The Things They Carried

My wife has a new role in the educational system. After more than a decade in the classroom as first a Teaching Assistant and then a middle-school Special Education teacher, she got hired this summer as an Educational Diagnostician. Basically, the diagnostician's role is to test kids who are referred for evaluation for eligibility for a number of different kinds of services, prepare reports based on the test results, and sit on the evaluation panel that makes a determination about the student's eligibility. 

We're about a month in to her new role, and I'd say it's going well. In fact, I got a text from her on Friday which read: "I. Love. My. Job." Instead of working in one school, she supports a cluster of three (one elementary, one middle, and one high school), all of which are within five minutes of our house. Her biggest concerns at the moment seem to be feeling weird that she has free time to get coffee, or leave for lunch, or go to the bathroom whenever she feels like it. Not wherever, like Dave. It makes me happy to see her happy.

There was a moment last week that, while a little bit related to her new role, completely and tangentially took me back nearly 45 years in a flash of memory and stuck with me as an example of how our wildly complex and lunatic brains process information and retain ephemera. 

She was reviewing one of the testing kits that she uses as part of the evaluation process. The battery in question is called the Kaufman Test of Educational Achievement (KTEA). It's a fairly standard instrument that's been in use for a long time. As she flipped through the pages, I had a flashback.

When I was 9 or 10, I was tested by the school in Alabama where I lived to see if I was eligible for the district's gifted and talented program. (I know what you're thinking, and I agree: wasn't it obvious, and why did they even bother with a test?) I don't remember very much about the test, save for one thing, and that memory is as vivid as if it were yesterday. The question in, um, question offered a logic question in the guise of a spatial relations question. I was presented with a square that represented a pasture, and told by the woman doing the testing that my ball was lost in the pasture. The task was to use my pencil to trace the path I would take to most efficiently and effectively find the ball.

Friends, I tell you verily that my pencil tip roamed all over that fucking pasture, to, fro, up, down, diagonally in no particular pattern with no particular rhyme or reason. The lady testing me did an excellent job of disguising her amusement at the little whackadoodle sitting in front of her. My answer looked something like this:

I have no idea whether I found my fucking ball. I remember nothing else about that test, which I passed with flying colors, according to my mother, who I recounted my recollection to over the weekend. But I remember walking out of the test berating myself internally for how badly I fucked up that answer. I knew immediately that my path was batshit dumb. I knew it while I was tracing it, as a matter of fact. And I know that I knew it because my dumb brain won't let me forget it.

For damn near five decades I've remembered that one question from that one battery I took and aced. The memory comes back on a regular basis, and it came flying back when I saw the testing kit my wife was working with. 

Ain't memory a bitch? And ain't it fascinating how we hold on to things that matter not a whit while we forget things of vastly greater import. Maybe it means I'm a creative thinker. Maybe it's a sign that my genius can't be constrained by the normies' notions of efficiency and order. Or maybe there's another explanation.

The lesson, as always, is that I'm an idiot. Turns out I've been on for a long time. At least my wife is happy.