The cafeteria traffic light…
6 minute read
January 10, 2026, 12:46 AM
Recently, I was thinking about the cafeteria in elementary school. No particular reason why, but seeing as I have a lot of time for thinking when I’m on the train, it just sort of popped into my mind.
When I attended Bonnie Grimes Elementary School from 1987 to 1992, we had one of those traffic signal-style noise monitors in the cafeteria. It was about the size of a real traffic signal, and shaped similarly to one. It was freestanding, being attached to a fairly simple wooden base. It was one of those things that would measure the ambient noise level in the room, and meeting different thresholds that were set in the device would change the aspect, i.e. below a certain level activated the green light, a noise level between a lower and upper threshold activated the yellow light, and above the upper threshold activated the red light and sounded an alarm. I believe that the product name was “Buddy Buzzer” (as told to us by my first grade teacher), though I could find scant reference to the product online, because presumably, the Buddy Buzzer product has been discontinued for decades at this point, and the manufacturer may very well be long out of business.
Interestingly, Grimes didn’t use the traffic light consistently through my five years there. They used it early on when I was in first grade, as it was one of the many new toys that the school got to play with that came when outfitting a brand new school building. Then after what felt like a relatively brief run, they stopped using it, and then it sat unplugged in a corner for the remainder of that year. It saw no use during my second and third grade years, languishing in a corner in the cafeteria, looking all forlorn. Then in December of my fourth grade year, they dusted it off and put it back in service, using it in the cafeteria for the remainder of the year. Then for fifth grade, it was back in the corner. I don’t know what they did with it after that, and I sort of wonder if it’s still knocking around there in a back room somewhere, or if they finally pitched that thing.
Continue reading…Categories: Elementary school
Remembering retail and respecting copyright…
12 minute read
July 9, 2025, 9:35 AM
Recently, while I was browsing Facebook, I found a post by a page called Remembering Retail, which focuses on retail-related nostalgia of various types. I have been familiar with this page for a while, as Facebook serves it up to me on a regular basis, despite that I have never formally followed it. In this particular instance, the post discussed Ames, a now-defunct discount store. The photo that accompanied the post was this one from my visit to the Gordmans store in Waynesboro, Pennsylvania on August 20, 2020:
Categories: Copyright infringement, JMU, Retail, Social media
Maintaining a healthy work-life balance…
13 minute read
May 30, 2025, 1:05 PM
Recently, I was thinking about how some people do a remarkably poor job maintaining a healthy separation between home and work, and making sure to have a life outside of work. I also can’t help but think that it’s the logical result of conditioning that we all received as children. As children, after all, we start out being pretty good at setting boundaries, as any child that says “no” about something could probably attest to. But then the ability to maintain boundaries and to maintain a healthy separation between the different parts of our lives is trained out of us as we grow up, and as adults, we have to relearn how to set those boundaries and relearn how to set and maintain that separation between work and having a life.
I would argue that this lack of respect for boundaries between various parts of one’s life starts very early, in school. I remember that school liked to make a lot of demands of my time outside of school. Homework, school projects, and the like taught us all that school was your entire life, and that this took priority over all of your other activities. It actually got to the point where I was made to felt guilty about engaging in activities that I enjoyed because I “should” be doing things for school instead.
I know that I’ve said a lot of negative things about my elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas, but homework was one thing that Grimes did right: they didn’t assign any. Later in my school career, after leaving Grimes, they told us that the goal was to have an hour or so of homework every night. Grimes didn’t assign any, and we did all of our work at school. I appreciated that, because it meant that once school was over, I could leave school at school and focus on my various other interests. In other words, it was a healthy separation between school and personal. My parents, on the other hand, were always critical of that, suggesting that it was wrong that Grimes didn’t assign daily homework. However, I suspect that some of their criticisms of the school were rooted in the idea that everything in Arkansas was bad or wrong because it was Arkansas. They didn’t really want to move out there in the first place, but it was a good career move for Dad at the time. But as far as the homework went, I was fine with not having any, because I understood that school happened at school, and my personal life happened at home.
Sometimes, you wonder if they’ve ever listened to themselves…
14 minute read
May 20, 2025, 2:22 PM
Recently, I was on Threads and found a post about the fallout from an Advanced Placement (AP) exam that was interrupted by a fire alarm at Davis High School in Kaysville, Utah. According to the linked article, a fire alarm sounded at Davis High School on Monday, May 12, about three and a half hours into a four-hour AP calculus exam, which required that the school be evacuated, which lasted about thirty minutes. The alarm was determined to be accidental, caused by a stray balloon that interfered with the operation of a beam detector designed to detect smoke using infrared light. When students returned to the testing room after the emergency was over, they were informed that their exam was invalidated. Students were then told that they could either submit their exams as they stood when the fire alarm went off, or they could retake the exam on either May 22, which is the same day as the school’s graduation ceremony, or they could retake the test on May 28, after they had all graduated.
