Ah, yeah, you grew up in a small town and stayed there?
Yes, until I went to my second high school.
This is entirely because I didn't quietly make good grades and answer questions, but I went around broadcasting my intelligence, engagement, accomplishments, rule-abiding-ness, and general superiority to the other students on the one hand, and my unmet intellectual needs on the other, to everyone I met on pretty much every occasion.
I mean, there is a difference between "quietly making good grades and answering questions" and "I'm going to show you that I'm smart and can answer your questions, no matter how hard they are," and I was the second. (I do know people who are extremely intelligent and are more like the first, including D.; that wasn't me, though.) Plus which I know you have noticed that a definite facet of my personality is HELLO YES PLEASE TALK TO ME ABOUT THE COOL THING :D :D (Also not a facet of D's personality!) ;) So, yeah, I did do the part about broadcasting my intelligence and engagement -- and, as I mentioned before, I thought of this as completely separate from broadcasting my accomplishments, which I didn't do. (And also, occasionally I was a total smart aleck, like the extra paper I wrote for my senior English teacher with an on-purpose bonkers thesis, supported with out-of-context quotations, to show my contempt for the idea of thesis statements. No one had told me about thesis statements before him! I thought it was stupid!)
Now, I was obviously in a much better situation than you to begin with, not least (a) because my mom actually fought for me, she got me accelerated in math (which I wouldn't have necessarily understood how to ask for myself) which cascaded to having a lot of other opportunities open to me that wouldn't have been otherwise; (b) the teachers at my second high school (except for my history teacher) were really good, so I didn't have to resort to anything besides being an in-your-face-about-being-excellent student to get noticed, and (c) in large part arising from (a) and/or (b), I had lots of opportunities which you didn't, to do things where I could excel and get noticed. (Relevant to (c) and the discussion of becoming known at a school, for example, I started out at at least a slight advantage in the second high school because the math department already knew about me when I came in, due to my already having done well enough as a sophomore to be noticed in state-level math contests (which a teacher at this school was involved in running).)
The thing is, I never talk about it these days (in large part because I still have a very hard time bragging, but also in large part because it seems very not relevant as an adult -- I've also forgotten the vast majority of what I once knew -- but also in this case because of this public and quasi-anon venue) and I'm not going to talk about it explicitly now either, but I was really quite a high school superstar, not least at my second high school where I started as a junior (it was just for juniors and seniors at the time). (I was a superstar at my first high school, too, but that was different because, like you say, it was a small town where we had lived there my whole life, and it didn't take very much to be a superstar there.) Everyone knew I was a superstar, and yeah, everyone doesn't just mean at my particular high school. I happened to be really good at academic contests and tests, and enjoyed them. (And music. Though that was less important, it still contributed to the overall gestalt of Winning High School.) And I didn't really need to broadcast it myself when I did really well on something, or won something, or my team won something -- it was done for me because it was good PR for the school that I went around winning things.
In general, though, my high school was extremely a place where we discussed grades and class ranking and everything. It wasn't just me, it was the other students.
Yeah, see, I grew up in the South. You did not talk about things like that outright, in front of other people! (Except when in a different subculture: see next paragraph.) I mean, class ranking was a thing in my first high school, and I'm sure people talked/speculated in private (as people always did seem to know who was highest ranked and so on), but not right out in public and everything! That would be rude! Ha, it sounds like my classmate would have done much better socially at your school.
But what all this reminds me of are math contest rankings. Because that was interesting! More interesting, at least, than grades -- I was easily top of my old high school, and my second high school didn't have rankings at all, so I never paid much attention to that -- but for math contests there were other people in the state I was competing with. And yeah, everyone knew each other's scores and rankings on the state math contest/AHSME/AIME/ARML/whatever, and we'd talk about them (we all knew each other after a while) and congratulate people who did well and good-naturedly tease people who hadn't done as well as they should have (me, senior year at state math contest! grr! Lol, I'd forgotten about that) -- even if it was the South, math competition culture was different :) So, yes, I do have some experience with that sort of thing, just not with grades.
