The Award

I'm not sure if it still exists today, but my elementary and middle schools (first Mountain Gap, then Challenger) had an advanced academics program called SPACE*. The so-called gifted kids in the program spent about a fifth of their class time with special teachers doing fun and educational projects while learning at an accelerated rate. In high school, these students would be automatic candidates for advanced placement classes, earning college credit before even stepping foot on a university campus.

I didn't actually know any of this stuff when my 2nd grade teacher recommended that I be tested to see if I qualified for SPACE. But like much of my adult life, I was eager to be accepted regardless of the consequences. There's something extremely attractive about exclusivity. However, the test proved to be too difficult and my teacher notified my mother that I wasn't right for the program. This was a huge disappointment at the time, though my mom consoled me with the fact that the recommendation itself was an intrinsic honor.

The next year, I was recommended by another teacher to take the 3rd grade version of the test. The ideas behind the questions and challenges were basically the same: spacial reasoning, problem solving, etc. Even though this was decades ago, I can still remember one puzzle from it now, and only because I'm certain that I got it wrong. I was asked to piece together silhouetted sections of a cardboard horse in a set amount of time, but I placed a part of its body where the horse's neck should have gone. Poor little pony. Regardless, I apparently did better than I had the first time and was given the SPACE seal of approval, which was a note to my teacher and a phone call to my mom. Soon after that, I was ushered into a gleaming world of magic and wonder.

Well, not exactly.

Twice a week, the other SPACE kids and I would go to a classroom with a special teacher and spend the full second part of the day there. The teacher, Mrs. K, was a fun and slightly eccentric woman in her thirties. She kept us busy for much of the time with logic problems, the kind where you have to figure out what fictional characters did and had based on given clues. For instance one of the clues might be "Bobby hates sledding and one of the girls brought a baseball glove." So, then we'd go to the grid and mark an X at the cross section of "Bobby" and "sledding", along with all of the boys and "baseball glove". You can imagine how quickly the charm of these little gems faded.

But there was one large, month-long project that I'll never forget. One day Mrs. K announced to the class that we'd be divided into teams and tasked with building model bridges out of toothpicks. Even the thought of it now fills me with an existential dread. Mrs. K told us that each team would present their model after four weeks and she would judge the results based on certain qualities, the most important naturally being how much weight the bridges could carry. But she hinted that other attributes like best design and most creative features would also be considered. It sounded like fun at the time and, more importantly, a long break from the world of stupid logic problems.

I was placed in a normal team (that qualifier, "normal", will make sense soon) and we began talking about ideas for structure and the benefits of glue over other binding agents, such as Scotch tape or bubble gum. I wasn't as much interested in these conversations as I was interested in doodling on graph paper and making jokes, which Mrs. K took notice of pretty quickly. This lack of focus continued and, at the end of the second week, I found myself heading up a new team. Mrs. K had rounded up all of the "dead weight kids" from each team, put us all in a group, and named me their leader.

I was a little offended to be singled out as a shiftless layabout at first, but I quickly embraced my role as king of the too-cool-for-bridges squad and announced to my lazy cohorts, Mrs. K, and all of the normal teams that we would continue goofing off. I reasoned that we'd only need a couple of days at most to build the toothpick bridges. After all, these weren't real bridges and no lives were at risk if our bridge was the worst. And yes, our team was destined to lose by the very nature of our origin story - this inherent limitation was not lost on me at the time.

As the following days and weeks went by, Mrs. K would occasionally check in on my group's progress. Having nothing to show in terms of actual work, I would shield from her whatever funny cartoon I was working on and report that we were still in the planning stage, but that everything was perfectly on schedule. Then she'd walk off and I would nervously look around the room to the normal teams, all of them hard at work on mostly-completed, perfect little toothpick bridges. Then I'd shrug and go back to my hilarious doodles.

Reality set in on the day before the competition. I'd practically trained the rest of my team to blow off any notion of work, so I found myself alone on an island of panic. I quickly learned that toothpicks are a tricky building material and my very rudimentary sketch of a bridge was a poor blueprint. I spent the last hours of class time in failure mode, but I held my brave smile anytime Mrs. K walked by with her left eyebrow arched. I told her that I'd be finishing the model myself at home that night.

I don't remember much from that evening. I probably begged my mom and sister for help, but I think I was left to go at it solo, one glue-drenched toothpick at a time. I stayed up past my bedtime constructing the world's worst model bridge. It was the kind of work that's both sloppy and slow, done neither fast nor correctly. At the end of the night, I sat back and marveled at the slight, precarious embodiment of procrastination that I had created. It couldn't support an ant. Right now you might be thinking two things: 1) that building a bridge out of toothpicks doesn't sound so hard (you're wrong and probably not a nine-year-old kid), and 2) that my bridge probably wasn't as bad as I'm describing it (you're right - it was much worse).

The next day's grand finale competition went about as well as anybody could have expected. Mrs. K elected my team to go first, just to get us out of the way, really. She added a series of floppy disks suspended by string to test the strength of the bridge and, surprisingly, my sad model didn't break or fall apart. It just kind of leaned in until it touched its cardboard base...and stayed leaned in once Mrs. K removed the weights. Regardless, I counted the weak demonstration as a major victory, though any bravado that I might have exhibited that day was there purely to mask embarrassment. I'll spare you the details of the awesome designs and constructions that the other teams presented, as their victory is not what this story is about.

After each of the bridges was tested and judged, Mrs. K began handing out awards. They were certificates that she had created and printed out herself, each with 1980's-era clip art and titles such as "Strongest Design" and "Best Teamwork". I clapped along with the others, occasionally pretending to be shocked when we failed to win a category. After all of the awards had been handed out, Mrs. K gave a short speech about the importance of leadership. I sunk in my chair, thinking that the hammer would surely fall my way once the moral of the story kicked in.

She looked at me and smiled; I cringed. Then Mrs. K surprised me. She told everyone that I had shown a special quality in leadership and that I deserved a special award for what I had done. Her smile grew as she handed me - not my group, but just me - a certificate with my name on it. The picture displayed a man treading water, so that only his head was visible. Surrounding him, fins peaked through the surface of the water, alluding to the deadly sharks circling him below. Atop the certificate read, "Coolness Under Pressure". It was my very own award, and believe me when I tell you that I earned it.


* For the life of me, I can't remember what the SPACE acronym stood for. I've tried searching for mentions of it online to no avail, which leads me to believe that it was a local program for Huntsville, AL. It makes perfect sense that the powers-that-were would choose a term to reflect our civic Rocket City, USA identity. However, the fact that I also couldn't remember what SPACE stood for when I was still in the program tells me that I probably wasn't the best candidate for it.