There are things we’re all good at. Things we can’t understand why other people can’t understand. For me, it’s maps. I can’t understand how anyone can be unable to read a map. You see a mark on the map, you see it where you are, you mentally overlay the image of the map onto what you can see in front of you and that’s that. You follow the map to where you want to be. If I have a map I’m never lost. But clearly there are a great many people who find it hard. I don’t understand how it’s hard, but I accept that it is for some people.
Then again, I’m not a great mathematician. I understand that this is common in maths – people who are good at it just can’t understand why other people don’t get it. This is part of why maths is a difficult subject to teach – the gap between “getting it” and it just not clicking must be a hard one to bridge. I wonder if there are techniques for doing this, for being able to empathise with someone on the other side of the Click Barrier.
So with what have you crossed the Click Barrier? Have you always been good at it or did you Get It one day? Think you could share it with others?
The one thing I can’t do is the summer/winter (daylight saving) time thing.
I can never work out which way the clock should go - I simply can’t comprehend what “clocks going forwards/backwards” means. I always try to imagine the earth turning under the sun, and moving the international dateline and so on, but it does no good.
I don’t think I’m unintelligent, and I can cope with changing timezones when I travel and the like, but there’s something missing from my brain that allows me to know which way to set the clock every six months.
(Incidentally, Mrs jjimm can’t read a map for shit either - I’ve heard it’s a 2D/3D comprehension thing regarding male and female brains, but that might be bull).
My big problem is knowing left from right. I’ve been preparing for my driving test recently and it’s a real problem. Being a good Irish (lapsed) Catholic, I mentally bless myself to distinguish but I’m still utterly useless. It drives herself mad but she hasn’t a leg to stand on because she went to the same school of map reading as the Kabbess and Mrs jjimm. She could be referred to as womanwithaplanandnocluehowtouseit
Time to 'fess up, I think. In our little corner of the universe, Mrs Xerxes is the one who can always find the way, with a seemingly infinite capacity to remember routes coupled with the inate orienteering skills of a flock of homing pidgeons. Me? I get lost. Often. Far more often than I should ever admit.
I rarely get lost, and when I do I can find my way back to somewhere recognisable pretty easily. It’s true even when I’m somewhere unfamiliar; one journey is usually all it takes for me to get a pretty good bearing on where I am and how to get from A to B.
I get political interpretations. That is, I can view a story or event and know what certain politicians and parties are going to say and do about it. It’s like a sixth sense: “Oh, X happened. Well politician Y should be saying something about that shortly.”
On the other hand I’m completely disoriented when inside a mall. I couldn’t tell you where anything relates if you held a gun to my head.
I have a tough time distinguishing left from right (marching band was a nightmare) but I have no problem reading maps. At math, I am above average, but long to experience that higher level of comprehension, where numbers take on an elegance and poetry…I wait to cross the Click Barrier, but have no desire to hunt for the bridge right now.
I am also good with maps and directions. I have to be, in my line of work. I also usually have a sense of which compass point I am facing. Mrs. Dave-Guy does not, nor does she care, which causes me much merriment.
I am severely math-impaired, however. Even the simplest calculations bring on mild anxiety, and I find myself distrusting my work and going over it several times, then choosing whichever answer appears most frequently.
Here’s my theory about the inability to read maps based on stringent empirical evidence (watching four friends of mine play Sega over the course of several months).
Do you know the game Micro Machines? You drive these little cars around a racetrack, watching an aerial view of the cars. The view of the track is always the same orientation, so it is the cars that turn throughout the game.
The two guys intuited the joystick left-and-right as “turn clockwise” and “turn anticlockwise”, and always won.
The two girls intuited the joystick left-and-right as “turn left” and “turn right”, and always lost.
I always put my ability to read maps down to the fact since Sign Language is my first language I am good at translating into 3D. That’s my theory, based on a sample group of one.
I’m the family navigator on land and on sea… and in the air, if I had kept up with my flying. As long as I know where I start and where I want to end up, I can usually find anything. And I’ve loved poring over maps since I was a young 'un.
I also have a pretty high math aptitude. And a flair for languages. And an ear for music. And I do OK in the kitchen and in the garden.
But when it comes to reading people, I’m lost. Maybe I’m too trusting and accepting. Maybe I don’t pay attention. But unless it’s blatant, I can’t tell if someone is being honest with me or stringing me along. I don’t catch facial cues. I’m not attuned to the subtleties of inflection and body language. One of these days, it’s going to get me in trouble.
