High School, exciting, frustrating, lonely, all rolled up in one. With lots of windows I had more landmarks and found my way better, the halls had windows and were like the legs of an octopus. They let me take more classes like algebra and geometry. In algebra there was only one student that did better. For the first time I could be a winner. It was very encouraging. I took band, played the flute, I was only average even though my father had been a professional violinist and I had a lot of his hearing and basic rhythm, but my fingers did not always do as I wanted them to, I had a built in pause and jerk to my finger movement and to my tracking of music, also I could not memorize. When younger I would lay on the floor and listen to my father's classic music by the hour, and I tried and tried to memorize the pieces of music and composers, I always ended up in tears. But average was fine with me. I could do it and that was fun. I was the top student in Biology thanks to my older brother's past lessons. Life was looking up. Or so it felt at times. At least I had some success.
But I had advantages in the above subjects. Now for the rest of the story. In English I was horrible as usual. I could read some of the material, but it was shabby at best. One day they gave a written IQ test and of course I flunked it. I could not read the directions nor understand what they said about how to do it. I was at the back of the room.
So they had a woman come to test me hands on. It took two days of testing. To me it was very traumatic, the personal touch of another human taking time with me, yet she had to remain distant, almost quiet, that tormented me. To be so close to someone to talk to yet unable to do so, it was like having my Grandma there and not being able to be reassured by her. I cried some of the time and a lot afterwards. But the testing itself was fun and they said I had an IQ above average. They said it was the same as my friend Judy who maxed every national test they ever gave her, while I was lucky to be average or above.
But I was about to take two giant steps ahead, and they shocked me.
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