Out of my depthAs a schoolkid, I signed up for a public speaking contest purely as a ruse to meet girls. It haunts me still: in front of 300 people, I started to speak, dried up, stood there for what felt like half an hour staring at the floor and then slowly walked back to my seat. Oh, and the girl I liked laughed.
Have you ever been utterly, completely, devastatingly out of your depth?
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chthonic, Thu 14 Oct 2004, 15:07)
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AO MathsBeing relatively bright in my yoof, I did maths GCSE a year early, then did something called Maths additional O-Level (or AO Maths). Was completely out of my depth from day one. Simultaneous equations. Mechanics. Woosh, straight over my head. Fortunately for me at the time my maths teacher was the laziest fat bastard I've ever met (we saw him teaching his kid to ride a bike on the playing field once, the kid was riding around and he was following him in his car). So instead of marking our work he made us mark our own (didn't even have to swap work! What a twat). So I just copied down what he said, then worked backwards from that so it looked like i'd worked it out. This worked for the whole year but backfired spectacularly come exam time. I did what I could do in about 30 minutes, got bored etc. One of the questions was to do with how far a ball had travelled when thrown, so I wrote an essay about did that mean distance relative to the ground, or distance of the arc actually through the air? That filled another 30 mins. So the remainder of the time I coloured in a whole sheet of A4 paper (both sides) with solid black biro.
As it turned out I passed.
(, Tue 19 Oct 2004, 17:28, Reply)
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