(Heh, and all this is reminding me that D took second place in his state math contest, and at one point in grad school (after I'd been dating D for a couple of years, and he was no longer in school) I met someone from his state who'd come to visit our department about whom, when I mentioned the name to D, D said, "Oh, he was the guy who beat me!" He got teased a little over that one :) )
Your comment, and thinking about math competitions, made me think about how one of the things that is so different about E's brain compared to... yours, mine, basically all the smart kids I know of, spectrum or no spectrum, is that she Does Not want to think about competition scores, etc. almost at all! (I didn't think about this at the time I wrote the previous comment, because I was thinking more about how she doesn't like to have conversations with other people, but on second thought, this is probably a bigger part of what's going on with her and is really quite bizarre to me.) Almost all math competition kids I've ever met, myself included, want to know exactly how they scored, how that compares to other kids, etc. (At the local competition we went to last month where I coached E's team, one of the kids on our team even volunteered to be the answer sheet collector because, he revealed afterwards, then he could see all the papers and see how everyone on the team had done immediately.) But not her! She just wants to do the problems and forget about it afterwards. I mean, she likes winning, but it seems like it causes her a lot of stress to think about how she's done. She often doesn't even want to talk about the answers to the problems and find out what she's gotten right or wrong. (Interestingly, one of her teachers has figured out that a workaround for this is that if she (the teacher) casts the discussion as "hey, let's figure out how to do this problem that you guys didn't know how to do," she will be all over that. Just not if the discussion is cast as "let me tell you what the answers are so you can see what you got right or wrong." So odd!)
They had the same approach my parents did: you go to school and do your best. No one responded to "Mildred is making the best grades because she does unassigned work" with "So if I want to beat her, I should start doing unassigned work." It was all "It will be a cold day in hell when anyone beats Mildred at anything--she actually *likes* this stuff and does it voluntarily!"
Well, I think some of that is "I don't care enough about beating her to do unassigned work." Most people don't! (Though my parents would definitely have been "So Mildred is doing unassigned work? You'd BETTER be doing that, then!")
It also seems like it was likely that they still couldn't have caught up with you even if they did do extra work (there's a certain synergy of loving a subject and how much you get out of it, plus a LOT depending on natural ability of course, plus if you knew they were doing extra work your competitive spirit would have kicked into high gear), in which case the way they thought was a very healthy way for them to think :P :) My poor classmate in chemistry that I referred to above did do unassigned work, way more than I did (yes, she was Asian), and she was never even close to beating me. (Though she probably wasn't trying to beat me so much as beating the other kids -- we were in different grades, so we weren't directly in competition for class rank even before I changed schools.)
Ha! I can still remember everyone who didn't give me the awards I had earned and who got them instead and am still disapproving. :P
Oh, if it had been another kid who had gotten the award, I would have remembered that! (I still remember the kid who beat me out for research camp summer after junior year.) The chemistry award didn't bother me because everyone knew I would have gotten it had it been given out! Btw, I talked to my mom and she doesn't remember about AP Chemistry, which leads me to believe I must have gotten the award that year, because I am sure my mom would have remembered if I hadn't. (She did remember about the previous year.)
Honestly, they didn't see me as struggling or going through a lot. They saw me as coasting and complaining about it. They specifically told me they didn't need to invest in my education, because my grades proved I was doing fine and would do fine in life without any investment. All the investment of resources went to my siblings, whom they could identify as struggling.
