The local radio station seems to like themes for their weekends; the one this last weekend was “time”. Mostly songs with the word “time” in the title …
Just before I was leaving for work Saturday (yes, retail doesn’t get Saturdays off) the song was “One Moment in Time” by Whitney Houston. Seems to me like she had more than one such moment …
Actually, I suppose I’ve had several such moments myself. Let’s see. certainly when I took the JETS test, the National High School Math Exam, the SAT, but also things like that time in 1973 when I realized I couldn’t really get lost or perhaps a dozen others.
Let’s start with 1973. I was a 10 year old kid bicycling with my family where we came across a playground. It was a nice playground, so I was thinking I’d have to remember where it was so we could come back some time. But then I realized I knew exactly how we got there and while it was a longer bike ride (say, maybe half an hour) I could do it again any time because I wouldn’t forget – and I could reverse it to get back home.
Come to think of it, I guess there were 3 before that. That time in kindergarten when Mom overslept so I decided to walk home – a mile and a half outside town. The cops picked me up at the freeway overpass and I was giving them directions to take me home when I saw our car coming and said “That’s my mommy!” so they turned around and pulled her over to turn me over to her. Then I was helping my older sister with her third grade Math homework (still in kindergarten – it was “What’s the next number?” questions). And I recall being in my first grade classroom during recess once and deciding to count backwards from 100 by 2s since I was bored – I was surprised that I got all the way to 0 without messing up.
The NHSME was in grades 9 and 10; that when I realized I was nothing like the other kids in my little school. I placed 126th out of roughly 30,000 kids in the state who took the test (in grade 9, and 93rd in grade 10) – including juniors and seniors. Unfortunately the teacher who organized that test for our school retired, so I never took it as a junior or senior. Grade 10 was also where my teacher decided I was asking questions that were too hard for the rest of my class, and therefore transferred me straight to the senior level class. Oh, and that time in grade 9 when the science teacher asked my permission to grade the semester exams on a curve comes to mind – the exams had been scheduled for the day the Blizzard of ’78 hit. When they finally cleared the roads 2 weeks later, I was the only student prepared for the exam to be that day, and hence was the only one who got what would normally be a passing grade. I doubt Mr. Swazick really needed my permission, he just wanted me to know that he recognized I’d earned a legitimate A and he wasn’t trying to cheapen that by raising everyone else’s score.
The Junior Engineering Technical Society test? That’s when I learned it didn’t even matter if I knew the material. The JETS is a contest, each school picks people for the available topics and each participant can take 2 topics. Of course I was my school’s person for Math. As Physics wasn’t even offered until Senior year at our school they had no Juniors for that topic and asked if I’d consider it. I did okay on the Math test (not like the top 1% I’d gotten on the NHSME, but still respectable). The Physics … I didn’t know more than half a dozen of the answers. But it was a multiple choice test, so I used reverse psychology to figure out the answers. There were a few cases where only one answer had the correct units (as in, the answer should be a volume and only one answer was cubic centimeters) or otherwise made sense. Most of them were answers in scientific notation where 3 had the same decimal part and 2 had the same exponent, so I picked the answer with that decimal part and exponent. Since I wasn’t calculating anything I was the first person finished, and I ended up in 3rd place overall.
Since I mentioned the SAT, I guess I have to tell you that one too. Prior to my year the SAT only had a 2-part score (Science and English, I believe), but they had decided they really needed to break it down more. My year was when they introduced an “Analytical” score, but labeled as “experimental” and not really to be considered (since they had no basis of comparison yet). English I got a respectable enough score on, 690 or some such. Math and Science I got 790 (maximum possible is 800), so just about as high as you can get, Analytical? I broke the test, got a perfect 800 on it.
I can go on, but I think this is getting a bit long already. Okay, my moments are generally things you couldn’t even imagine. Well, that is kind of the point isn’t it? I’m sure you must have plenty of experiences I couldn’t imagine some of which you’d consider to be “peak moments” as they’re often called. Maybe not placing in the top half a percentile on a test or competition, but just some time when you knew you’d done something significant even if only to you. I feel sure most people have had more than one already, and will have more opportunities to come. I mean, I’ve had 3 so far this year – my 60th birthday, my 15th year with my current employer and a monthly “Best in team” back in June – so why stop now?
