How Did You Get This Number Read Online Free PDF Page B

question “If Suzy has twenty bales of hay and Jimmy borrows a bale per month until the frost, how many bales does Suzy have left?” was not hypothetical. I thought I did okay. In reality I bombed, landing in a breathtakingly low, of-the-masses percentile. The school called, expressing grave concern. Had all that unconscious head banging finally caught up with me? Should I be held back a grade? Two? In one section of the test, we had to look at a series of everyday objects, match them with their proper names, and fill in the bubbles on a Scantron sheet. I got nineteen out of thirty wrong.
    “Sloane doesn’t know what a spatula is,” the school psychologist offered. The “Need I say more?” was silent.
    “Oh , please,” said my mother. With the new cordless phone in one hand and my wrist in the other, she marched me to the kitchen, flung open a drawer, and held a rubber paddle in front of my face.
    “This,” she said, loudly enough for the school psychologist to hear, “is a spatula. Okay?”
    “Okay.” I nodded.
    My mother went on to explain my brush with brilliance, my aptitude for genius, my general awesomeness, but the school was having none of it. They insisted I take an IQ test. The test was a combination of oral logic questions, written analogies, and pictures of deformed animals with missing hooves and otherworldly trees that failed to cast shadows. There would have to be something profoundly wrong with you to look at a one-legged donkey and see nothing amiss with that picture. But my cockiness took an instant beating with the math portion of the exam. Even the school psychologist was stunned, and she expressed her surprise by helping me cheat.
    “How many people do you think there are in the world?” she read from a clipboard.
    “A billion?” I bid on humanity.
    “Oh, come on.” She raised her thumb as if I was lowballing her.
    Even with her help, I failed spectacularly. After getting gold stars on the first half of the test, I think she thought I was intentionally trying to throw the math section. For what purpose, I do not know. I was not raised in a movie where it’s better to be a dumb jock than a bookish band geek. It was better to just be a super-hot band geek.
    The psychologist informed my parents that she had rarely seen such a right-left brain discrepancy. At least not in kids who made it through the day without soiling themselves in public. And with that I was diagnosed with a severe temporal-spatial deficit, a learning disability that means I have zero spatial-relations skills. It was official: I was a genius trapped forever in an idiot’s body. The reason I did so poorly on the Iowas was that the questions were multiple choice and presented vertically. Once I had decided on an answer (say, “spatula”), I had to remove my eyes from the paper and shade in the corresponding choice in a horizontal line of bubbles. This, much like reading a map, playing cards, or telling time on an analog clock, was an impossibility for me. The chances of my ever achieving a non-embarrassing level of mathematical functionality were about as good as the chances of Jimmy’s returning those bales of hay.
    My teachers were told to be sensitive about this, but my mother, armed with a biased skepticism and a master’s in special education, started testing me at home. Just to be sure. She’d tell me to get something that was to the right or to the left of something else. She quickly discovered that I had already found ways of masking my panic—saying I was distracted while I was actually desperately trying to figure out the answer. I could feel her staring at the back of my head. I spent a lot of time like this, faking daydreams while counting or trying to guess which way is west if this way is north.
    Another thing about having the village idiot camped out in half your brain is that the other half is forced into some resourceful public-relations work. At school, if someone asked me what time it was, the