Help! I’m Stuck In First Grade and I Can’t Get Out

red trianglesIf you want to feel completely stupid, go to www.ixl.com and try to ace all the activities in anything above Pre-K. I don’t know when you went to school, but I started first grade in 1957. There was no kindergarten in our town and my birthday is in April, so I had to wait until I was almost 7 to go to school. I had been reading since I was 3, but I still had to take off my shoes to count past ten, which Miss McElroy, otherwise a very nice teacher, refused to let me do. Still, back then, first grade math pretty much stopped at simple addition so I didn’t have any trouble with it.

Apparently, things have changed in the educational world since then, if IXL is anything to go by. Daughter and I have a little friendly competition going there, as she reviews her math skills preparatory to launching into 8th grade algebra. Me, I may have to settle for a spot behind Jethro Bodine of the Clampetts, who, if I remember correctly, was a proud graduate of 3rd grade. I can’t get out of first grade, thanks to something they call “Geometry: Count vertices, edges and faces.”  It’s a diabolical little exercise that can lead the spatially impaired amongst us to teeth grinding and hair pulling. I mean, would YOU be able to figure out how many vertices, edges and faces a 3-D triangle has? Hmm? Do you even know where all those things ARE on a triangle? Well, I thought I did, but obviously I was wrong.

I did manage to guess my way to a score of 58, but most of that was pure luck and 70 is a passing grade, so I’m still stuck in first. I thought I’d just ignore that little section as a fluke that I could have pulled off if only my blind spot wasn’t… well, vertices, edges and faces, I guess.  So, enough of the baby stuff, and I went on to logic problems in third grade. Crikey! Here’s the first question:

Lisa is 4 years younger than Gale. Suzanne is 36. Hiram is 2 years younger than Suzanne and 4 years older than Gale. How old is Lisa? I thought I was really hot stuff when I figured out that Lisa is 26, but I really question whether the average 3rd grader would be able to figure out this problem without some heavy help from someone older. I couldn’t have figured it out in 3rd grade without someone giving me the answer or Lisa telling me, herself. Back then, I was still working on my multiplication facts up to 12, not figuring out logic problems that would have appeared in the NY Times at the time.

Daughter, of course, just sails through this stuff while I slog doggedly through it like I’m wading through treacle with Crocs on. I don’t think I’m revealing any secrets when I say that the little brat snickers up her sleeve every time we compare test scores. She’s probably going to be done with what she needs to review way before our month-long membership is up, but I’m not canceling it until I battle my way to the upper grades. Well, at least to fourth grade. No! Make that 8th grade and I won’t stop until I get passing scores on every damned one of the practice areas.

Back in 8th grade, I failed algebra, but a kind teacher gave me a C-, because I had A’s in all my other subjects and he didn’t want to ruin my report card. I floundered through math until I quit school to get married halfway through my junior year. I never “got” algebra and only got a weak grasp on geometry until about five years later when I trained to be a welder and found that my lack of math smarts was holding me back. I could weld with the best of them, but when it came to the math part of the training, I was lost. So, like the stubborn idjit that I am, I went out and got a math tutorial on algebra and geometry and completed the course, along with two hefty workbooks, inside of 6 weeks. At that point, I “got” algebra and geometry with a vengeance. I also got my GED and aced the math portion, much to my surprise.

Since then, I’ve completed about 3 years of college classes, here and there and in no coherent fashion. I just took what I wanted for my own purposes. Creative writing, philosophy, science and women’ s studies. I never took math again, which is probably why I’m shaky on vertices and other geometric wossnames. Starting tonight, however, while Daughter thinks that I’m playing games on Pogo, I’m going to do what I did lo those many years ago. I’m going to go online and learn what the heck a vertice is when it’s at home, scope out geometry and logic until I’m blue in the face and burn through 8 grades of math at IXL. The fact that IXL costs 19 dollars and change a month is all the incentive I need. I may be a little slow at some math, but not when it comes to saving money.

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A Conditional Post

Photo by Chris Denbow, Flickr

When I was a kid, my uncle Jerry used to show up at family gatherings with a six pack of beer and a bottle of whiskey. He never went home with them. This is why Uncle Jerry was the hit of the party for the first part of it and a pain in the aspidistra for the second half. He played guitar and wore Hawaiian shirts and had a hula girl doll on his dashboard. He was sexist and offensive, but he did have one redeeming feature. He could do a fantastic Jackie Gleason impression. Sometimes, when the six-pack had turned into a three-pack and the whiskey level in his glass was higher than the level in the whiskey bottle, he was more like Jackie than Jackie was.

One of his favorite shticks was also something he said even when he wasn’t channeling The Great One. “I have a condition,” he’d say, when someone asked him why he didn’t mow the lawn or take out the trash or change a flat tire. The questioner would nod his head and look solemn while my Aunt Mildred glared daggers at Uncle Jerry, because she didn’t have a condition, so she was the one who had to do all the things Uncle Jerry neglected.

