The Windkey and the Lamplighter

I am taking a training class this week, learning Geometric
Dimensioning and Tolerancing. It’s actually neat—way more math
than I anticipated, even if it’s nothing more complicated than trig,
and usually not more than addition and subtraction.

But two things really struck me as interesting in the class.

1. I am one of the youngest people in the class, but part of a
   bimodal distribution.

2. I appear to be more quicker to finish our quizzes than most of the
   others, even though the first few, at least, were mostly just
   writing out definitions from the book.

Number 1 makes sense—I later realized that, in addition to representing
the bimodal distribution of the company, everyone in the class was
either training or retraining after having taken this class or its
equivalent 20 years ago. So of course it will select the very new
and those who need a refresher.

Number 2 actually eventually made sense to me, too, when a couple things
were pointed out to me. First, I got slower as we started having
drawings to dimension and tolerance, so it’s not actually that I
understood the material that much faster than average. But second, I
was one of very few who was going and reading the books we were
given. Most people were looking answers up in the slide handouts,
rather than in the GD&T standard or the reference text we were
given. I also appeared to have better reading comprehension than
some of them—my table-mate kept saying "If I could just figure out
what they wanted, I’d be doing great on these quizzes." We had a
conversation, later in the week, where both my table-mates admitted
to not really ever reading books for pleasure—magazines at most.
Maybe being a regular reader keeps me in practice?