Waiting for Mensa to Call...

This year I got a page a day calendar, and it’s put out by Mensa. Imagine the joy of getting up each day to a pop quiz. What fun.

Whee.

The first three days however, I gave it a shot and you know what? I did it.
What a rush.

The first day I solved the problem, I felt like “Hello, I’m Super Mom and me and my magnificent brain thingy are going to solve all your problems. Ask me how to go from COAST to SLIDE in seven steps, changing only one letter each time and each time making a word. Go on…Ask!”

No one asked.

The second day, I solved the math pattern problem and got the answer right but the method wrong. Close enough I thought. I GOT THE RIGHT ANSWER. Sherry G. Antonetti…supra genius. I like the way that rolls out….Sherry G. Antonetti….supra genius.

Reality hit back hard when the toddlers found the left over Christmas wrapping paper and unrolled it to get the cardboard tubes. Hey Genius the mess seemed to mock, how to you clean this up?

On the third day, it was a Tom Swifty and though I unscrambled all the words correctly, when it came to phrasing, I got it wrong. Being a Supra Genius, I said, “Who cares?” And then to prove the point, I wondered, “Why do Tom Swifties exist at all?”

The next two days were the weekend and I didn’t get to the calendar. Come Monday, it was a word problem. I hate word problems. I got it wrong. I tried to justify my answer. It was still wrong. Still, my record was 3-1-1 so I was shaken but not out of the genius running.

Yesterday. A pattern question. I spent all day puzzling over this one. All stinking day. When I finally checked my answer and got it wrong, I declared it a cheat test of my intelligence if they don’t give all the rules. When my husband looked at the puzzle and remarked “That’s tough.” I casually let slip, “Oh, it’s every letter that is made of only straight lines.” I had my reputation to maintain.

It has become an epic battle just to know what day of the week it is. I dread being given yet another chance to prove my ignorance on a daily basis, but I go back to it, just as surely as I do the super hard Sudoku. Today's puzzle, a letter problem.

"Place the same three-letter word in each blank below to make three different words."

_ _ _ ANT
_ _ _ DON
_ _ _ URE

Maybe there's a B-Team for Mensa.

By the way, the answer, (I looked on the back), is TEN --Get it, today's the tenth. The Supra Geniuses of the world are sniggering at my piddly intellect.

Higher Concepts of Math and Me

“Why do I have to learn these things?”the familiar lament uttered by my daughter resonated with my own grade school experience.

“No one has ever asked me to recite the opening to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales either but I had to learn it."

My daughter gave me a look.

"Okay, I haven’t had to use the quadratic equation in my adult life…yet.” I admitted.

“Will I ever need this?”

“You never know, there might be some math mugger out there who will tell you give me all your money or explain the transitive property. If a=b and b=c then a=c.”

“Mommmm!”

“Okay, let me think and try this again.”

Higher math skills have never been my strong suit. In college, I got through the required core calculus class on a good calculator, prayer and several all nighters of cramming formulas into my liberal arts based brain.

When my oldest first needed assistance in seventh grade, I cagily suggested he teach the material to me, as that would indicate how much of the stuff he really knew.

After considering the possibility for all of ten seconds, he went upstairs to his room to study.

Using a similar approach with subsequent children, I had managed to avoid solving for “X” since my own eleventh grade. It’s not that I was a poor student. I always did the homework; I never skipped class. I even liked my teacher. I always thought knew the stuff. Then the test would come, and somehow, all the theorems in my brain became more secret and less accessible than Coca-cola’s formula.

I think the whole problem with math for me started back in eighth grade with an unsolvable math problem.

“If a train travels east at sixty miles an hour…and a man travels west by foot at six miles an hour and they pass in six seconds, how long is the train?”

I got it wrong.

The teacher explained the formula and drew out the solution on the black board. I wrote it down. Then I tried doing the problem again.

I got it wrong.

I restudied the formula and tried a third time on a clean sheet of paper.

Wrong.

I brought it home to my mom and dad.

Wrong.

Thus far I had plugged in the facts over six times and arrived at six separate incorrect answers. Having the problem, the solution, the formula and still being unable to find the one correct answer from the endless infinity of wrong ones, I mollified my adolescent ego. It was justified if I wasn’t able to beat the odds.

Since then, I’ve studiously avoided higher math skills the way Willie Nelson avoids taxes. I have not missed them. They have not missed me. It has been a good arrangement. In college, I was thrilled when I could abandon math all together in favor of being an English Major. Oddly enough, the first eighteen lines of Chaucer's prologue still stick with me in ways math theorems never could.

Last week, I pulled my time tested stunt on my daughter when she asked for help in studying for a test. However, as my algebra teacher taught me, I shouldn’t compare apples to oranges. She took me up on my offer. They were studying formulas like distance equals rate times time.

“Now Mommy. If a train is traveling at sixty miles going East and a man is traveling…”

I’m still getting it wrong. I may have to go find the math mugger and demand, "Explain the theorem of d=rt so I can get it right or I'll make you recite Canterbury Tales in Middle English. "Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote..."