I play a lot of problem solving games to keep my brain limber. There are all kinds of games on the internet, on phones, on various devices that can keep you engages and have your neurons firing.

ION, I had a bloody nose this morning right before I had to leave for work. I hope the rest of you had better mornings...

I definitely had people telling me I was smart, but it wasn't my Japanese parents. However, they were always supportive of me. They didn't pressure me, per se, but they did have high expectations, with which I pressured myself. The stereotype is interesting, though, in that it's what I've complained about most of my life. People assuming I make good grades because I'm Asian and therfore must be naturally smart. And me asserting that maybe I just work really hard.

Only I definitely was lazy and unwilling to pursue what didn't come easily. Which I discovered in seventh grade (I attended a truly excellent middle school, high school nsm) when I was placed in an independent studies program. I was not an independent studies kind of person, and basically I was doing it because my perpetual unrequited crush was in there. Neither condition was conducive to successful studies.

Then I skipped my junior year and subsequently bailed college early, both basically out of academic arrogance. I regret the latter but not the former, although I would not mind retaking the advanced subjects I missed. (I'd been accelerating classes to be able to take the higher maths and sciences, which meant at the end of my sophmore year I realized I had well more credits than I would need to graduate. So I doubled up on Englishes, and then bullied my would-be junior English teacher into letting me write for submission that period in the guidance counselor's office. So skipping was easy but I missed out on trig, calc, and physics, all of which I would have enjoyed.)

This thread gives a lot of recommendations for Khan Academy.

I read about Khan Academy a little while ago, and thought it sounded interesting, then totally forgot about it. Taking a look now.

Trig moved me to tears, except for the portions where we could apply the formulas to real things. I got As in those sections and Cs in the theoretical sections, but to my mind it just meant that practical stuff was easy and theoretical stuff was too hard for me. And Geometry was also easy to me. So I just shrugged and figured I couldn't do theory, and that my teachers were just being nice when they praised me.

Damn, so classic for the situation.

People who are good at cooking: If a recipe calls for sliced zucchini to oven-roast in with the chicken, can I use a bag of frozen, or will it be too mushy at the end?

I not only had the advanced track math & science classes thru high school, the slight majority in those classes were girls! Can't say enough for the peer support that gave me.

( this was mid-70s! )

And I enjoyed the heck out of it, too. But I went to college to become A Writer which in retrospect was a poor choice.

If a recipe calls for sliced zucchini to oven-roast in with the chicken, can I use a bag of frozen, or will it be too mushy at the end?

It will be mushy, but it will still taste good.

I've told my calculus story in here, right?

I completed messed up my first semester of calculus in school because while the math was okay, conceptually I was not getting it. The teacher told us about calculations that involved spinning a washer around an axis and to get the hollow point.

For 5 months, I thought he meant a washer (as in dryer) and I could not get how a 5 cm washer was anything we should worry about. I did not get visually what he was driving at.

It was not until 5-10 years after that, that I learned the name of the metal disks that were lying around my house and that I saw my father use all the time. It was then that I understand why I missed the boat.

Thanks, Jessica!

I don't know whether or not to be surprised that so many of us had similar experiences -- believing we were smart kids, getting by without having to work too hard, and therefore thinking that we just weren't good at anything that didn't come easily. I still feel that way, though at least these days I'm more able to recognize the mindset and talk my way out of it on occasion.

My favorite teacher in HS, both at the time and in retrospect, was Ms. DeFeo, my English teacher in 9th and 11th grade. She gave me my first C, and though I was mortified about it at the time, it did motivate me to work harder in her class, and to realize (maybe for the first time) that being a smart kid didn't automatically mean I'd get As all the time.

She was also a cranky, eccentric, funny, outspoken, unabashed feminist, and she let me write a paper on Jeanette Winterson's Sexing the Cherry. God, I loved her.