#106. This Guy Just Wins (Thursday, June 21, 2001)

What was your best day…of putting to use a skill you thought was useless?

For much of my formative years, I was under the impression that my exceptional math and logic skills (later revised to “moderately above-average”) weren’t going to do me any good in the real world. Part of this had to be the limited opportunities I had to show them off, outside of being an arrogant know-it-all in math class while the teacher was trying to explain something new¹.

But on this rare occasion, I got to show off not once but twice in a single day. Plus, we went on a field trip—and field trips make everything better.

First. There’s this classroom game called “around-the-world”. Basically, a student goes around the room, competing one-on-one with each student to answer simple math questions (asked by the teacher) as quickly as possible. The person who loses sits down in that seat, and the student who wins moves on to the next. And so on.

We’d been playing this game in our fifth grade class for a couple of months now, and the record was 15—shared by me and this girl, Haley, who had gotten unfairly shafted². And this Thursday morning, before we got on the bus to the Museum of Civilization, was the last time we would ever play it in that class.

And I destroyed the record. I got to 22, only two away from completing a proper “around-the-world”, losing to none other than Haley when she said that 3 times 3 equaled 9, milliseconds before I did. Still, the final title was mine.

The Museum trip was fun. The notable moment was when one of the girls in our mini-group thought it was okay to lie down in one of human molds in the First Nations exhibit; which led to the other five of us yelling at her in unison and nearly getting us kicked out.

And when we got back, we still had an hour to kill. So the teacher had us compete to solve this crossword puzzle-thing as quickly as possible.

I say puzzle-thing because it wasn’t the traditional clue-based crossword, but basically a list of words of varying length that you had to fit into the crossword grid together…so kind of like a math optimization problem. Anyways, I recognized that type of puzzle from a Puzzlemania book that came with my Highlights for Children subscription³. So I finished it in twenty minutes—twenty minutes ahead of the next person. By the end of the day, only four people had completed it.

All four of us got one of those Smarties (i.e. Canadian M&M’s) boxes for our trouble; but the chocolate was nowhere near as good as the pure satisfaction of winning again.

Which, in hindsight, was more a product of all the extracurricular study my parents were making me do than anything else.
She got to 15 without losing (actually went “around-the-world” because several students were absent that day), when the substitute teacher said: “Okay, good job, now let’s have another person go.” The circumstances around that were unclear (I kept my mouth shut), so they just put her as the co-leader.
The best children’s magazine ever, before it got overly kiddified.