Smarty Pants

Lately I have become concerned that being out of a classroom has left me quickly falling into the depths of dumbness. The lack of information being forced into my mind and the lack of requirement to make sense and/or spell things correctly in a paper or public classroom response have allowed me to lower my standards to an alarming level. I’m not going to lie; I was never a big reader in college. I was pretty good at getting the “gist” through classroom discussions and found if you read the first 2 chapters, the middle chapter and the last two chapters, you are pretty much up to speed in 1/4 of the time.

But I did always pride myself on my ability to articulate my point well in papers. As all of you have probably noticed, I have an uncanny way with words. But now I find myself misspelling the most common things. Today I almost spelled caps with a K. In my first draft of this post I spelled ‘swung’ as ‘swong’ and ‘original’ as ‘ariginal’. What makes this even more difficult is that I’m too proud to resort to spell check. I will re-type the mistake over and over in Word waiting for the red squiggly line underneath to disappear. You can imagine how much time is wasted adhering to my stubbornness. I tap at my brain and think to myself, you graduated from college, Anna, why does this word look so weird?
Oh, right, because I spelled traffic with two Rs.

I can’t even articulate my point well in spoken word anymore. I get easily flustered, forgetful and I believe I’m developing a stutter. The other day, the little boy I nanny ran in front of me as we crossed the street. He was safe but I still I yelled out a gentle reminder, “hey, stay on the… the… the lines… shit what is that word? The yellow lines…stay on those while you cross!” I swung my arms around like a conductor hoping the child had eyes in the back of his head and understood what the hand motions meant, because I sure didn’t. When I made it safely across, out of breath and completely mentally exhausted from searching for the correct word, it came to me. Oh, did I mean crosswalk? YES, I DID.

I have never been more consciously aware of my intelligence than I am now, when I’m no longer being graded on it. I have come to turn to the “story time” portion of my nanny job to get some new information. I first want to say everything is much easier to learn and remember when it is in rhyming form. So thank you, Dr. Seuss, I now know that all the planets of our solar system can fit in Jupiter! I also now know that it’s spelled Jupiter not Jupitor.