literary heroin …what i never expected my life to be about…

Against my better judgement, during my Junior year of high school, I opted to not take Honours or Advanced Placement History, and instead ended up in “Academic” United States History which is to say I was not with the smart or exceedingly smart kids, but neither was I with the kids that needed extra help. This was the history class most of the Junior class was taking–the average people.

I’m not sure what history class is like in other countries, but when I was in school, it seemed like every US history class started with the Mayflower dropping off the Pilgrims and would get to somewhere around the Civil War by the end of the school year. Luckily, the teacher for Junior year moved at a faster clip and there was still plenty of time left in the school year when we finished the Civil War to move onto the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, the Civil Rights Movement, etc.

Unluckily, this meant that a lot of the people in the class were suddenly in uncharted (or semi-uncharted) territory, myself included. Whereas previous classes had embellished and re-embellished previously known information, now we had to learn thing that were completely new.

Rather than actually reading the textbook, which I found insufferably boring, I solved this problem by sitting near the back of the class with my text open on the desk in front of me. As the teacher taught, she pretty much followed the flow of the textbook, so if she threw out a question to the class, I could find the answer quickly, then wait for someone else to answer.

No one ever did.

So, rather than all of us sit there waiting in silence for someone else to answer, I would raise my hand and answer it (and let me stress this) using the book that was sitting open on the desk in front of me.

I didn’t realize anyone noticed that I always had the answer until one day the teacher was trying to illustrate some point I can’t remember and said, “If I was suddenly called away from class because of an emergency, what would you all do to keep the class going?”

One of the other kids in the class else responded, completely honestly, with “Have Amadei teach the class. She seems to know everything already.” The rest of the class murmured in agreement.

I was flabbergasted. Somehow, they had made the connection that I always knew the answer, but they hadn’t made the connection that it was because I always had the book open in front of me. Because of the way the classroom was set up, I was in the back of the room, but most of the class was clustered against the wall farthest from me with a lot of empty desks in the middle, so there was no one blocking their view.

It was at this point that I realized something–when it comes to learning, people are lazy. Not only are people lazy, but they see some sort of mystical quality in people who take an extra step. Boggles my mind, frankly…

Heaven knows I’m not the most ambitious person, but I my tendency to look something up if I don’t know the answer makes me feel like the smartest girl in the world sometimes.

Maybe intelligence shouldn’t be measured by how many facts one knows, but one’s ability to research and find a correct answer. Maybe the smarter people are able to take an extra step beyond that and apply this new-found knowledge to the world around us. Maybe the geniuses take a leap from there and realize how the information could affect the world instead of how it already does.

That’s a lot of maybes…but it does give the opportunity for people to strive for intelligence instead of wandering in the doldrums of ignorance just because they don’t know how to open an IE Window and pull up Google.