I didn't mean kid struggles, I meant adult struggles! There is a whole family story with my family, starting with my father's grandmother, who identified education as the way to get out of the horrible living conditions in rural Korea (e.g., no indoor plumbing or electricity, that's just for starters) and made sure my dad's dad could train as a medical doctor, so he could get OUT. My dad ended up in those same conditions for a while -- and then was dependent on the kindness of strangers to provide him room and board in high school when they moved to the US -- and had the same reactions, that he was going to get OUT and that if/when he ever had kids, his kids were NEVER going to be in a position where there was any chance they might go back to that. (To be fair, simply not being a colossal jerk like my grandfather and my step-grandmother -- who kicked my dad out both times -- would have been enough to ensure the vast majority of that, but that's not the only lesson he got from it.) And when I was a kid my parents were always, while not as desperately under the poverty line as when my dad was a kid, always struggling to figure out where to put every penny. (By the time my sister came along, they were more secure. My dad had a good job which he was hyper-competent at, it was just that he started with literally nothing, so it took time for them to get a financial cushion.) Honestly, what my dad would have really liked is for us to be hedge fund managers or CEOs and pull down seven figures a year and have a family who was never EVER insecure about money. And they saw education as the key to that.
And also because my dad lived among rich people in high school and aspired to that, I think he understood, without being able to articulate it, that there was a class element involved and that educational accomplishments were the key to that. I really resonanted with siderea's class discussion here -- especially sections VI and VII -- my parents definitely thought along these lines although they were not nearly as good as articulating it; the extent to which they did articulate anything along those lines was something like "what kind of people you socialize with are important, and you're more likely to socialize with the 'right' people at a good college," and "it's just as easy to marry a rich person as a poor person, and you're more likely to find the former at a good college." That's the kind of thing I was hearing when applying to college. (You know, when I finish my dad's memoirs -- hopefully this summer -- I'll just send them to you and then you'll understand exactly where he was coming from.)
Like -- I guess your family got by, and maybe they didn't have the kind of hard life my dad had, but it sounds pretty hard to me! Why wouldn't they do all they could to help their one kid who had a chance of getting out to a better life to do so?? I mean, I guess i know why -- and actually this was a pretty common way to think in the small town I grew up in -- your parents clearly didn't think it was as bad as all that, plus it sounds like they had anxiety about not being thought good enough (for my family, totally not an issue -- obviously not their fault they grew up in the aftermath of the Korean War, or that my grandfather was a jerk) plus they're not Asian, lol -- I've noticed most USians don't have the (very common Asian) idea that one's family is all in this together, which we've talked about re: the Tillermans; my mom fought for me a lot, but she was also fighting for herself because any glory that came to me also reflected on her.
no subject
Ah, yeah, you grew up in a small town and stayed there?
Yes, until I went to my second high school.
This is entirely because I didn't quietly make good grades and answer questions, but I went around broadcasting my intelligence, engagement, accomplishments, rule-abiding-ness, and general superiority to the other students on the one hand, and my unmet intellectual needs on the other, to everyone I met on pretty much every occasion.
I mean, there is a difference between "quietly making good grades and answering questions" and "I'm going to show you that I'm smart and can answer your questions, no matter how hard they are," and I was the second. (I do know people who are extremely intelligent and are more like the first, including D.; that wasn't me, though.) Plus which I know you have noticed that a definite facet of my personality is HELLO YES PLEASE TALK TO ME ABOUT THE COOL THING :D :D (Also not a facet of D's personality!) ;) So, yeah, I did do the part about broadcasting my intelligence and engagement -- and, as I mentioned before, I thought of this as completely separate from broadcasting my accomplishments, which I didn't do. (And also, occasionally I was a total smart aleck, like the extra paper I wrote for my senior English teacher with an on-purpose bonkers thesis, supported with out-of-context quotations, to show my contempt for the idea of thesis statements. No one had told me about thesis statements before him! I thought it was stupid!)
Now, I was obviously in a much better situation than you to begin with, not least (a) because my mom actually fought for me, she got me accelerated in math (which I wouldn't have necessarily understood how to ask for myself) which cascaded to having a lot of other opportunities open to me that wouldn't have been otherwise; (b) the teachers at my second high school (except for my history teacher) were really good, so I didn't have to resort to anything besides being an in-your-face-about-being-excellent student to get noticed, and (c) in large part arising from (a) and/or (b), I had lots of opportunities which you didn't, to do things where I could excel and get noticed. (Relevant to (c) and the discussion of becoming known at a school, for example, I started out at at least a slight advantage in the second high school because the math department already knew about me when I came in, due to my already having done well enough as a sophomore to be noticed in state-level math contests (which a teacher at this school was involved in running).)
