Edjumacation are kool!

I named this blog Rural Nerd Tales for a reason, I've been calling myself a nerd since I was a kid. I was good at math and science, and enjoyed history class more than anyone else in school. I wasn't a good student, because the shit was boring all the fucking time. Except for second grade. That was my favorite year of school. The teacher also introduced me to science, he did the hard cooked egg sucked into a glass bottle using nothing more than a lit match. When that egg got sucked into the bottle, it was like magic, and then he told us how air pressure works. I was hooked from that day on. He also blew up a desk too, but that just solidified him into being the fucking coolest teacher that school ever had. Not only did he torch a classmate's books and school work but we got to see our fire department in action, that wasn't a drill that day. How he wasn't fired we will never know, but everyone wanted to be in his class after that, and I was reborn into a nerd.

A couple weeks ago I decided to check out Khan Academy, I saw it on the Windows App Store and installed it because it was free and I'm a sucker for a freebie. My Angry Birds addiction is still going strong, QUIT FUCKING ADDING LEVELS! But after loading the Khan Academy app, and it did not work, for what ever fucking reason Windows 10 decided and I cannot fix this, I uninstalled it and just went through the browser. The first thing I did was check out the math section. I always felt I had a good grasp on math through school. I liked calculus and could do a lot of trigonometry in my head because it was easy once you knew what the hell needed to be done. I skipped a couple grades of math back in seventh grade, really, how hard could seventh grade algebra be? At first the problems were fucking easy. Multiplying multiple digits together, easy. Adding fractions, easy as well. Most of that shit I don't remember from being in my algebra classes but okay, it's been more than twenty years, maybe it's just all added in now. Then it got to long division of multiple decimals into decimals. Fuck! I couldn't remember how the fuck to do those. I refused to use the goddamn calculator, I passed this shit with ease back in school. Why the hell could I not remember how to do this. Son of a bitch, I felt like a fucking moron.

With the failing of that part of math I decided to say fuck it and go all the way back to the first grade level. Counting. An hour I spent on those, not because they were hard or anything. Shit, I still count on my fucking fingers once in a while, this was nothing. Which shape has the most sides, with nothing but a triangle and a square for options. How many ducks are there? How many blue squares are needed to fill in the rest of the big square? Which is a rectangle? One of these things is not like the other, which one is it? First grade math is nothing. And I did get a couple wrong, but that was because I didn't bother reading all the instructions. The whole, I got this, adult mindset kicked in. I stuck with that stuff for so long because it felt good, failing at that one subject dented the hell out of my pride. Second grade math was simple too, it was including adding large numbers (three digit was the largest it got to) and they introduced subtraction as well. Went back to doing this shit in my head. Easy. Passed through that and into the third and fourth grade stuff easily too. Finally I got to the long division again, the easy stuff that didn't involve those goddamn decimals. Pride and ego were back to where it needed to be. Got back to decimal division again, and came to the same road block. Dammit!

They have a button called, surprisingly enough, “I haven't learned this yet” and I hadn't clicked on anything other than to go to the next problem. I clicked it and a video pops up, with a guy that has a very soothing voice, explaining each step on how to do these math problems. Holy shit! I felt a little stupid but no longer because I couldn't remember some knowledge I gained decades before. The stupidity was because I didn't look at everything, and then remembering how I missed a fucking counting question was even more embarrassing, for the same goddamn reason. Now, not only do I know how to fucking do seventh grade math again, but I'm just busting through that stuff once again. I'm going to have to check out the science stuff they have there because I know I've forgotten a lot of it in the twenty or so years out of school. They have coding too. And history as well. Relearning something is good, and if they had this when I was a kid I would have gotten better grades. Unlike how they just let me constantly die of dysentery on every trip on the Oregon Trail. The site is great and I highly recommend it to you readers with kids, because when you fail at counting, they're just going to have more reason to laugh at you.