Learning to be a Superhero

Everyone played games when they were little where they pretended to be a superhero. Over the past week, however, one of my roommates taught me how to actually be a superhero, specifically Gambit (for those of you not familiar with the X-men, Gambit charges cards with kinetic energy and causes them to explode). Well- he taught me half of it. My roommate Connor couldn't help much with the explosions part, but he did teach me something much less useful (and much less likely to cause something to blow up in his room): how to fling cards.

Now, I'd tried card flinging before and simply could not wrap my head- or my fingers- around it properly. This inability to do something aggravated me to the point where I'd get a little annoyed any time I saw someone try to fling a card (especially when they succeeded). So when my roommate asked me if I knew how to fling cards, I was a little irritated. So of course he kept pressing the topic. Finally, I took the cards and tried to throw them.

Not knowing where exactly my fingers were supposed to go or even which fingers to use, I took the first card, placed my thumb over the card in the bottom right corner, put my pointer and middle fingers under my thumb, and flicked my wrist. Much to my disappointment, but not at all to my surprise, the card went maybe an inch before blowing back closer to where I was standing than my hand had been when I threw the card. I went through the entire (red) deck of 54 cards (it had 2 jokers), and only one card in the deck went almost a foot; the rest went only a couple inches (I admittedly wasn't throwing them very hard) or even in the wrong direction.

Connor then took another (blue) deck and showed me how to properly fling a card. He took his pointer finger and put it over the top right corner of the card and put his middle finger under the same corner. He flicked his wrist and voila! The card flew across the room and hit the wall. Repeating the process another time or two, he handed me the remainder of the deck to practice with. Following what I saw him do, I placed my fingers accordingly on the card. A little apprehensively, I flicked my wrist. To my great surprise and excitement, the card went almost half of the way to the wall. I quickly grabbed the next card and, quite forgetting what I had just seen, threw it absentmindedly to a spot a couple inches in front of me. Refocusing, I continued with the deck. Connor also took a deck (another red one) and began to fling cards. When we were done, the 162 cards on our floor looked kind of like the Ottoman Greek flag:After another maybe 20 minutes of throwing, I had managed to hit the wall a couple of times with more successful throws the longer we went. When we finished, I was glad that I had learned to do something that had previously frustrated me because of my inability to learn due to lacking someone who could properly show me how to fling cards.

While you could simply "read how" to throw cards, it is to no avail without someone to physically show you. Sure, you could learn where to place your fingers, but the actual movements of the wrist must be seen. Likewise, videos tend to not show the different aspects in close enough detail or not be fast enough to capture all the motions. If you'd like to try anyways, however, you can try it with written directions for a lot of different methods (a video is also on the site) and let me know how it works out! Then, if you learn how to charge them with supernatural kinetic energy, let me know how and we can be a superhero team!

The learning half of this activity really reminded me how much you need to be able to see some things in order to learn them. I myself am an auditory learner when it comes to facts, which is usually what we do in high school, so this is the kind of learning I have habituated myself to. When it comes to actually doing things, however, I am a visual learner, which really helped me to appreciate this activity more. I also think it is going to help me with the second half as I teach someone else a task, remembering to show them the actions I do and not just tell them what to do.

I apologize for not having any pictures of me or my roommate actually flinging the cards. I don't have my camera at school, and my phone's camera isn't nearly high enough quality. I have instead posted images of different ways to throw cards, in the hopes that you will see how useless this information really is and you will understand it is something that must be watched. I also wish I could have done this assignment with someone whose presence isn't as common for me as my roommate's, but lack of a means of mechanical transportation limited this as well.

Later this week, part two: "Qu'ils mangent de la brioche- ou du gateaux"