Mrs. Holmes was my fifth grade teacher—one of my favorites growing up. She had gray hair and what I considered a grandmotherly kindness about her. She seemed elderly to me, but she probably was in her fifties. I liked her plenty because she paid attention to me.
Sometimes I helped her create bulletin boards. A couple times I played my clarinet for her. One time she asked me to help her with paperwork. She sat me at her big wooden desk and handed me a stack of large manila folders. Then she gave me a sheet of printed labels. She told me to match the name on the label with the name on the folder and showed me where to stick the label on the inside cover.
The folders were called “cume folders” —meaning cumulative—containing each student’s entire educational history. They were thick with papers: report cards, evaluations by teachers and administrators, notes to and from parents, etc.
The labels I was to stick on the students’ folders were the results of an I.Q. test we had taken earlier that year.
I was flabbergasted! Wasn’t someone’s I.Q. private information? Wasn’t this a breech of teaching etiquette? But wasn’t it so darn interesting?
I sat quietly—sticking and peeking. I read a bunch of stuff about my classmates. By the time I had finished I was a walking encyclopedia of knowledge about the kids in my class. And instead of walking home that afternoon, I ran.
The only person I wanted to tell was Jo Ella (my next-door neighbor and good friend) because she told me Big Girl stuff she had learned from her older sisters. But the whole thing was so secretive. And what if she told her mother? Then maybe Mrs. Holmes would get in trouble. Nope, had to lock my lips and throw away the key!
To this day I have never told anyone anything about anybody… until now.
I have wondered why Mrs. Holmes gave me that chore. Did she know I could be trusted to keep my mouth shut? (She never asked me to.) Did she think she was giving me an advantage in life by letting me know what my “competition” was? Or felt I should know my own I.Q.? Or was she just too darned tired to stick stickers in a folder?
I did enjoy that I was third in the class. Not too shabby, I thought. It confirmed my self-opinion—I was no dummy. A few points ahead of me in the number two spot was Rosalie. Everyone knew Rosalie was “a brain.” But the head of the class was Janet. Holy Moly—her I.Q. was off the charts.
I believe it was Janet’s sky-high I.Q. that made our 6th grade teacher Mr. Allen treat her differently. (More on that in “Relating-Part 3.”)
The fact that I knew where all my classmates fit in on the “intelligence scale” changed my behavior, too. I think I related to some of them differently. The knowledge gave me a long-time fascination with a boy named Paul. (More on that later…this subject is worth a few blogs…)
I knew most of these fifth grade classmates for years—some since kindergarten. I graduated from high school with about two-thirds of this fifth grade class. I knew the I.Q.s of two of the four Valedictorians—who were not Janet or Rosalie—but had lowers I.Q.s than those girls.
Who knows if the test was valid or if the scoring was accurate. But it was interesting that according to the results, some of my classmates were “over achieving” and some were “under achieving,” which made me realize that raw intelligence is only part of the success equation.
The I.Q. episode affected me most about myself. It motivated me. I decided that I was going places in life. And I’m still trying to get there!
But whether or not we know our I.Q., don’t we owe it to ourselves to keep striving to reach our potential??—our potential being whatever we decide it is for ourselves, not what any test result says.