First of all, for those who are not familiar, Advanced Placement, commonly known as AP, is a program run by the College Board, which is the same organization that administers the SAT. High school students take specially-designated AP courses in high school, and the instruction culminates with an AP exam, which is given in May on a date that the College Board determines. The exam consists of several sections, and then it’s all sent off to the College Board for scoring. You get your score some time during the summer, typically in July. You get a score between one and five for the AP exam, with five’s being the highest. This score is then used by colleges to determine whether to award credits for the equivalent courses in their programs. Because of the third-party scoring, as well as the timing of when the scores come out, there is no way for an AP exam score to be used as part of the grading for the high school’s purposes. Thus this exam only determines credit for the next level of education, i.e. college. Then you only find out what your AP scores were really worth once you enroll in a college and they determine how to apply your scores. In my case, I got a 3 on my AP history exam during my junior year, a 2 on my English literature and composition exam and a 4 on my US government exam during my senior year. JMU, where I attended college, at the time would award course credit for a score of 4 or above. So the AP English literature score wasn’t worth a bucket of warm spit, and we knew that as soon as we saw it, but at the same time, we weren’t surprised, because I had struggled in that course, for reasons that I have discussed previously. We knew that my AP government score would get me course credit, and as it turned out, my 3 for AP history was a moot point, because that course satisfied the same general education requirement that the government class did, and I had gotten credit for that.
Categories: Companies, High school, Ride On, Social media
The trend of redacting anything and everything whether it needs it or not is getting really old and needs to stop…
14 minute read
February 12, 2025, 2:38 PM
One of the things that has bothered me about online content for a while is when people will redact portions of an image whether it needs it or not, often the faces of bystanders, license plates, or otherwise. They’ll do it either by the electronic equivalent of scribbling something out like one might do with a pen on a physical image, or by placing goofy oversized emojis over people’s faces. The problem with this behavior is that it draws attention to the very thing that the people doing the redacting are ostensibly trying to make disappear. In other words, these various redactions draw the focus off of whatever the person wants us to see, and the first thing we notice is this big smear of color that shouldn’t be there.
While this behavior has annoyed me for quite a while, there was recently some discussion in a group of fire alarm nuts that I’m part of after I posted a photo of the alarms in my old elementary school, Bonnie Grimes Elementary in Rogers, Arkansas. Late one night, I decided I wanted to check up on Grimes and see how they were doing. No one that worked there when I attended is still there, and that’s been the case for a while (and I suspect that a lot of the present-day teachers there are younger than me), so I really was just checking on the building itself, since I don’t know anyone in any of the photos. So I went to their Facebook page and went for a dive. I commented on a few photos. One photo that I commented on was about the spelling bee, about how I had done the same thing on that same stage three decades prior. Another one was about the addition of a second set of glass doors at the main entrance to form a vestibule. There was no vestibule in the front before. Just go through the front door and that was it. I also commented on a photo showing a metal play dome on the playground, mentioning that it was installed when I was a student there in the early nineties and that I was glad that it was still in use, and also about the absence of a wooden play structure next to it that they had built later. All in all, I had a good time doing a virtual visit back to my old elementary school. Based on the photos, the school has been maintained very well over the years. The walls have been painted, and the floors have been replaced, but the place looks amazing, and does not look like a 38-year-old school. My middle and high schools looked far worse back when I attended those schools than Grimes does today, and those schools were half of Grimes’ current age. I also checked up on the fire alarm system, and found, to my dismay, that Grimes finally got a new fire alarm system last summer, and so the Wheelock 7002Ts of my childhood are gone. Though I’ll say that 37 years is a pretty good run for a fire alarm system. It served the school well, and so while I was sad to discover that the alarms that I knew were not there anymore, that old system had more than done its job, keeping thousands of students safe and announcing the start of hundreds of fire drills over the years.
Categories: DC area local news, Elementary school, Fire alarms, Netculture
One of my best years in school…
50 minute read
June 21, 2024, 1:00 PM
Out of all of the school experiences that I’ve discussed in the past, I recently realized while I was out operating the train that I’ve never said a whole lot about sixth grade. That year is a tie with eighth grade for my best year in school, because for the most part, everything that year just worked out really well. It was a year where I learned a lot in new surroundings, and I had a lot of great new experiences.
