Tears of Frustration by Chip

Tears of Frustration by Chip - August 2014 Scholarship Essay

It was a simple assignment. All I had to do was summarize the basics of how boomerangs work in one paragraph for a fourth grade research project. As I began work, however, I became enamored in the aerodynamics and physics of the boomerangs. The concepts of airfoil technology, centrifugal force, and other modern concepts had been employed by such primitive peoples. I read for an hour on the physics, diagrams, and geometrics until my head was swollen with an ocean of facts and ideas. Then came time to write.

As soon as I began to type, the words flowed fluently. I knew exactly how boomerangs worked. As facts flowed from the sea of information in my head, my fingers orchestrated a dissertation on the physics of such a complex process, at least as best as a fourth grader can explain. After a page or so, however, it became painfully clear that what I had written was not a paragraph, but a treatise. After two pages, I had barely broken the surface. How, I wondered, could I fit all this incredible information in such an insufficient medium? At that point I did the only thing bright, aspirational fourth graders know to do. I got my mom.
She couldn’t understand my frustration, which only aggravated it. She explained I was going into far too much detail and the assignment only required a superficial and synoptic overview, not the thesis I was writing; however, try as I did, I couldn’t wrap my mind around how to squeeze all this incredible information into the limited space. I began to cry.

The tears streaming from my eyes, however, were more than tears of frustration. They were leaks from the ocean of knowledge in my head, bursting to be let out, held back by the simple dam of a paragraph. How could what took physicists centuries to understand be contained in the synthetic grammatical device of a paragraph? It felt unjust, sinful even. Have you ever tried to fit your closet in a grocery bag? Neither have I, but that’s what it felt like.

To me, there was no way to explain the properties of the boomerang without delving into the deep waters of concepts and swimming amongst diagrams and numbers; however, I was drowning. My teacher had invited me to wade into puddles, but I had leaped into the ocean without the proper equipment. I was not prepared and, consequently, was in over my head.

Eventually I began to arrive at the agonizing conclusion that I would have to part with the sea of facts which I had grown to love, but even then I couldn't understand which ones to part with. I had already spent over two hours on this fifteen minute assignment. I was determined to write the best paragraph of anybody and in so doing not let the inordinate amount of time I had spent on it go to waste.

After much frustration, my mom could not see how I could not simply give an overview of what all I had read. She told me, “You don’t need all these facts. Just summarize.” But the few attempts I made barely broke the surface tension of my ocean before I was paragraphs into my summary. Finally my gracious mother said, “Just say something along the lines of ‘Because of how its shape changes the pressure of the air, the boomerang is able to turn.’” It clicked. I gasped for air. Suddenly, the ocean of ideas shrunk to a drop of water as I zoomed out. It made sense.

I realized I had been too focused on all of the little ideas, though now it seems obvious that was the problem. That day, I, learned to zoom out and see the ideas from thirty thousand feet. The facts, diagrams, and numbers simply faded away behind the raw, unexplained concepts. That was all I needed.

To this day, I use the same techniques that I learned to help me summarize complex concepts. Because I have a compartmentalized mind, I learned to jump from one box to another. From the box of innumerable facts, I jumped to the box of vague ideas. To me, the boomerang embodies my journey of maturation because I learned the invaluable concept of summary. That day, it all came full circle as the boomerang of complex ideas returned as the paragraph summary I had been assigned. The mountain became a pebble. The ocean became a puddle. I will forever be grateful for the boomerang and the seemingly little assignment my fourth grade teacher gave me. To this day, I have that paragraph in my room.