quarter century of life behind her.