Sixth grade came on the heels of my absolute worst year in school, i.e. fifth grade. I’ve written about that experience in some detail not once, but twice, but to put it simply, it was an extremely toxic environment where the school was actively working against us, and which we had determined would not get better no matter what we did. Additionally, sixth grade was still part of elementary school in Rogers at that time, so if we had remained, we would have been right back at the same toxic school environment for another year, which have been far less than ideal. I admit that I was a bit wary about wanting to deal with school again, but of course, it wasn’t like dropping out and doing something else was an option. I was absolutely delighted to learn that in my new school district, sixth grade was part of middle school, and not the final year of elementary school. By fifth grade, it was clear that I had outgrown the elementary school format, so moving up to the next tier made enough sense. I was ready to do something new, and I was up for the challenge. It was the perfect stage for a fantastic rebound year after the previous disaster of a year.
On the day that we arrived in Stuarts Draft, we took care of school matters for both my sister and me. She would be starting second grade at Stuarts Draft Elementary School, and I would be starting sixth grade at Stuarts Draft Middle School. And there was another twist: sixth grade orientation was that same night. We all were like, guess we know what we’re doing tonight.
Categories: Fire drills, Middle school, Stuarts Draft
Adventures in the mountains…
21 minute read
April 6, 2024, 6:38 PM
From March 20-22, Elyse and I made our quarterly weekend trip down to Staunton. This was one where the planning was kind of light. We planned the dates and booked the room well in advance (vacation at my work is scheduled all at once for the year in June), but the planning for the actual adveture was a little light. So we just kind of played it by ear. It turned out to be pretty fun, with a few hard want-to-see things, and a lot of happy surprises in between. This trip started out somewhat unconventionally, though. Elyse got an early start in order to see the “Fleet of the Future” event that Metro was running down on the mall, so she left early and took the train down to see that (I went the following week, so stay tuned for my reportback there). I then left at my intended time, and scooped her from Vienna. Once I got Elyse, we were on our way again, heading down I-66 to I-81. The plan for the trip down was to stop in Middletown, where there was a place called Shaffer’s BBQ. We stopped in there for lunch on the September trip, and enjoyed it so much that we went again this time. Then our next stop was going to be Harrisonburg, because Elyse wanted to eat at D-Hall.
When we got off I-66 and onto I-81, though, we immediately noticed that the air was really smoky. We didn’t know what was going on, so we made our planned stop at Shaffer’s and did some research online. I ended up making a Reddit post while I was at Shaffer’s to see what I could find out. Reddit is pretty useful for that, throwing a question out there and then seeing what you get back. Consensus was that there were a bunch of wildfires burning in the state because of dry and windy weather, and that what we saw was most likely wildfire smoke. Okay.
Then after we finished at Shaffer’s, we continued on our trip south, taking US 11 to avoid an issue near exit 291 on I-81. While we were going down the road, Elyse spotted the source of the smoke: a large wildfire to our west. Okay, then. We pulled over and strategized a little bit, looking at Google Maps and figuring out how to tackle this. We ended up playing it by ear, taking various back roads while keeping an eye on our target and navigating closer to it. We pulled over at one point to get our bearings after going for a while without seeing the fire. There, we sent the drone up and verified where it was relative to our location.
Categories: Augusta County, Harrisonburg, JMU, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Travel, Virginia, Walmart
No, I do not have to get anyone’s permission for that…
11 minute read
March 30, 2024, 1:35 PM
It has always amused me about how often people play the permission-of-the-subject card with me. Usually, it comes from someone who is a bit salty about coverage of their activities that may portray them in a negative light. However, recently, someone played this card on a post that I made on Schumin Web‘s Facebook page in regards to a wildfire in Virginia that I recently photographed with my drone. The post was about a photo that depicted a house burning to the ground that I am planning to run as part of a Journal entry about a weekend trip that Elyse and I had recently made:
Categories: High school, Middle school, Montgomery Village, Photography, Schumin Web meta, Social media
The most pointless school day ever…
7 minute read
February 17, 2024, 8:03 PM
This year marks thirty years since the most pointless day of my entire school career. It was the only day that I attended where, if I were to do it all over again, I am 100% certain that I would have skipped it. That was the day that Augusta County decided to have a snow make-up day on a Saturday. Yes, you read that right: they had school on a Saturday.
