Personal Blogs

Throughout my life I have been told (on and off - not daily or anything so worrying!) that for someone who appears intellectually very able on most levels, I can be incredibly stupid.  And they are right.  Every now and then, I discover something that is so obvious that I can't believe I have been unaware of it for so long.

As a child I was years ahead of my peers in all the factual subjects, yet I couldn't learn to read analogue clocks, could never find my lecture theatres, and often couldn't even recognise my own friends, despite having 20/20 vision and what was otherwise a very efficient brain.  I am so lucky to have been well liked for the most part, or I don't know how I would have survived school.  I only made it to lessons because friends would meet me in places they knew I could find, and walk the rest of the way with me.  I avoided catching the bus to school whenever I could, as it frightened me not knowing where it was going, and even after years of practice I could never ever recognise my stop.  I used to get on, and my heart would pound and pound as other kids got on.  There were 2 schools that caught the same bus, and it was mainly kids from the other school that got on.  I would watch out the window at each stop, shaking all over, hoping against hope that someone with my uniform would get on so I'd know when to get off.  Real terror.  I used to get in so much trouble if it was discovered that I had 'chosen' to walk (4 miles, just over an hour = late).  Chosen?  Then when I did get into school I'd complete the whole terms textbooks in a lesson, no problem.  No one ever believed it was for real.  How can a child be simultaneously so brilliant and yet so incapable? 

A few years ago I discovered that banoffee pie is so called because of the banana/toffee mix.  That couldn't be more obvious.  But I always just thought it was a nonsense word, or possibly even a place, like Missisippi.  That certainly does not give the impression of intelligence.  What makes it worse, is how excited I was when I worked it out (by myself!), and chose to phone people to pass on the exciting news.  People thought I must be joking, but I couldn't have been more serious.  It was a very very exciting day for me, and I was disappointed to discover that most people had had the same knowledge from when they first learnt to speak.

Today I had a similar revelation.  The way the OU codes courses.  The first number corresponds to the level of study.  How obvious.  Yet how useful to know.  So now if someone says they are studying a T3 course, or an S2 course, I can pretty well guess at a technology level 3 or a science level 2 respectively.  And that's really as much as I need to know.  Saves a bit of online searching. 

This time, however, knowing that it is not so much a revelation, as a commonly known fact, I'm posting my glee here.  It saves me phoning round friends and boring them with the details.  They get quite enough nonsense from me.

Happy days!