A Blessing and A Curse

Hello Humans! It’s not even Friday yet? Holy cow this week has gone by so slow. Mainly, because my classes are super boring. We’re just reviewing right now, which is good to the extent of refreshing your brain and getting it back into “school mode,” but seriously people! It’s the people in my Calculus Class that I’m speaking to, but they ask the dumbest questions! I normally would say that there is no such thing as a dumb question, but when you have to ask how to factor in a Calculus class, you shouldn’t be there. You should be back in College Algebra 1. I normally wouldn’t care too much about this, as I just sit in the back of the classroom on my favorite left-hand side, and play on my phone, but this review is dragging on forever. And I want to get my money’s worth here! I don’t want to fail the course because we didn’t have time to go over integrals on a deeper level because we were figuring out how to factor and what a function is.

We had a quiz today in my Calculus Class. It was almost as easy as my Physics final. Just kidding, it was a ton easier. You just had to look at a graph and find the limits, which we’ve been going over for three class periods now, and then find the limit algebraically, which we’ve been going over in class for 5 days now. I did it in less than 2 minutes, and I thought I was going slow. I ended up being the first one done, which isn’t surprising, considering it’s math and I can compute things and do math things very quickly and accurately. But everyone else ended up taking 10 to 15 minutes. I mean, I would have been fine with 5 to 7 minutes, but it took forever! And when you only have 50 minute classes, that is a lot of precious time learning wasted away. Luckily I have my textbook, in which I can read and understand faster that the Professor can teach the material to our class. I finally made it through the two long and boring review chapters, and am now at the first chapter on derivatives. I am so excited to get my brain learning something new and exciting.

I texted my mom after the quiz had been collected and expressed to her my pain and agony of having a brain wired to math and science, and the want to learn something new. She replied “It sure is tough being brilliant.” I then replied, “It’s a blessing and a curse.” It’s weird being able to think about really complex problems and thinking of different ways to solve them, and different experiments to run to prove or disprove it (blessing), but then not being able to do all of the math, statistics, chemistry, and physics required (curse). But I want to learn it, and learn it fast. I mean, my brain eats and craves information like I eat and crave pretzels and Nutella. It consumes information and digests it really fast, and then is ready to move onto the next topic (blessing). But I can’t have that if we’re reviewing in class for two or three weeks (curse). I am already moved ahead of my two hardest classes: O-Chem and Calc. And it feels good. That’s the great thing about College: You can read ahead (blessing)! But then, you get to be bored in lecture because you’ve already learned it all (curse).

The other “curse” of being smart is that EVERYONE asks you questions and expect you to know EVERYTHING. And being a Chemistry tutor has helped me out a little bit on this one, because now I get paid for doing this. But, some of the people you help have a really hard time understanding because they don’t know the vocabulary, equations, or have as much experience as you do. So, then you have to dumb it down a few times, and then maybe they’ll start to catch on. But the blessing from tutoring and teaching people, is that you get asked questions you may not have been asked, and are then forced to think about the subject in a different light. You are also forced to explain it in different ways, which gives you a better understanding of the topic.

While there are many good and bad things to being smart, I will take being bored for a few weeks over losing my smart-ness, genius-ness, and brilliant-ness. I love my brain too much to lose it. Stay wild, flower child.