I suppose that the lead-up to this made enough sense, because in Augusta County, the winter of 1994 was a very snowy one. School was cancelled for a total of 16 days over the course of that winter for various weather events, including one instance where we were out for the entire week. The thing about Augusta County, though, is that the schools use one calendar across the entire county, but being such a large county (only Pittsylvania is larger), the conditions end up being very different in various parts of the county. So if road conditions would be too treacherous for students in the more rural western part of the county to go to school, they would call a snow day. Thus, students in the more urbanized eastern part of the county (where I lived) would also get the day off, but our roads, being more heavily traveled, would typically be fine. So with 16 snow days, three were built into the calendar, i.e. they made the school year 183 days long, assuming that we would have at least three snow days, i.e. those snow days were essentially freebies because the calendar already accounted for them. That in itself was a first for Augusta County, as the previous year had no built-in snow days at all, therefore all of the snow days that we had that year had to be made up. For a region that is north enough to get a lot of snow but south enough to where people still freak out over it, it’s surprising that they didn’t build in snow days before 1993, especially considering that the previous year had 14 snow days (why do I still remember this?). So accounting for the three built-in days, that meant that we had to make up 13 days.
The way that Augusta County allocated make-up days was something that I disagreed with. They generally preferred to use existing time off within the year for make-up days before extending the year out into June. While they would add some days at the end of the year before some holidays, they only were in the make-up day plan after one or two other school holidays, conference days, teacher workdays, etc. had already been taken away. So having 16 snow days, we were going to school five days a week from the last snow event in March all the way to June 17, with no breaks of any kind, as every single teacher workday, parent-teacher conference day, and long holiday weekend had been commandeered for instruction. I would have preferred to just tack every single make-up day onto the end of the year in June and leave the breaks intact, because I felt like those off days had value because they prevented burnout all around (and trust me, the burnout was heavy that year, and was exacerbated by jackoffs like Frank Wade, who were more than happy to remind us that we had our Memorial Day holiday back in January). And really, with the schools’ being out for more than two months in the summer already, it’s not like anyone would really notice an extra week. If they had extended it out to June 24 or beyond, I doubt anyone would have cared much, except maybe those families who planned big vacations immediately after school let out (and they should know that the end date for the school year is really not set in stone until spring).
Categories: Augusta County, Middle school
A weekend in Augusta County, unsupervised…
28 minute read
December 22, 2023, 5:00 PM
I did my quarterly trip down to Augusta County on December 13-15, and this time, unlike most occasions when I do this trip, I was doing it completely unsupervised. Elyse was pet-sitting for a friend of ours, and so she was in Fort Washington while I went down to Virginia. With that in mind, I took full advantage of this situation, packing in all of the stuff that I would want to do that Elyse would probably not have the patience for. In other words, lots of drone photography, mostly photographing Augusta County school buildings, with the thought’s being that very few people would get good aerials of these relatively small schools. I had a good time, and I felt very productive.
I got out of the house around 11:00, and then hit the road. This was a trip where I went down via US 29 and back via I-81, and things immediately did not look good, as I encountered major traffic on the Beltway. That was annoying, but I recovered well enough, though I did start to contemplate how much of a difference it would have made to go an alternate route for a Charlottesville trajectory, with the thought’s being to 270 to 15 to 29, going via Point of Rocks and Leesburg, or something similar to that. After all, the alternate route works well when I’m going to I-81. That alternate route bypasses the Beltway and I-66, going to I-81 via US 340 and Route 7 via Harpers Ferry and Winchester, and only adds seven minutes to the trip. I ran my proposed alternate route for 29 through Google, and it adds about thirty minutes to the drive to go across Montgomery and Frederick counties via local roads, and then 15 at Point of Rocks, and joining 29 just south of Haymarket. This also bypasses the busiest part of my route on 29, in the Gainesville area. The question really becomes a matter of whether this alternate route is worth the additional time to travel it vs. dealing with the annoyances of the Beltway and 66, as well as the additional cost involved with taking the express lanes.
In any case, once I got to the express lanes on the Beltway, I took them, and continued in the express lanes on I-66, because I didn’t want to risk any more delays. I made a pit stop at the Sheetz in Haymarket, and then from there, I took 15 to 29 and then the rest was normal for a trip down via 29. The plan was to dip into Warrenton on the way down to photograph some converted restaurant buildings. I had spotted a few of these on past drives through Warrenton, and now I was going to do them, along with whatever else I found interesting on the way down. This was also why I hit up the Sheetz in Haymarket rather than the third Sheetz (Bealeton) like I normally would. Warrenton came before the third Sheetz, and I wanted some food inside of me before I got busy.
