A few weeks ago I was helping a kid during after-school tutorials with their AP Stat homework,1 when she said something that struck me funny:

“I wish this stuff came to me naturally.”

I retorted with a “This is STATISTICS. This stuff doesn’t come naturally to ANYONE.”

Nobody goes to school to learn how to change diapers.

And yet there are millions of people on the planet who know how to change a diaper better than anything they went to school to learn how to do. That’s because for most people, at some point in life, changing diapers is just one of those things that you have to figure out in order to make it to the next day.

I feel like being a teacher is full of those types of moments.

This is sure to blow some minds out there, but here’s the truth:

Just about anything that any teacher has taught you, they first had to teach it to themselves before teaching you.2

As far as AP Stat goes, I’ve said it before: It’s at least a degree of magnitude in difficulty above any other high-school level math course, in terms of learning everything well enough to teach to others.

Which got me to thinking: What are some of the most difficult things I’ve taught myself for recreation?

Here is one in particular:

How to read [basic] Japanese

Final Fantasy 3 was released here in America in the Fall of 1994 for the Super Nintendo.3 I rented it from Blockbuster Video4 and after realizing that I wouldn’t be able to finish the game during a rental period, I decided to scratch up some loose change and headed over to Best Buy to buy myself a copy.5 That sucker cost $84.99. 6

A year later, during freshman year at UT, the internet7 taught me that gamers outside of Japan completely missed out on a Final Fantasy game in between 2 and 38. Thanks to a number of dedicated fans who were literate in both English and Japanese, it was possible to get basic item and even script translations via the internet.

So in the summer of 1996, I called a video-game import shop in San Gabriel, CA that I found in the back of a video game magazine and ordered a copy of Final Fantasy V.9 But even with basic translations available via our dial-up connection to the world-wide web, attempting to slog through a text-heavy role playing game in a foreign language was one of the most mentally frustrating things I’ve ever attempted — I remember wanting to almost quit midway through the first world.10

I finally started taking Japanese classes11 in the summer of 2000,12 which was mostly for sport at that point.

(back to present day…)

If you ask me what the hardest week of the year is, I would say it is without a doubt, unequivocally, hands-down, indisputably, indubitably, the week leading up to the AP exam.

One bright spot for the week: When a couple of kids asked if I had pictures of my prom from back in high school, and I had to explain that that was before we had digital cameras. -_-

Also: the big head13 made its debut this week. Gotta love what kids will do with it:

1. rules for calculating means and standard deviations with transformations of random variables [↩]
2. Though, to be fair, I didn’t fully understand this until I became a teacher myself. [↩]
3. Final Fantasy 2 was a gem during my freshman year of high school, in 1992 [↩]
4. this also ages me [↩]
5. Another reason I felt the need to actually buy a copy was that my local Blockbuster had 3 copies of the game, and I feared that if I rented it again, I might not get the same copy that my save data was on. We didn’t start keeping our save games on memory cards until the Sony Playstation came out a couple of years later — necessitated by the fact that it was impossible to save your games on the CD itself [↩]
6. Yes, that is $84.99 in 1994 U.S. dollars. People forget: back when games were on cartridge, the amount of memory the game took up directly related to its cost in dollars. Final Fantasy VI — or rather 3, as we knew it in the states — was a 24 megabit game. To put it in context with other SNES games of the time: Street Fighter II Turbo was 24 megabits — while the original Street Fighter II was 16 megabits — Chrono Trigger was 32 megabits, and Super Mario All-Stars was 24 megabits. Also remember that there are 8 bits in 1 byte. To put that in context, the last selfie you took with your cell phone probably took up more storage space than any Super Nintendo game ever made. [↩]
7. in the Dobie Hall computer lab, in between study breaks [↩]
8. FF2 was actually IV in Japan, and FF3 was actually VI… apparently Squaresoft thought Final Fantasy V wasn’t worthy of release in the US. I remember a letter-writing campaign in an issue of EGM implored gamers to write in to Square to petition them to release FFV in the US. It didn’t happen. [↩]
9. Oh, that sucker cost $110 to import — as it was a 16 megabit cartridge, let alone an import — and I paid COD – cash on delivery — do they even do that anymore?! [↩]
10. I later played through Final Fantasy 7, 8, 9, and 10, as well as Chrono Cross and Xenogears — yes, freaking Xenogears — in Japanese before they were released locally — typical lead time for an RPG to get translated and released stateside was something on the order of 6-8 months. Final Fantasy X was the first of those to have voice acting. [↩]
11. Present-day comment: I thought of this when I was looking over the released AP Japanese free response questions, which came out today. [↩]
12. when Shaq and Kobe won their first title over Indy [↩]
13. thanks to the season seven Divaz. [↩]