4-23-02, Lisa Laird
It's Not for Me to Solve
By Lisa Laird
IPS Features
I was stopped at a red light the other day and
couldn’t help but notice all the speeding automobiles on the road passing by
in front of me. I repeatedly turned
my head to the left and to the right, hypnotized as the drivers zoomed by.
Some with both hands firmly on the steering wheel, others with one hand
casually on the wheel, and quite a few with phones plastered to their ears.
They all had places to go and people to see; everyone in a hurry to get
their agendas completed for the day. Life
is one big “things to do” list. That’s
how we want it, as it makes us feel needed, important, and purposeful.
Thanks to technology, our mission is facilitated and
expedited. Hallelujah for modern
inventions and conveniences. If
technology were left up to me, we’d still be sitting in caves!
I admire and envy those super human intellectual types
with highly logical minds. I was
never mathematically or scientifically inclined.
I remember being totally lost in geometry class during high school.
One day, I sat in the classroom, thinking, “I must have missed
something between yesterday and today.” It
was as if the teacher jumped from the beginning to the end and I had no idea
what happened to the middle. Sort
of like when a magician pulls a rabbit out of an empty hat after the tap of a
wand; however, in this case, there was no tap of the wand.
I missed the trick. My
ritual evolved into staring out the window during exams, in this instance,
wishing I were on the outside looking in. After
handing my teacher a few exams totally blank, I realized I was destined for
summer school. And why fight fate?
I passed the second time around by the skin of my teeth.
To this day, I don’t understand why I had to “prove” a triangle. With the pressing social ills occurring in society at that
time, I was busy getting frustrated analyzing shapes.
Go figure.
Another subject that gives me agonizing flashbacks is
high school chemistry. Forget
citations; force the mass majority to retake chemistry class if they’re caught
speeding. Believe me, limits would
be consciously adhered to out of shear fear.
Talk about effective deterrents. I
pity the government for attempting to balance the Federal budget; I had enough
of my own problems trying to balance a chemical equation.
By the way, did you ever notice that examples in textbooks were always
the easy, straightforward ones? However,
on exams it never failed, we were faced with every exception to the rule
possible.
Science lab was a reoccurring nightmare.
No matter how careful I tried to be, I always seemed to be washing
chemicals off my hands. Halfway through the course, my lab partner was on her own to
conduct experiments. She understood
that she was better off without me anyway.
I was a hazard waiting to happen and definitely better suited as an
onlooker, less of a liability.
At least attendance and punctuality were never a problem
with me. I didn’t have to worry
about arriving at summer school late for geometry…I was already there bright
and early each day repeating chemistry. In
this case, there was no lesser of two evils; both subjects were like foreign
languages to me.
But I do
know that whenever I turn on the computer, start my car, or gaze at a beautiful
architectural structure, I thank God for the mathematical and scientific
geniuses who made all the luxuries we indulge ourselves with possible, probable,
and plausible. Without them, I
wonder what I’d be doing now. Probably
sitting in a cave. Or, worse yet,
back in summer school balancing triangles in the science lab.
I’ll take the cave.
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