Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

The Gloom of "Duhhh..."

The Gloom of “Duhhh…”

One of the reasons I never did well in school, aside from being “Developmentally Retarded" (that was what my mother was told when I flunked the 5th grade) was that it took awhile for concepts to process through my convoluted and dyslexic mind. By the time they emerged from the gloom of “Duhhhh…” the term or semester would be over and I’d take my miserable “C” and be grateful for the charity.

Then, gradually as the purpose of a class mulled about in my mind, the message would become increasingly clear,,, but first it had to pass through the Percy Goodfellow filter.

I once worked with a group of engineers and my boss, the head engineer, would tell this minions, “Go and brief this to Percy and if he understands what you’re talking about then anybody will.” Now that was a left handed compliment of sorts but it was also more of the same old put down I’d been hearing all my life.

My wife and daughters are extremely bright and never had to study much to get good grades in school. My wife loved school because her home life wasn’t always that uplifting. Me on the other hand hated school because it as a series of social and academic nightmares.

I really don’t know where my understanding of things comes from. I just wake up one morning and the light comes on. It is that way with languages and that way with analytical skills. I took trig three times before understanding Identities. I explained them to Linda and she got the idea almost immediately and enjoyed puzzling around with them. My younger daughter is a math teacher. My older daughter has a gift for languages and writing. In school, both would look up at the blackboard from time to time, yawn and then go back to the myriad of other interests, swirling about in their heads.

I used to enjoy programming computers. Writing in GW Basic (Is that language even used any more?) and C++ was fun until I got into a difficult algorithm. When that happened I had to find an abstract thinker to write it for me. It was either that or play around with the variables until the answer jived with the test data. It there weren’t too many variables this approach usually worked. More than five and I was in deep kimshee.

So, to understand things, I like examples. Even better I like analogies. An analogy gives me a framework (a work table) for the new understanding I’m trying to acquire. Sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.