having words with friends.

Words with Friends is a Scrabble™ knock-off, in case you haven’t encountered this manner of trounce-or-be-trounced interactivity, available to ipod/pad and smartphone users.

Flashback to school days...I’m wrapping up 6th grade. Oak Hill Elementary—such a colorful exemplification of all that was wrong with 70s notion of education. A place where I could crawl around under “study carrels,” or swing on stall doors in the girls bathroom when I was meant to be self-pacing myself through a series of math cards. Let’s say 4th grade math concepts were more or less covered by the blue set, and 5th grade by the orange set. As I was too busy practicing math-avoidance to complete more than 30% of the blues, they’d just promote me to orange when I moved ahead a grade. I scored well on standardized tests after all...why insist I actually learn the concepts?

I tend to fare pretty well, on average, in Scrabble type games. I win a lot. You (anyone, actually) would beat me at whack-a-mole. I’d invariably lose a math-off. If the devil went down to Georgia I would NOT step up to the plate with my fiddle, and you’re going to get a book seriously published before I do. But I might beat you at Scrabble or Words with Friends. But I might not.

Junior High was a rude awakening. Unlike Elementary School where you mingled with the same-age kids who just happened to live in your neighborhood, Junior High drew from a larger region and they started grouping us by whatever the prevailing measures of academic aptitude were. Suddenly, I ceased to be smart (relatively speaking) without exerting effort. I was in the midst of academically-competitive kids, and the realization took me down a peg or two.

I know a hot game of Words with Friends when I’m in it. There are better-than-average players, against whom word placement becomes a thrust, or a parry or a “take that!” But it’s okay, because I’ve been softened up like an old punching bag. My expectations of victory have had practice being put in their place. The apple, you see, truly does not fall far from the tree. Daughter Becca has bested me two out of three so far. I can deal. But if you challenge me to whack-a-mole I’m going to say no.