Basically, the year I hit Pomona and was surrounded by other kids who were not only bright, but had learned to study. And could grasp things like Set Theory or Relativity. I’m a Euclidean, Newtonian sort of gal. I love low level algebra. This deceived me into thinking I was good at math. Hah! I dropped out after coming closer than I like to think to failing my first (and only) year. Returned to school at Temple some 15 years plus later and graduated with a 3.98 GPA, but I was in my late thirties by then and the competition wasn’t exactly, um, sterling - mostly a bunch of kids straight out of high school who weren’t exactly top achievers to begin with. By then, I’d wised up and was slacking my way through a Psych major.
Now, at the age of 52, I’ve realized that between my laziness, the dilatory nature of my info-gathering, and my lack of any real intelligence, I lie in that nice little niche between truly average and truly above average - what you might call high-mediocre. I have a garbage brain that remembers oodles of useless information and almost nothing of actual value. I can’t speak a second language. There’s barely a quote in excess of, say, eight words in the world I can get straight, not a poem or a song title I can recite or identify. I’ve forgotten my computer languages in the two years I haven’t been able to work and I have almost no useful skills. Given a good backspace key, I can type, and I like to think I can reason and analyze fairly well. My spelling and grammar are usually decent.
Realistic detachment in self-assessment ain’t all it’s cracked up to be. But at least I’m not running around bragging about skills or talents I quite obviously lack. I think. But my capacity for self-deceit is probably as great as anyone else’s, so who knows?
Shagnasty, hilarious! I took that *same * Pascal class. And just the other day it occurred to me to wonder why in the heck so many people took it. It’s not like Pascal turned out to be useful in any way. I was pre-med and a psych major, considering a double major in cognitive science, and that double-major possibility is why I took the class. But I think it had 80-some people in there, emphatically not computer science geeks (who undoubtedly would have known to stay away from Pascal) and I was thinking how incredibly unlikely it was that any of us ever used it.
I hit the intellectual wall taking philosophy classes from math professors. The case for the existence of God, with equations.
Yeah, for me it was grad school. I graduated with highest honors in electrical engineering. It was rather humbling to find myself amongst the stupidest people in grad school. I managed to get my masters degree, but just barely.
High School physics. I was great at Chemistry and Trig and it seemed like I should have no problem at physics. I just couldn’t visualize it.
The instructor of the course believed in a “gentleman’s C,” so I knew I wouldn’t fail. In a way, that’s too bad…if I knew I could fail, I probably would have tried a lot harder and hammered it out, learned something. OTOH his method was “Get it—or don’t.” He seemed like a really brilliant guy and I did ok in his geometry class, but I liked the subject and his presentation in there was enough.
When did you take it? I taught it ( in my two hour course given at the beginning of other classes that used it) in the mid-70s, and back then it was great for illustrating the principles of the new concept of structured programming. Back then I wrote lots of useful stuff in Pascal.
For psych majors, maybe not. However I did teach an introductory class, and discovered that the English department accepted a computer language in fulfillment of the foreign language requirement.
HA! It was when I switched to Molecular Biology (to earn the favour of an instructor) that I soon realised my demise… I ran out of money to pay for school. And my research project was sabotaged. … but I’ m not bitter.
I believe that we have different levels to our intellectual capacity in different fields, so I have prepared a list of what I consider entirely seperate boundaries:
Science: College physics. I took it in high school and it was a breeze, but I found out that I just cannot visualize vector motion in 3D and calculate anything about it at the same time.
Math: Calculus II. I hate math, but I’m good at it, all the way up until the Calc II level. I’ve passed Calc I twice. I got an A in every non-Calc math class I took. I was a TA in a high school math class where the kids told me that I was way better than their teacher and that they wished I could be their teacher instead. But I just cannot wrap my head around Calc II. Can’t do it!
Philosophy: Trying to read Kierkegaard. I got it eventually, but when I finally concluded that he was a pompous asshole with nothing to offer me, part of me was relieved that I didn’t have to bash my head against the wall trying to figure out what the fuck he was talking about anymore. His work being first in a primer on existentialism–well, it’s just bizarre. I get it from a chronological point of view, but he’s really not a beginner’s philosopher. If I hadn’t already taken a couple of philosophy classes and had more of an idea of what to expect, reading Kierkegaard in that book would probably have turned me off of philosophy completely.
As for macroeconomics, I just don’t get it at all.
We’re generally expected to work 70+ hours/week (and meal breaks are off the “clock”, not there’s a clock, but whatever.) And the first semester is just classes and maybe teaching, so that’s considered the “easy” semester.
So yeah, it would have just been downhill from there. It takes some people years to realize it’s a bad fit, so good for you for getting out earlier.
I don’t know that it’s “smart enough” thing though. I know some really dumb people with Ph.Ds (I should start a thread on my coworkers some time, like the really dumb one who is now a prof at the aforementioned U. of NC), and some really smart people for whom grad school just didn’t work out.
In the late '80s. AFAICT it was about as dead as Latin. It did serve to teach the basics of programming. But I don’t think I have ever seen it in a job ad or otherwise encountered it in the workplace. I’m not doubting there have been some people using it in the workplace, but it wasn’t what you’d call a marketable skill.
Maybe so, but we broke a lot of students of their bad habits using it. About that time, or a bit earlier, a lot of my CS professor friends bemoaned the kids they got in their classes who had programmed in BASIC and thought they were hot shots. In the 1980s I was working for Bell Labs, so my language of preference was pretty much fixed.
Actually, I’m not making that up. I systematically went though the Macropedia on Wikipedia (no mean feat, someone actually took the time to transcribe the list, also, according to the discussion page) and I could “see” all the areas of knowledge that someone else knows better than me - biology, chemistry, law, drafting, gardening, immunity.
The limit of my intelligence is philosophy, political science, and business.
What that means, for me, is that I can place my understanding of game theory into the context of ecology, for example. It means that someone else is a bigger history buff. Someone knows more about mechanics. It means someone doesn’t know the workings of a political system or the organization of a business.
It means that we could have a roundtable discussion between a businessman, a biologist, a lawyer, and an engineer!
