It is sort of a story about my American past. Sounds so strange to my own ears, but after nearly 19 years in the US, we got a significant "past" in America.
When we came in the summer of 1991 and plunged into the scorching hellish heat with 104F in the stone jungles of New York after cool Moscow, we were thirsty, poor and very optimistic.
I could write, read and speak English and do it all pretty well. But I had difficulty understanding English. My ears were not adapt, and fluent speech was difficult to understand.
Some of it was not even the language itself, but the reality of life. What the heck is Real Estate? Translate into Russian and get "real" (meaning not fictional) and "estate", as a big house on a sizable piece of land with barns and stables...
The notion of private ownership of dwellings was foreign to me. And this type of problems were everywhere. So, I started reading newspapers, left by people in the Madison Square at lunch, and also I started going to all open seminars. If it was free, I would go. And a lot of those were Real Estate related. So, I went to listen to real estate millionaires, and gurus.
Three months later I answered an ad in the newspaper "Free Real Estate School" and something about getting a license. Which was a magic word, and was attractive. It was in Brooklyn, big expense for me on subway, but they promised that I could get a real estate license, and we figured that we had to shell out the money. Free school beat subway fare...
When I first got to school, the teacher - a gentleman from NYU - started the class with a math test, how he called it. I was stunned that everyone had a calculator. Well, I had no clue that I needed one. All I had was a pencil. The teacher said that he could not help me, so I decided that there was nothing I could do, but try to survive without the calculator.
There were 6 tasks, so I used a few sheets of paper for calculations and finished the task first. Everybody were still working on it. The teacher noticed that I was doing nothing and asked me why. I told him that I was done.
"Then go to the second task" he said. I told him that I did all 6. He looked at me very suspiciously, but walked to my desk, checked the sheet with answers and asked me where I was from. Satisfied with my answer, he walked back to the table and waited for others.
Turned out I was the only guy, who did all 6 correctly. I was absolutely amazed. In school math was never my forte and I had 3 (and the scores were from 2 (fail) to 5 (excellent). I was good with simple arithmetic, but math was beyond me.
When the time was up and everyone gave the result sheets to the teacher, he picked a guy for each task to explain how it was supposed to be done. I was one of those. So, I got to the blackboard, and wrote a proportion the way we were taught at school. It is very simple and I am still surprised that it is not used here, because it is amazingly simple way of figuring certain tasks. While I was explaining, I saw that nobody seem to understand me. The teacher politely came to the rescue and told to go to my desk and started explaining it.
Students got back to life, started smiling, nodding... and I was the only one, who did not get that complicated thing that he was showing.
Years later I tried to teach my grandson, but I miserably failed. Then my wife, who is so much better in math than me, sat with him and taught him that, and he finally got it.
By the way, when he tried to show me how they do it here at school, I still did not get it, which is OK.
Back to my training. After a couple of weeks of this training, I successfully passed the school exam, and then took and passed the State Exam on the first try. In 1991 I got my first license in the United States. It was a real estate salesperson license.
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