Battle of the Captains

rules of the game

When I was learning how to subtract in grade school, I went to my brother's room for help on my homework since my parents weren't home and my mom had told me that I had to be done with my homework by the time she got home. I was handling subtracting of two digit numbers just fine until the whole concept jumbled up in my mind when the teacher told us that we had to start borrowing numbers from the tenths digit when the unit digit was too small to subtract from. Don't ask me why my brain couldn't comprehend it because I wouldn't have an answer. So I interrupted a very serious game of Halo and got my brothers' characters killed. I told them that I didn't get subtraction and Kain, the brother closest to my age, called me stupid, which had probably sprung from the fact that I had ruined their game.

"You're stupid," I bit back and walked over to the eldest of our family instead, with a worksheet and pencil in hand. "I don't get it."

"What do you mean? You just subtract it," Kaden said.

Thank you, captain obvious. I had no idea that doing subtraction meant that I had to subtract it.

"But why do I need to borrow a number from the tens digit?"

After thirty minutes, Kaden started to yell. He couldn't understand why I couldn't understand that I just had to borrow one stupid number from the tens digit because that was what the teachers taught everyone– because that was the rule.

Kain got fed up with my whining and dropped his remote, grumbling to himself as he stalked upstairs. He thought I was a total buzz kill. My other older brother, Keith just continued playing in single player mode. Eventually, frustration ate Kaden up from the inside.

"Try to solve this question again," he'd said. "I'll just go get something to drink and I'll be right back."

He didn't come back. I doubted he even got something to drink. But still, I tried finding the answer to sixty-three minus seventeen, like he'd instructed. It was just Keith and I now. I sat there, practically listening to the useless gears in my mind turning as if it was actually working. I'd never felt more stupid than that moment. Keith finished his game and he looked at me like he hadn't realized that I was even there in the first place and pity filled his features when he detected the teary eyes that frustration had produced in me.

He reached out to pat my head, which did not help my case at all. Then he actually said something smart– something that I guessed he found on the Internet, on a poster or in a book or something because it was too helpful to be a creation of his mind. He said, "You know, you're not dumb. You're just doing it wrong." Except, I was trying to do it exactly how everyone was telling me to. "If you can't solve a problem, it might be because you're playing by everyone else's rules."

And that was exactly my problem. I didn't even understand the rules of subtraction so how was I supposed to uphold them?

"That's stupid," I said.

"Hey, at least I know how to subtract."

Keith left me alone to think and I made up my own rules with a super farfetched solution that worked out for me. It was too hard to explain the logic of it to anyone else but basically, instead of borrowing a number from bigger two-digit number, I added a number to the digit in the bottom. It was quite hard to explain to others but it made perfect sense to me.

That year, I became the best in my Math class and for a month, Keith became my favorite brother until he decided that it would be fun the spray me with a water gun filled with mud.

Anyway, the point is that it wasn't bad take a different approach to things, even if it wasn't how other people normally did it.

My approach to defeating Austin Collins had always been to be better than him and to have more friends than him and to be more popular than he was. None of those things ever actually worked. He was a worthy opponent. But maybe my problem was that I was taking the wrong approach.