My one big “click” came when I was learning to fly. I couldn’t learn to land properly. Most people solo after about 10 flight hours - it took me 21. I flew with 3 different instructors before one said the right thing in the right way, and everything fell into place. However, I haven’t piloted since 1978 - methinks that click is gone…
When I was learning to fly helicopters my approaches were fine, my flare was fine, but I could not “stick” the last bit. My instructor kept telling me to level out into a hover, but I just culdn’t “get it”. Then one day I realized what was wrong.
I learned to fly in airplanes. When I’d land a fixed-wing aircraft I’d flare, flare, flareflareflare with the stall warning horn going off, and the aircraft would stop flying on the runway. They high nose provided aerodynamic braking, so I’d hold it up for as long as possible. Obviously this is the wrong thing to do in a helicopter. If you keep flaring, you’ll start backing up. I was subconsciously trying to flare the helicopter until the forward mothin was stopped, at which point I subconsciously was going to get the skids level.
The penny dropped, the gumball rolled out, and I got it. Once I realized I was trying to land the helicopter like an airplane, I started landing it like a helicopter. My instructor had no idea why my landings were suddenly right.
I’m male, intuitively good at math, and I can’t find my way anywhere. I get so lost, so often, that it’s really embarrassing.
Actually, there are occasions when the good-at-math/gets-lost-easily things are directly related: I’ll be driving down the street, trying to multiply a couple of three-digit numbers in my head for the hell of it, and suddenly realize that I have never been here before. I’ll have to turn around and go back and frequently get even loster (?) than I was before.
Once I got lost in my apartment. Another time, when I was in grad school, I got lost going to school one morning, after doing it daily for a year.
Once I live in a place for a while, I’m usually better at it, and since I’m single and living on my own I have to pay a bit more attention, but if I have to go anywhere that I haven’t been many times before, it’s best to bring a cell phone and maybe some blankets and food.
Oh yeah; no problem with maps at all. In fact I’m sure I would have strayed off and starved to death by now if not for maps.
Well to be fair to the kabbess, when it comes to sense of direction and orientation, she’s second to none. Unlike me, sadly. When we go out for a walk I’m generally lost within about 30 seconds and entirely dependent on her to get me home. If she ever wanted to be rid of me, she would merely need to take me on a walk in some woods and then run off.
Woods? Who am I kidding. She could do it in a thicket.
Now, the “aha” I can really remember is when I learned how to ski. It’s all weight distribution you know. Suddenly I could parallel turn and all that other shit. Prior to that I just kept falling over.
Examples of where I hit the “Click Wall” and bounced off:
Hmmm… I can’t add 269 and 324 without a calculator. I suck… say it with me now… suck ass at math. Can’t do it for sh*t. Just don’t get it. Whatever you want to say. G-d forbid I should ever have to factor something… I sure hope your life doesn’t depend on it, because you’d be one dead G. I’ve had the same problem with every math class I’ve ever taken, from Calc, to Trig, to Geometry… etc. I got through most of them by cheating. <shrug>
I also can’t read music. I look at a piece of sheet music and it may as well be a thousand year old piece of alien text. Something about sheet music just escapes me and makes it impossible for me to learn, or if I do learn the basics, retain for any length of time beyond half an hour. Same with tablature.
Now here’s the rub:
I’m an excellent programmer. I can code circles around most of my colleagues. Take to new languages and logics like a fish to water. I don’t know… it seems I’ve always been told that you had to be good at math to be a good programmer… something about the logic behind both being very similar. I don’t get math, so I wouldn’t know, but if that’s the case, I seem to be a living contradiction. I don’t see any similarities between math and coding.
I’m also what I would consider to be a passing good musician. Not being able to read music seems to not have hampered at all my ability to write it. In the words of Will Hunting, when it comes to music, I could always just play.
So, there ya go. I don’t know how interesting any of that was, but now you’re stuck with it.
BTW, when I was writing in the OP about an inability to do maths, I was thinking about Kabbes’ board stats at appear in ATMB occasionally. As much as I’d love to understand them, my brain just spazzes at it. I think it’s the [sup]T[/sup]s and [sup]n[/sup]s. I understand theoretically what they’re about… but taken in the context of a wider theory or formula I’m left mentally floundering in a sea of “the proportion is indirectly related to the inverse spiral widget with a degree of mayonnaise on Sunday”.