Uncle Jerry is gone now, a victim of his “condition” and the millions of cigarettes he smoked while sipping his highballs, but I still think of him whenever I listen to Hawaiian slack key guitar music or see a hula girl figurine on a dashboard. I got to ruminating about Uncle J the other day, when I just didn’t feel like getting up and leaving the deck, where I was having a beer, to take the clothes out of the dryer.  I had actually gotten out of my chair to do it, when Daughter appeared and told me that the dryer had stopped.

I started to tell her that I’d fold the clothes, but then I stopped myself and asked her if she’d mind doing it. She was in the middle of a Redwall book and obviously not crazy about breaking off to handle laundry, but she sighed and slouched off to fight the good fight with fitted sheets.

“That’s wicked nice of  you, Sweetie,” I called to her as she left.  “You know I don’t usually mind doing it, but what with my condition and all …” and I stopped there.

So I stayed out on the deck, had a second light beer (my limit nowadays and they have so little alcohol that they’re labeled “Near Beer” in TX and mouthwash in some counties in ME), and thought about Uncle Jerry. You might want to try his ploy whenever someone asks you to do something you really don’t want to do. No one under the age of forty remembers Jackie Gleason any more, so you’ll probably be able to get away with it. And, let’s face it, we all have conditions that make us want to do what we want to do, rather than what needs to be done. (I believe that’s the human condition.)

So, if you can find someone else to do it, it still gets done and you get to sit on the deck and have another beer or a highball or a double latte with extra froth or whatever your particular “condition” calls for.  And if anyone questions you too closely about what your condition is,  tell them that it’s one of those conditions that you just have to live with and ask them if they’d like to donate to finding a cure for it. They’ll change the subject and you can get back to loafing.

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Up On The Roof With a Rodent

Benny

The other day, things starting going kind of swimmy on me. When I looked out the window at lunch, birds looked fuzzy and I could hardly tell a finch from a thrush. My cat, who was hunting in the field, looked more like a lopsided marshmallow that had been burned in a couple of places than he usually does. I asked Daughter if it was misty out and she assured me that it wasn’t, so  I decided a visit to the optometrist was in order if I still had “this vision thing” the next morning.

I still had it when I looked out the window at breakfast, and it was worse, actually. A hummingbird zoomed up to the window and I couldn’t tell if it was male or female until it started fighting with its reflection, which gave me a clue. Anyone else ever notice how male hummingbirds seem to spend almost all their time fighting? One wonders how the heck they get enough to eat or produce next year’s crop of hummingbirds. But I digress.

Dr. G had an opening so I hustled down to the mall to get my eyes examined. She said everything was fine – or as fine as it gets for someone who is legally blind in one eye without her glasses.

“Have you been doing a lot of close work?” She asked. “Do you spend more than two hours a day on the computer?”

Sheesh, 22 hours would be more like it, some days, and I told her so. She shook her head.

“Well, you have a temporary condition caused by too much straining to look at a computer screen,” she said. “It’s called “Computer Vision Syndrome” and it makes your vision “swimmy” as you put it, for objects that are farther away than your monitor. It’s because you’re sort of clenching the muscles in your eyes to focus. It can last for a day or even longer after you leave the computer and the only thing that helps is fewer hours in front of that blue screen.”

I told her that I have to spend hours in front of my computer, because I’m a writer and asked her if there wasn’t something else I could do to help.

“Well, you can try taking frequent breaks to walk outside and focus on something way off in the distance for a few minutes. That might make your eyeballs “unclench” so to speak.”

So, I drove home, trying not to clench my eyeballs. When I got there, I noticed a fresh mouse carcass in the yard, compliments of my cat, Benny, no doubt. He usually eats the rodents he catches, but the hunting is so good in the summer time, that he sometimes leaves one for the dog whose digestion just isn’t up to mouse tartare any more, so we try to dispose of them before she finds them.

But, I remembered, as I picked up the mouse by its tail, I was supposed to be focusing on the distance, so I looked off into the trees in the side yard, willing my eye muscles to relax and unwind, as I hurled the mouse up and into the air. Because I was looking off into the distance, I didn’t realize where it had landed, at first. Then I looked up at the garage roof and there it was, looking very odd and out of place. Daughter came out to join me just then and I showed her what had happened. She’s softhearted about critters, but has gotten somewhat inured to Benny’s turning our yard into a slaughterhouse. She loves the little creep.

However, like me, she thought the mouse on the roof motif was pathetic and creepy at the same time. I mean, who has a dead mouse on their garage roof? Owls? Actually, an owl is what we need right now or I’m going to have to dig out the roof rake that we use to get snow and ice off the roof and use it to get the late mouse down.  I’ll give it a couple of hours and see if an owl or hawk or – hey, maybe a turkey vulture or crow – will get it first, so I don’t have to.

In the meantime, I’m sitting here, staring over my laptop screen through the window into the distance,  typing as far away from the keyboard as I can, given the length of my arms, and trying not to clench my eyeballs. For some reason, I just realized, that makes me grit my teeth and I’m beginning to get an ache in my jaw. I suppose I’ll be off to my dentist next to be told that I have some other syndrome you get from trying not to clench your eyeballs while typing with your arms extended. There’s always something.

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