Categories: Augusta County, Charlottesville, Family, High school, Middle school, Staunton, Staunton Mall, Stuarts Draft, Travel, Waynesboro, Woomy
Playing with the AI image generator…
22 minute read
October 27, 2023, 10:02 AM
Recently, a friend of mine posted some computer generated images from the Bing Image Creator, which uses the DALL-E system as its base. I enjoyed their posts, so I decided to take it for a spin myself with subjects that were more relevant to me. My first idea was to have it generate me. The way I saw it, ChatGPT kinda sorta knew who I was, so it seemed reasonable to see if Bing Image Creator could perform similarly.
The first prompt that I gave it was “Ben Schumin in Washington, DC” and this is what it produced:
Categories: Afton Mountain, Artificial intelligence, Baltimore, Fire alarms, Honda HR-V (2018), JMU, Kia Soul, Mercury Sable, Stuarts Draft, Today's Special, Toyota Previa, Washington DC, WMATA
The group process interview…
8 minute read
October 16, 2023, 9:30 AM
Recently, while I was alone with my thoughts while operating the train, I recalled the weirdest job interview that I ever had. That was the “group process” day that the Office of Residence Life at JMU did as part of their selection process for new resident advisors, at least back when I went through in the early 2000s. You spent most of the day in Taylor Hall with the Residence Life people, doing various activities with your fellow candidates so that the hall directors could see how well you worked as a team. The sense that I got was that it was well-intentioned, but it was a bit misguided, because the dynamic was quite different from what one would experience in real life, and thus the utility was quite limited.
The way that it worked was that they put everyone in groups of about five people, and those were the people that you would be working with throughout the day. Then they rotated you through a number of different rooms, where they had different scenarios for you to work through as a group. I don’t remember all of them, but one of the situations that they put us in was where we had to get everyone from point A to point B across what was supposed to be a dangerous moat or something. One person was not allowed to see, I believe, and another person was not allowed to speak. I was the no-speak person in that exercise, which was a challenge for me, but we all made it across successfully.
At the end of the day, you were asked to do an evaluation of how the group process interview went, as well as an evaluation of your own performance in their interview. Then the group process interview was followed by two conventional one-on-one interviews at a later date. One interview was with one of the next year’s hall directors, i.e. the people who would ultimately be selecting the RAs, and the other was with a member of the full-time staff, such as an area coordinator (i.e. the hall directors’ bosses). Those were pretty straightforward, being your typical job interview, where the interviewer asks you to share times when different things happened in your life and/or career, and find out how you handled them.
Twenty years out of college…
17 minute read
July 12, 2023, 12:20 PM
This year marks twenty years since I graduated from college, and in seeing all of the people posting stuff about college graduations and such on Facebook these last few months, it’s made me realize that I have a lot to say about my college experience. It’s one of those things where I wish that I had known then what I do now, and it makes me wonder how things might have gone if I had reached the same present as today, but knowing what I know now.
It’s worth noting that with the passage of time, I have come to view my college years in an increasingly negative light. In the moment, as documented in my College Life website, which now serves as an archive of what was once a section of the main website, I was having a pretty good time and enjoying life – or at least that’s the public face that I tried to put on about it. The truth is that I never felt a sense of belonging there, my performance caused me to develop a major inferiority complex while there, and I coped with the stress of the environment in unhealthy ways. I believe that the root cause of all of my difficulties was a then-undiagnosed case of autism. However, high-functioning cases of autism like I have still weren’t really looked for and diagnosed like they are today. I was not formally diagnosed diagnosed with autism until 2022 at the age of 41, when I finally decided to put the question to rest.
First, though, when it came to my deciding whether or not to go to college, that was never really a decision. My parents had determined, practically from conception, that I would go to college, and that was that. When it’s been drilled into your head that you were going to college like it was a commandment from on high or something for your entire life, that’s just what you did, largely from not knowing any better, and that you would then get a “college job” after getting that degree. So growing up, any thoughts that I might have interest in fields that didn’t require a college education were more or less quashed, and any exploration of those fields was discouraged because that conflicted with my parents’ plan to send me to college. It was also strongly implied that any path that did not lead to a college degree was a failure, because it didn’t live up to my parents’ expectations for me. It caused me to think that the people who went down the vocational track in school were failures, because they couldn’t get into college. I understand that my parents wanted what they thought was best for me, and they considered a college education to be that thing, but the mindset that they inadvertently instilled was quite toxic, and it took many years to unlearn. I suppose that was something of a failure on their part, because with my now being the same age as they were when they were raising me, they almost definitely knew better about jobs that didn’t require a college degree, but that’s not what they instilled in me, intentionally or not.
