...in California many years ago, and fireflies here in the Northeast, so I really had no opinion one way or the other.
I wasn't aware of phosphorescent fungi, but I'm sure there are some, and perhaps you know more.
My problem wasn't being "gifted" or "exceptional" in school. I had the misfortune while in third grade to have an "IQ" test which in my time was very talismanic.
From then on, whenever I didn't do well on something it was "because I wasn't applying myself."
Now, my father had an eight grade education; he dropped out to shine shoes and help feed his family when his father abandoned the family. My mother had a 10th grade education; she dropped out to get a job.
When I was growing up, the only book in my house, besides the bible was a Bible commentary, although we did get tabloid newspapers which my father read religiously and in great detail, complaining about the "Left Wing" editorials in Newsday at that time, and loving the (then) right wing NY Daily News.
I had the "Golden Books Child's Encyclopedia," my text books, and could take out books from my limited elementary and Junior/Senior High School libraries. My town did not have a public library.
My parents however heard I had a "high IQ" and ran like hell with that idiotic number. (Imagine that, the claim that you predict a person's whole life with a two or three digit number. I ridiculed that idea elsewhere: A Note on This Race and IQ Business.
The times I grew up in were less stupid than modern times, but that doesn't mean that they weren't stupid in many other ways.
Later, when I was well into high school, my parents bought me an Encyclopedia Britannica.
Freeman Dyson told me that he learned Calculus from those Encylopedias. I sure as hell didn't. I wouldn't have known where to start. I learned calculus from a senile old high school teacher with missing teeth and probably in the early stages of dementia.
That IQ thing was brought up through much of my early life, and it was horrible.
I understand that my parents were uneducated, and though very bright in their own ways, and that they loved me and wanted the best. But they put pressure on me to do things they knew nothing about. That didn't work.
After my parents died, I started giving lectures to my kids about science and stuff in front my aunt, and I was surprised by her perceptive remark, "Don't you do that to those boys. You didn't like it when your mother did it to you!"
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