I’ve learned a lot in darkness. I was the queen of the all-nighter in grad school; I gave lessons. It was so much easier to concentrate when it was dark and quiet. Concentrate—that’s what we were trying to do in school.
Kids today talk about focus—it’s a teacher word. When I was a kid “focus” was for eye exams. For all the stupid stuff we were told as children, at least we weren’t told to focus. Nobody explained focus, change, transition, or emotions—common chatter in today’s parenting books. Nobody explained much of anything at all, except how to color in the dots of the Scantron tests. They were new.
“Do not make stray marks.”
What were stray marks and why were they so bad? They were definitely worse than lying, cheating, and chewing with my mouth open.
When you’re learning words and other new stuff so fast, you’re also learning about how to learn these things. I was pretty young when I discovered the inky learning of night: third grade multiplication tables. My first all-nighter was the eights at eight.
Sixteen, twenty-four—oh that’s easy—music time. But how would I ever remember a number like fifty-six. How does that fit into anything. Seventy-two was a strange number at first but I liked that it was twenty-seven backwards—my birthday date. Once I got used to it, it made a great landing pad for my nervous chant through the eights. “Seventy-two, my old friend. I’m almost there.”
Adults have different problems with multiplication. For example, divorce times backstabbing times sick child, times crazy boss, times stopped-up toilet equals chest-pounding tremors. Nobody prepares you for this kind of multiplication. When you lose the numbers you lose all kinds of certainty. For one thing, there’s no way to check your work. And no one wants to see your miserable little on-the-fly-process, except the doubt-mongers and second guessers. You’ll be re-assembling incomplete records forever if you start listening to them.
But if you think adult multiplication is hard, wait till you get to Division. Everyone, even the teacher, agrees that division is a terrible word.