Approaching a familiar issue

On another message board, I heard the cry for help…someone wanted to know how he could improve his social skills. I went in the topic amused…not expecting to do anything…but the topic creator said something interesting: his own thoughts on how to improve were to pretend to be interested more.

I had to comment…If you have to pretend, then this should tell you something.

The topic creator misinterpreted what I meant (focusing on the have,) but revealed something more:

I have to pretend. i cannot honestly say that i am interested in what most people are talking about. perhaps changing my current, shitty character to something more appealing is a more suitable way to describe it

Not interested in what most people are talking about..? I took the opportunity to jump into the fray. I suggested that maybe his personality wasn’t to be an extroverted butterfly.

Sure, sure, even if you aren’t extroverted, that doesn’t mean you should be a social shutoff. You have to know the basics and you have to know the way to work the system for networking’s sake. You don’t have to like it and you don’t have to prefer it. But that’s something you have to do. However, what you do in your free time should be what you want to do. That’s, I think, what introversion is about. When you are free, do you want to spend time with others…or not? If you don’t, then I don’t think you should be pressured in slaving your life away at every party or every movie or every…everything. Every everything is something you should only do if you want…because you are a free person.

Well…anyway. I was not unmatched. Immediately, someone leaped at me.

“face the fact” is a bullshit idea. Anyone can change from intro to extrovert if they’re willing to try. Your views suck.

I was unaware of which line to parry first…so I wanted to be sure that this guy was really talking about changing a core aspect of his personality. Introvert to extrovert is paramount…it’s not like changing the clothes you wear. Going to party more might be changing the way you look on the outside, but it doesn’t change how you perceive yourself on the inside. So I asked my opponent: do you really think you can change who you are deep inside?

Yes, and I have. I used to be a shy, introverted little nerd in middle school, then I stopped being stupid, realized that I was heading towards a horrible direction, and started working on change. Now I’m a senior in high school and most people that would meet me (who didn’t know me from middle school) would say i’m an extrovert.

I was still skeptical on whether he had changed his actual thought process or if he had just changed his public facade, but now his true line of attack was clear. He hated being introverted…it brought him down. So he embraced change and sought it.

Of course, as I pointed out, he also hated being shy. I always must point out that shyness is not introversion…so if this person actually hated shyness, he shouldn’t hate introversion too. I couldn’t help him, though. He was set in his mind…

All I know is, ultimately I do not want to be an introvert, because i think that introversion and shyness aren’t personality traits, they’re weaknesses that inhibit a person’s real personality.

If you believe this…then there is no question that you should change. I think that this person, however, has let his personal experiences with shyness cloud his opinion on the legitimate introversion. I…as much as anyone…will fight to always raise awareness for the fact that you can be introverted without being shy. I agree with this poster on his description of shyness, because I more often see people limited by their shyness — who want to change but feel they cannot — than I find people who are ok with it. However, I don’t say the same for introversion.

That is why I must respectfully disagree with this poster. I only what will happen with the topic creator? Will he decide that who he is is less important than a societal ideal of who he should be? Or will he decide, as the poster who opposed me did, that introversion itself can never be who he is!?

Not a math person…

I was thinking about high school again (as my first year in college comes to a close). I realize that back then, I was comically bad at math. Even worse, my reputation seems to have traveled with me a state over to college.

It’s not that I was bad at math (that is, if you can bear that finding that 18 divided by 6 = 4 is not bad math)…I was just bad at calculations…and I still am. If I can latch on to a general theory or the rule behind a system, then things are a little better…but then I’ll make thousands of errors in application.

I wouldn’t say that I hated math back in school. I actually liked most of my math classes…until I got to the point (which always happened very quickly) when I couldn’t figure out the correct answer…one way or another. Sometimes, the theory I needed to use would escape me (or maybe I had never learned it)…other times, I just wouldn’t be able to calculate correctly. In these cases, I really was trying to do things right (no one wants to be frustrated and wrong), but…I guess…as some might say…I was just not a math person. Interesting factoid about me: every B on my otherwise beautiful transcript came from a math or math-like class (chemistry).

It’s funny. Math is supposed to be super logical…so someone who likes logical things should like math. Unfortunately, in my personal pain olympics, I’ve never found that to be true. I find that math is increasingly convoluted and illogical. Its rules are dreamed up by select oracles of autism with the penchant for revelation from the devil on how to make humankind suffer a little more (plz don’t sue me, numerous parties blasphemed just now). Maybe it started with my geometry class…whose teacher never used proofs (how do you to go through a geometry class without ever using a proof?!)…but somehow, since then, I’ve lacked this foundation for math logic that has never quite caught up to me. Things that should be logical don’t seem that way, as a result.

I loved my AP Calculus class, though. It was like a mutual struggle for most of us…my teacher know about the particular geometry teacher and her ill-begotten legacy (everyone in that town does, of course), and so he had taken it upon himself to get us up to scratch with the basics while teaching us the new things (it also helped that he taught a PSAT prep class for sophomores and juniors, so we were able to absorb from that too.) Come to think of it, my AP Calc teacher (also my AP Econ teacher) kicked butt. Also, his wife who was my AP English teacher. There was lots of awesomeness between them and it’ll be sad when they finally retire (which they keep prolonging, fortunately), because then I’ll know that every class that doesn’t have them just won’t be good enough.

Well…even though it was only Cal AB (there would not have been enough interest for a BC class, the school administration told us), I felt good about math. To be honest, I still thought I was hopelessly inferior in the subject…after all, I wasn’t a “math person,” and in some of my other organizations (Academic Decathlon, Panasonic Academic Challenge, quiz bowl in general), I was surrounded by guys and girls who could outrun me many times around the mathematical race track…but I was feeling better about things.

Then came that fateful AP test of 2007. The free response…ugh…brutal…we all thought we had failed. No doubt about it. But I was ok with it, I thought. After all, I wasn’t a math person.

I got a 5.

I had never gotten one on any of our class’s AP run-throughs, of course. I couldn’t quite believe my 5 on the real thing was official (except for the fact that this was the most official result I had ever gotten).

That was a roundabout way of getting to here: what’s the deal with being a “math person” or not? Can’t we be competent either way? Sure, I can’t solve most problems in my head (or on paper) with any reasonable accuracy, but I know how they should work theoretically. It is excruciatingly frustrating and I’d never want to live my life doing it (which is why I’d never become an engineer, but that’s another story), but I am not hopeless and helpless. The moral of this story, I suppose, is that we can’t let labels be our handicaps…we do need to capitalize on our strengths…this is true, but we can’t let or weakness atrophy into nubs.

P.S. Accounting is not about math. I don’t know where people started this, but I really want to punch the person who started this. I have to explain ad nauseum about how the little math that is in accounting is not very advanced and can be outsourced to computers anyway…