Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The title is slightly misleading; I meant to say that I’m a Wheel of Fortune Idiot Savant or something approaching that classification. If you’ve watched Wheel of Fortune with me, you know that I’m a freak: a freak that’s really good at getting the puzzles before everyone else. :-)

Crissy and I talked about this for a bit and we have a theory on why I have this skill. We immediately ruled out evolution; I’m guessing game-show skills aren’t selected for in the Indian subcontinent.

To explain, let me tell you about my childhood (pull up a chair and relax). We moved a lot when I was a kid. I ended up going to 5 elementary schools in 3 states in 4 different school districts. This meant I never followed a “standard” curriculum.

To make matters worse, I went from good east coast schools to Alabama (cough) and then to good Colorado schools. It’s not that big of a deal; thanks to Mom and Dad teaching me things early and giving me frequent access to all the books I wanted (yay for libraries!), I had an good foundation.

One strange thing that happened though is I never took phonics as a kid. I could read very well, but I never had a formal phonics based education. So technically, my literacy is the memorization based model. My main symptoms of this are having bad spelling as a kid and not recognizing some obscure, esoteric words in print, though I know their meaning and use.

As a result, Crissy and I have lots of conversations like this:

• “Crissy, what’s this word?” [pointing at a word in a book]
• “Oh, that’s [some word]. I’m not sure what exactly it means.”
• “Oh, that. It means [definition].”
• “If you knew what it meant, why did you ask me what it was?”
• “Because I’m stupid, you know that.”
• “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

Anyway, so why do I think I’m good at Wheel of Fortune? Because the foundation of my language skills is memorization with pattern based recognition. Remember all those experiments that show how people can still read text if only the word length, and first and last letters are correct? That’s how my brain works.

The whole point of Wheel is for you guess the answer based on the word length and some correct letters. I’m good at that; I’ve been doing it all my life.

So Phase One: move around a lot as a kid and learn to read the “wrong way”. Phase 2 is to get on the game show. Phase 3? Obviously, Phase 3 is “Profit”. ;-P