downtroddendeity:

thequantumqueer:

orochimemelord:

severus-snape-is-a-butt-trumpet:

is there a word for “i was instantly good at a lot of things as a quote-unquote gifted child, and, as a result, i was able to skate by without ever being taught how to actually learn a new skill, and now that i’m an adult trying to learn new things that i can’t be good at instantaneously, i don’t have the patience or knowledge to improve on them, because skills that don’t come naturally to me just make me angry because i lived off instant gratification my whole childhood due to not ever being challenged intellectually or taught basic learning skills?” asking for a friend

people like this piss me the fuck off

why does everyone refuse to consider the possibility that maybe an education system designed from the ground up to turn intelligent and creative children into mindlessly efficient factory drones might have a negative effect on the people it deems (correctly or not; usually not) to be more intelligent and creative than average?

we were punished for “learning too fast” by having the lessons about how to learn taken away from us, and by couching it all in positive language so that our peers would resent and isolate us. literally all of us know we’re not better than anyone else, but that doesn’t seem to matter in the face of “i was jealous in elementary school and have held on to that for 15+ years.”

when we say things like “i don’t know how to learn things that i don’t immediately understand” you hear “i was that kid you hated because i never studied but i always got a 100% on the test anyway,” but what we mean is:

• i have a vague understanding of what a flash card is, but no idea how to make them or what to do with them
• i have literally no idea how to take notes because:
• i don’t know what i’ll forget if i don’t write it down
• i don’t know how to pay attention to what’s being said while i write
• i wouldn’t know what to do with the notes anyway
• if i don’t understand something, i don’t know how to formulate a question
• i don’t know how to recognize when i don’t know something until it goes wrong, at which point i don’t know how to identify what i did wrong
• i can’t tell the difference between a mistake that’s part of the learning process and a mistake where i should know better

but yeah, if we ever acknowledge any of this, we’re definitely just being ungrateful whiners who don’t realize how good we had it when we were 7

Don’t forget that:

1. Gifted children sometimes get explicitly punished for being smart, either because the teacher resents the kid (especially if the kid is getting some sort of special advancement), the teacher thinks the kid is cheating (I once got a zero on an assignment in middle school for finishing it too fast), or they act out because they’re bored out of their minds (incorrect ADHD diagnoses aren’t uncommon, especially among underprivileged kids).
2. And when I say “bored out of their minds,” I mean “there were times when I got physically ill before school because the thought of another day of that was soul-crushing.” Anything in school that was so boring you felt like your brain was turning into porridge? The easier the work is for you, the more of that feeling you get.
3. Gifted children often end up with perfectionism complexes, because they’re constantly taught that high grades are the most important and valuable things about them, and anything less than a 100% is a failure. This can easily lead to crushing, crippling anxiety and self-sabotage when they hit something that’s genuinely hard for them, because you’re supposed to be good at this, and if you’re not, there’s nothing left.
4. Gifted children with mental illnesses or learning disabilities are in for a special hell, because nobody wants to admit they exist. Good grades are used as evidence that you’re not trying hard enough, and disabilities are even more likely to be treated as moral failings than they are in non-gifted kids. Just off the top of my head, I personally know:
1. Someone whose daily, violent panic attacks were written off by the school as “acting out for attention” because when they didn’t have a panic attack, they had no problems with the work
2. Someone whose previous teachers would warn the next teacher to have her each year not to seat her next to the window or anything that made noise because if you did she’d get distracted and never listen in class, but when the possibility of ADHD was raised by her parents, all the teachers insisted that couldn’t be true, because she got good grades
3. Someone who, while at a gifted school, asked for accommodations for their mental illness, and was refused because “you shouldn’t be handicapping yourself like that”
4. Someone who went to a school counselor for suicidal ideations and was blown off because their grades were good
5. And that’s not even getting into the interaction with, say, dyslexia or dyscalculia.

A very, very high proportion of the gifted ex-kids I know (and I know quite a few) are dealing with a cocktail of depression, anxiety, and often at least one other mental illness that wasn’t diagnosed until they were out of school. Many of them crashed catastrophically in college, either because they were never taught basic learning skills or because they burned out under impossibly high expectations. Hell, I know a guy who started college at 13, graduated it at 17, got a bunch of achievement awards from gifted organizations, and was homeless at 20.

The school system sucks for everyone. Just because someone got higher numbers written on their papers doesn’t mean it sucked any less for them. It just might suck in a slightly different way.