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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (41738)	11/14/1999 12:10:00 PM
From: Edwarda	Respond to of 71178

penni, you will really enjoy The Chosen, I think. Do let me know what you think of it when you have a chance to read it. I know what you mean about some of the people on SI. People such as Chuzzlewit have wonderful minds, but their minds are leavened with humor, kindness, and a sense of proportion; they are a joy to know. There are others with whom there is no pleasure in engaging because of their narrowness and plain meanness of spirit. BTW, you are one of the people I enjoy engaging at all times!

To: Rambi who wrote (41738)	11/14/1999 12:20:00 PM
From: Crocodile	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

Hey... a "story" about a test... Couldn't resist... Then I have to go and build a barn door... (-: I have to say that I have a pretty low opinion of tests... If you live out in the country, you see all kinds of wonderful barns with amazing post and beam construction... fabulous roofs... all built by farmers who just scratched out their "reckonings" on a squared timber. I've seen and studied a lot of this stuff while doing architectural research... and have even worked with farmers who are putting up barns to see how they do all of these things... it's amazing... it's mostly just intuition... And I've visited the national archives to go through the old "plans" of a well-know builder-mason from our area and studied his notebooks and building plans to see how he did his calculations...surprise...there usually weren't any... just a few little doodles here and there to roughly show where a door or window would be... and yet the final result would be some amazing stonework... I've seen the same thing when I've worked around guys doing intricate patterned hardwood floors or ceramic tiling... Which brings me back to the original story about "tests".. Many years ago, the province in which I was living began to do some form of standardized testing (a math and a language test). When it came time to do the math test, it had your basic math stuff... addition, subtraction, etc... and then it got progressively more difficult so that you would have those crazy "problems" about trains and clocks and socks in drawers, etc... You didn't have to show how you did each thing, but you had to turn in your "worksheet" with the answer sheet at the end of the test. You could use your geometry set as well. So... I did the best that I could, using whatever way I could find to answer each question. A couple of weeks later, these 2 well-dressed men from the provincial education department came to our school and wanted to "discuss" my test results with me... they said that they wanted to see me "in action" solving some more problems for them because my worksheet didn't give away much about my methodology... a few dots and scribbles here and there on one page..... I was a bit surprised by the attention, but I obliged them. They gave me the first problem... something about trains and distances and times... So I used my ruler to make some dots on the page, and did a circle of 12 dots and a drew a line with little marks on it...and then just "reckoned" out all the distances and minutes and gave them an answer.... They looked at each other rather incredulously and then gave me another problem, and another... Then they seemed to get quite "annoyed"... I suppose they were hoping to be able to declare that they had found some kind of "math genius" ...but instead they found a very weird twirp who used bits of paper and rulers and drawings to come up with measurements and times and other related stuff... BTW, I ended up dropping math a couple of years later... just couldn't show the teachers how I got the answers...which is just about the same as cheating... or so it would seem... I don't really care... Since then, I've built all kinds of interesting structures, worked on complex layouts for magazines, worked out exacting calculations for medicating animals... even for math whiz teacher friends who have sheep farms and don't know how to figure out how much E-Selenium to give a day old lamb... Guess they're smart enough to know when it's time to turn to an idiot savant for advice... (-: