Malevolent Dentist by Austin

Malevolent Dentist by Austin - March 2014 Scholarship Essay

This is an anecdote about my incompetence revealing my intelligence and knowledge. Despite sounding more absurd than e-mails from Nigerian princes, it is true. This event took place in geometry class during my freshman year of high school.

I used to, and still do, hate copying someone else’s notes because they don’t think like me. My dentist must have known this, as she collaborated with my mother to schedule an appointment on the day of a geometry test. This meant that I would have to take the test the following monday, and miss taking notes.

One can’t expect a high school student to remember anything after being out of school for any length of time, not even a weekend. This is common knowledge… among the students. I didn’t quite remember what the class was doing during the previous week, but I was sure it would come back to me upon seeing the test. During geometry class on the following monday, the teacher handed me the test and sent me to another room down the hall so the roar of the students in her classroom wouldn’t completely deafen me.

The material did not come back to me. The arcane runes made little sense to me, and I swear I had never seen them in my life. Minutes passed as I stared pensively at the first question before tentatively writing something down. At the end of the class, I had only managed to answer half of them, and I could say with confidence that all of them were wrong. Upon returning the test to the teacher, she took one look at the paper and laughed. If I simply read the title, I would have seen that it was an algebra 2 test, which is a class I would take next year. Out of curiosity, the teacher graded the test, revealing that all the questions I had answered were correct!

Because of my lack of observation, my mathematical abilities were demonstrated. Despite this, I still had to complete the geometry test on tuesday… and copy two days worth of notes from a peer.