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| Image by mohamed_hassan from Pixabay |
*This title is NOT me bragging. It's more of anticipation for when someone asks me this question...which has never happened before. As a tactician, I'm practicing being several steps ahead of my opponents, including earthly life itself.
Some people see me as an incredibly smart kid thanks to my serious personality and ability to talk much longer about a wide variety of topics than other people. I often write in complete sentences in instant messages, if not paragraphs, compared to most people answering with one word or phrase at a time.
While I do acknowledge that some of my abilities, especially in English, are much greater than the average Joe, I often overestimate the intelligence of others as being on par with mine since, for the most part, my mom, brothers, and friends can keep up with the large amount of stuff I say. I should remember that others may have not been raised as well as I was or that they did not have my younger selves' habits.
Speaking of which, it's explanation time.
Childhood (4-8 years old)
Through Studying
Mom and Dad bought us a LOT of educational books and videos when my younger brother and I were little kids. These included Blue's Clues, Dora the Explorer, and Disney's Magic English. I'm glad they never told us these were "educational" as I get how lame-sounding this word sounds to slightly older kids; I enjoyed them as if I was playing normally with toys. Heck, I watched them on repeat.
I was strangely addicted to answering quiz books, mainly about math problems and English vocabulary. I even begged Mom to buy me more.
I had a laptop-like toy full of educational content as well. I grinded that thing like crazy as if I was playing video games even though I kept seeing the same questions repeatedly. I loved when it kept telling me that my score was 100%.
Through Experiences
In addition to the educational materials above, I learned to read by playing Pokémon games over and over. Big Brother taught me some basic logic by explaining type matchups...and why my Pikachu did absolutely nothing to Brock's Pokémon.
I further built upon my practical math knowledge by playing board games and card games a lot. Snakes & Ladders was one of my first steps towards adding 2-digit numbers by 1-digit numbers while Monopoly walked me through numbers in the hundreds and thousands.
Through "Random BS go!" (i.e. trying pointless stuff out for fun)
This is where I think my writing ability all started.
Basketball is the most popular sport in the Philippines and I felt desperate to join the other players on the court but, #1, we don't have a basketball, and #2, I was mostly told to stay home. I know we had basketball in school but I thought there's no way I could get my hands on their ball even if they were playing casually--I was shyer as a kid.
So, as copium, I instead wrote a story called "The Ultimate Basketball Challenge" and had my dad print it while he was at work. I don't remember the plot at all and Dad lost the copy but I bet it was cringe.
As a visual learner, I'm easily attracted to different colors, hence my attachment to a set of different-colored plastic keys. I also wrote a story about them...but I also lost that copy. Man, we barely paid attention to file preservation at the time.
In terms of acting, like pretty much most people, I started out by imitating pretty much everything I saw in fiction, including voices, physical movements, and even sound effects like gunfire. I vaguely remember a video of me shooting imaginary enemies with a toy assault rifle. I wildly flailed my arms and legs around as if I was in a one-vs-many kung fu fight scene. My younger brother and I roleplayed a lot, including but not limited to being US Navy SEALs, buying concert tickets, and...some weirdly cute stuff.
I think my child self would see these as "just for fun" but I realized these seemingly pointless experiences actually helped me in the distant future. I'm now more capable of writing much longer stuff about a wider variety of topics. D&D is now one of my favorite games to play. And...I flex my voice acting ability to my students.
Tweenhood (9-12 years old)
Is "tweenhood" even a word? Whatever. It doesn't seem to be marked as a misspelling by Grammarly, unlike when I put Japanese words in romaji.
Teaching and Being Taught
As a tween, I think my mentality was, "If you're not interested in what I'm interested in, I'll make you interested in it." Yeah...that sounds like a tyrant.
So I bombarded a teacher's assistant almost every day by teaching her how to open a Facebook account and play Facebook games which I was interested in at the time. While she never actually played (I think), she did figure out the Facebook account part.
I can't remember what made my civics teacher say it, but she encouraged me to become a teacher. It's a shame I didn't add her as a Facebook friend...or maybe I unfriended her in a fit of rage or to clean up my account. I want to thank her.
In 5th grade, I struggled a lot with algebra. Consider the problem 2 − 2n = 3n + 17. Big Brother explained to me that coefficients and variables are instead "humans" and "trolls", respectively, and they should not be on the same side because they're enemies. As such, this can be solved, for example, by transferring the 2 humans to the 17 humans and making the 2 humans negative, and the 3n trolls to the -2n trolls and making the 3n trolls negative, giving us -5n = 15. To get rid of the -5, we divide everything by -5, giving us n = -3.
As such, I'm learning to adapt my teachings to the student's interests just like what Big Brother did. Perhaps, instead of asking "What clothes do you like?", I can ask "What video games do you like?"
And I put too many video game references in my schoolwork... (Don't worry, I explain those references to my mostly non-gamer professors.)
Roald Dahl Books
In 3rd grade, instead of reading stories from textbooks, we mainly bought storybooks such as Roald Dahl's. They picked the shorter ones such as The Enormous Crocodile and The Magic Finger.