A missed (or ignored) opportunity to really do some good…
16 minute read
May 9, 2023, 8:39 AM
I’m sure that you all are familiar with how terrible my seventh grade year was at Stuarts Draft Middle School. I’ve written about it at some length, and also discussed it a little bit more after my autism diagnosis last year. Recall that during seventh grade, I had a large problem with bullying, both from the students and from the staff. In fact, that year was unusual because of heavy bullying from fellow students as well as staff. Most of the time, the bullying largely came from the staff, and bullying from fellow students was less so (though it did happen), but in seventh grade, it came from all over pretty consistently (Michael Stonier was just the most memorable of many), and I was miserable for it.
Frank Wade, the chief bully on the staff side that year, had referred me to guidance for my alleged “problems”, and I would visit with Jan Lovell, the guidance counselor, on a weekly basis for the remainder of the year. I didn’t mind going to guidance, because while they were terrible in their own right with their continued attempts to gaslight me into thinking that I was the problem rather than the victim, it meant that I wouldn’t have to deal with my bullies for a time. In hindsight, though, this was just exchanging one bully, i.e. Mr. Wade and all of the kids that he enabled, for another bully, i.e. Mrs. Lovell the guidance counselor, but one bully was easier to handle than multiple bullies at once, though it was still crappy no matter how you sliced it.
Recently, I was thinking about one thing that I brought to Mrs. Lovell towards the end of the year, and I realized that she either missed or deliberately chose to ignore a tremendous opportunity to look into a bullying problem in the school. It really made me think that while I don’t know how much they were paying her to be the guidance counselor, whatever it was, it was probably too much. At that point in the year, I recognized that things were very bad, and I also recognized that the chances that things would improve before the end of the year were slim to none. To that end, I had already mentally written seventh grade off as irreparable. In other words, I was just doing my best to make it through it, and looked towards the future. To that end, I had prepared a list for the guidance counselor of all of the kids that I did not want to be in homeroom with the following year, with the idea’s being that since guidance was the entity that did student scheduling and such, I was submitting this request to the correct department. It was not a large list, mostly because homerooms were done alphabetically by last name. Therefore, I only had the chance of being in homeroom with people with last names starting with P through Z. So out of about 300 kids in a grade, I only had the possibility of being in homeroom with about 75 of them, and my list was limited to that subset. And considering that students were arranged in three different “teams” in middle school, each belonging to a group of teachers who all worked together with the same kids, what I was really asking was that I be on a different team than these kids in eighth grade.
Categories: Autism, Middle school, Schumin Web meta
Thinking about mental math for a moment…
8 minute read
April 19, 2023, 4:55 PM
I’ve mentioned before that working on the train allows me a lot of time alone with my thoughts. Sometimes that leads to my working through some of my problems and coming up with some solutions, sometimes I am mentally writing out Journal entries, sometimes it just replays traumatic experiences over and over again (though writing that letter and then mailing it to the other driver really helped me make peace with things, i.e. mentally, I think I’m going to be okay), but sometimes, I’m just doing things in my head like figuring out how many presidents have unique first names as far as the list of presidents goes, or doing math of some sort.
Funny thing about math. Growing up, I always thought that I was bad at math. I always tended to struggle in math in school, and looking back, I don’t quite understand why, because as an adult, I’m pretty sharp with math. Give me a calculator, and I can solve just about anything. I’m inclined to blame the various teaching methods used for my math struggles growing up, since it wasn’t until college, when I had Dr. Ed Parker at JMU in a summer math class to satisfy my degree requirements, when he taught us algebra in a way that made things finally fall into place. In other words, the way that we teach math kind of sucks. I also realized that I just plain don’t like division. I find it overly complicated. Flip it around and express it as multiplication, though, and I’m fine – then it all makes sense to me. Similarly, I am never doing long division by hand ever again. It’s too complicated, and besides, it’s not like I don’t always have a device with a calculator on it with me all the time these days. This, of course, is contrary to what the teachers always said growing up, i.e. that we wouldn’t have a calculator with us all the time. Clearly, these teachers never anticipated smartphones in the nineties. It’s an even stranger statement considering that calculator watches already existed at that time, even if they were not the most common of things, meaning that some people already did have a calculator on them at all times, strapped to their wrist.