rat

I took three seperate IQ tests prior to sixth grade (three elementary schools requiring them for placement in the upper-echelon classes...WEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!) and scored a mean of 163 on two paper and one oral IQ tests. I took the ASVAB for the Army along with the DLAB (Armed Services Vocational Assessment Battery and Defense Language Assessment Battery, respectively), and I found their format to be roughly similar to the IQ tests. I maxed both the ASVAB and DLAB. The key to all these tests is that they assess your ability to ingest, decode, organize, and assess raw data--in short your ability to learn. They're all focused on pattern recognitions of various types. The DLAB was administered at 0600 at MEPS the morning I took it, and it fucked my head up as I'd had 2 hours of sleep the night before. The thing that saved me was my ability to learn, encode, and decode patterns--which happens to be exactly like learning a language, mathematics, or any other basic area of study. You learn the rules, you apply the rules, and formulate responses.

True IQ tests are classified as 130+ as genius. The key to genius is not the quantity of data inside a person's head, but rather their ability to receive it, process it and apply it to the world as we know it.

The other key to life is that little thing "common sense." My father raised me to be practical, and as I became more worldly, I found my common sense increased as things became habit and thinking ahead became natural--but I found my success in the classroom diminishing as I was surrounded by intellectuals in my classes who lived in worlds of pure ideals, black and white situations, and none of the gray areas that define life would sink in with them. Frustration ensued, and I began to tune out professors and peers alike as I gravitated towards people that could survive in the real world on their own.

The irony was also that many of my classes had people who weren't intelligent in an educational sense. I'll always remember discussing the thrust stage we were building for our musical my junior year of high school with my theatre teacher. I was weighing the merits of freehand sawing a length of 4x4 or mitre-sawing it, and was explaining to him why we needed to be "flush" with the floor on each corner and on each support. Then some broad in my class goes "don't you think you're so hot using all those big words?" I blinked, did a double-take and asked "What, using flush as intended for carpentry?" Hands on her hips, indignant set to her jaw, "Yeah, you think you're so smart." ... Blinked again, and said "Flush has five fucking letters in it. That's one more letter than 'Dumb' and the same amount of letters as 'Bitch', both of which apply to you currently." I don't know if I've ever been dumbfounded by that degree of stupidity ever again...

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