The illustrations of the Enormous Crocodile's Paper-Thin Disguises were amusing to me: he posed as a seesaw, a coconut tree, a merry-go-round seat, and a picnic bench. Too bad all his sneaky plans were foiled until he was ultimately hurled into the freakin' sun--I actually wanted him to eat at least one child. (Says the kid who was still kind of scared of monsters at the time.)
As for The Magic Finger, I paid more attention to this one in class. We focused mainly on this paragraph:
"Now the one thing that Mr Gregg and his two sons loved to do more than anything else was to go hunting. Every Saturday morning they would take their guns and go out into the wilderness to look for animals and birds to shoot. Even (forgot his name), who was only eight years old, had a gun of his own."
I think this class taught us that the first sentence about the Gregg family loving hunting was the topic sentence--every other sentence after it was related to hunting.
I was particularly shocked at the 8-year-old kid having a gun considering I had a fear of guns at a very young age when my maternal uncle fired a real gun into the air.
I think we never actually finished the books in class, but in my spare time, I blasted through them. I had mixed emotions when the girl's magic finger turned the entire Gregg family into little people with duck wings instead of arms...while the ducks grew human-sized and had arms instead of wings. I thought, "Serves you right for killing those animals!" and "Poor Greggs can't grip things properly anymore thanks to a lack of hands..."
Anyway, where am I going with this? Roald Dahl's books were my first steps towards reading comprehension skills. Unlike in earlier grades where reading comprehension stories felt like tests, we were made to buy these books ourselves, making them feel more similar to the storybooks I read for fun at home. I actually engaged with the characters and plotlines: a stepping stone to me now paying attention to the lore in games like Genshin Impact and comparing real people to fictional characters.
Mom and Dad bought me more Roald Dahl's books as a result, including The BFG and James and the Giant Peach, which I binged for hours and finished. They were longer but the stories were worth it.
This made me able to read much longer books like the Harry Potter series.
Still, don't make me read academic papers that don't have experiment statistics...
Posing as a 14-Year-Old at My Mom's Gym
One time at the mall, there was an area where some gym staff were advertising. They left a stationary bike which anyone in the public can use...and I loved it.
When Mom invited me to her gym when I was 12 years old, I was nervous but also excited. There were a LOT more bikes in there, in addition to a bunch of other gym equipment like treadmills and fun stuff like TVs.
I continued to go to that gym for 2 years until Mom signed me up for a gym dedicated to boxing. I think, to this day, the staff still don't know my real age.
For context, the minimum age of entry at that gym is 14. They don't want kids trashing the place now, do they? (Trust me, though--although I acted like a chuunibyou with my stunts and fight moves, I didn't actually trash anything.)
How does this make you smarter?
Exercise stimulates blood flow through the body, including the brain, making mental work much easier. It also makes sleep much more comfortable.
Teens (13-17 years old)
Actually Applying Video Game References
In 8th grade, I did a science presentation about electricity with another classmate. I made her do the writing while I did the visual design and arranged things coherently.
I also made some Minecraft references in the process, mainly with redstone.
Though the presentation wasn't graded, my science teacher gave it a 9 out of 10 when I asked her to rate it. Not gonna lie, I still brag about it 'cause this wasn't the only nice thing she did to me--I still talk to her occasionally.
Boxing for the First Time
In January 2014, when I was 14 years old, Mom signed me up for a boxing gym. Long story short, in addition to watching fightTIPS videos, my Dexterity has significantly improved to the point it's even greater than my Intelligence.
I'm more capable of striking weak points and dodging incoming attacks and vehicles.
Fighting aside, Dexterity really comes in handy when beating deadlines and mashing my keyboard while teaching English or doing the Spiral Abyss.
9th-Grade Essays
9th grade put a lot more focus on essay writing than simply answering, say, math problems, one-sentence comprehension questions, or multiple-choice questions. The teachers really emphasized this since my classmates had really badly written "essays", usually one-sentence answers.
They really wanted our essays to have at least 3 paragraphs: an introduction, a body, and a conclusion.
I hated this kind of schoolwork at first since I wasn't really good at expressing my opinions in detail...but I guess being urged to get better made me get better. Perhaps I thought of it like I'm explaining a new concept to someone. Or maybe like I'm ranting.
I placed Top 9 in the final exam.
Using Video Game Features to Compare People
While I did this way back as a tween, teenhood is where I properly learned how to do this mainly using traits from The Sims 3.
This was one of my first steps to finding out who's worthy of being a friend and who's not. For example, I get along with Geniuses well but not Hot-Headed people.
Today, I find that many Hopeless Romantics are also Couch Potatoes or, even worse, Mean-Spirited... (Says the Hopeless Romantic lunatic who plays video games a lot!)
Young Adulthood (18 Years Old-Present)
Starting This Blog
I started this out of rage because Mom kept telling me to start earning money and my grades in college were pretty bad. This was a form of rebellion against the sheer complexity of academic writing where I can write...pretty much anything in any way I like.
Little did I know this would also improve my academic writing. When writing my posts, I often anticipate questions from readers, allowing me to steadily make my points clearer.
I feel proud that I have written a 6-part Hytale series all about gang wars.
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