Grades (April A2Z ~ Misty Memories)

School pic, around age 12

Welcome to my April A2Z posts! This time, I am officially signed up on the challenge sheet and will be visiting other bloggers on the list. My theme is "misty memories," which will include a bunch of rambling about old stuff in my life, and hopefully some of it will be accurate, but if not, there's no one around to contradict me. Today we continue with G for Grades.

I didn't start out spectacularly as a student. I began reading early, but nothing extraordinary. Since I read a lot, I had an extensive vocabulary, but it was mostly on paper ~ I couldn't pronounce all the words I could spell. I'm still not great at pronunciation. In fifth grade, first semester, I received a C grade for penmanship, and my mother was annoyed. Over winter break, she made me write all my notes over in new notebooks in neat handwriting. Something odd happened at that point.

As I focused on the shapes of the letters, I began to enjoy the act of writing. Watching the words form under the pencil created a new pathway in my brain; I was able to effortlessly recall the words on the page. I soon realized that I could get perfect (or nearly so) grades on a test by simply rewriting my notes or the important parts of a text. After a while though, I didn't have to rewrite them ~ I could picture them in my mind from reading in a super focused way. I knew there was such a thing as photographic memory, but I didn't really have it ~ I had to read and study to remember.* These days, I can still memorize by picturing text, but it's harder. I'm also usually good at remembering where things are by picturing them in my head (except for maps/ directions).

Naturally, my mother was thrilled when I began bringing home straight-A report cards, and I felt she loved me more when my grades were high. Maybe that wasn’t really true ~ I assumed lots of false things as a child. Later on, I realized that getting top grades was the one thing I could do better than other students. I wasn't pretty or athletic, my personality was meh, I had zero artistic or musical talent, but dammit I could be at the apex of the grade pile. Competition became a driving force, even replacing the thrill of my mom's approval, which I had quit caring about so much by the time I was in my mid-teens.

This competitive urge stayed with me, independent of whether I knew other people’s grades or not. As I aged, acing tests, games, puzzles, quizzes, etc., became a self-motivated challenge. I'm still competitive, but now I'm fine with others beating me as long as we're all having fun. I also am fond of playing solo games and doing jigsaw puzzles, where no one really wins, but the challenge exists nevertheless.

*Funny example of how I didn’t have photographic (eidetic) memory. In seventh grade, the teacher handed out sheets of biology information. They were fuzzy photocopies and hard to read. I did my usual glance-over, and when the teacher asked me how many bones were in the human body, I said 26, which of course was way off. It turned out that the zero in 206 didn’t show up well in the copy, and when I conjured up the pic in my mind, I saw “2 6.” That’s when I realized I would have to read/ study for real. Ah well, it had been a fun couple years when I relied on my mental photographs before understanding that they were sometimes wrong.