2nd Grade Claim to Fame

I was talking over Optimize Me!'s bio-feedback scheme with my wife today, and she implies that they would remember me from my earlier visit. I expressed doubt, and she disagreed. She was sure they would remember me because they had run out of math problems for me to do.

During the evaluation at Optimize Me! they had me alternately relaxing and then performing simple mental exercises. One of these exercises is to perform a series of simple mental arithmetic problems: two times three, four plus five, that sort of thing. Afterwards they told me that they have a script they follow, and I did all the math problems so quickly that they ran out of problems and had to start making them up on the fly.

When I was in second grade (at Lafayette Elementary School in West Seattle back in 1958), our teacher used to play records of simple math problems for us. I was so good at it that one day she turned the record player up to top speed just to see if I could do the problems that fast. I think she told the rest of the class not to bother trying, they were just going to see whether I could do it or not. Not only was I able to answer all the problems, I got them all right. Yay! I was a second grade math prodigy, high point of my career in math..