The thing is, I never talk about it these days (in large part because I still have a very hard time bragging, but also in large part because it seems very not relevant as an adult -- I've also forgotten the vast majority of what I once knew -- but also in this case because of this public and quasi-anon venue) and I'm not going to talk about it explicitly now either, but I was really quite a high school superstar, not least at my second high school where I started as a junior (it was just for juniors and seniors at the time). (I was a superstar at my first high school, too, but that was different because, like you say, it was a small town where we had lived there my whole life, and it didn't take very much to be a superstar there.) Everyone knew I was a superstar, and yeah, everyone doesn't just mean at my particular high school. I happened to be really good at academic contests and tests, and enjoyed them. (And music. Though that was less important, it still contributed to the overall gestalt of Winning High School.) And I didn't really need to broadcast it myself when I did really well on something, or won something, or my team won something -- it was done for me because it was good PR for the school that I went around winning things.
In general, though, my high school was extremely a place where we discussed grades and class ranking and everything. It wasn't just me, it was the other students.
Yeah, see, I grew up in the South. You did not talk about things like that outright, in front of other people! (Except when in a different subculture: see next paragraph.) I mean, class ranking was a thing in my first high school, and I'm sure people talked/speculated in private (as people always did seem to know who was highest ranked and so on), but not right out in public and everything! That would be rude! Ha, it sounds like my classmate would have done much better socially at your school.
But what all this reminds me of are math contest rankings. Because that was interesting! More interesting, at least, than grades -- I was easily top of my old high school, and my second high school didn't have rankings at all, so I never paid much attention to that -- but for math contests there were other people in the state I was competing with. And yeah, everyone knew each other's scores and rankings on the state math contest/AHSME/AIME/ARML/whatever, and we'd talk about them (we all knew each other after a while) and congratulate people who did well and good-naturedly tease people who hadn't done as well as they should have (me, senior year at state math contest! grr! Lol, I'd forgotten about that) -- even if it was the South, math competition culture was different :) So, yes, I do have some experience with that sort of thing, just not with grades.
(Heh, and all this is reminding me that D took second place in his state math contest, and at one point in grad school (after I'd been dating D for a couple of years, and he was no longer in school) I met someone from his state who'd come to visit our department about whom, when I mentioned the name to D, D said, "Oh, he was the guy who beat me!" He got teased a little over that one :) )
Your comment, and thinking about math competitions, made me think about how one of the things that is so different about E's brain compared to... yours, mine, basically all the smart kids I know of, spectrum or no spectrum, is that she Does Not want to think about competition scores, etc. almost at all! (I didn't think about this at the time I wrote the previous comment, because I was thinking more about how she doesn't like to have conversations with other people, but on second thought, this is probably a bigger part of what's going on with her and is really quite bizarre to me.) Almost all math competition kids I've ever met, myself included, want to know exactly how they scored, how that compares to other kids, etc. (At the local competition we went to last month where I coached E's team, one of the kids on our team even volunteered to be the answer sheet collector because, he revealed afterwards, then he could see all the papers and see how everyone on the team had done immediately.) But not her! She just wants to do the problems and forget about it afterwards. I mean, she likes winning, but it seems like it causes her a lot of stress to think about how she's done. She often doesn't even want to talk about the answers to the problems and find out what she's gotten right or wrong. (Interestingly, one of her teachers has figured out that a workaround for this is that if she (the teacher) casts the discussion as "hey, let's figure out how to do this problem that you guys didn't know how to do," she will be all over that. Just not if the discussion is cast as "let me tell you what the answers are so you can see what you got right or wrong." So odd!)
They had the same approach my parents did: you go to school and do your best. No one responded to "Mildred is making the best grades because she does unassigned work" with "So if I want to beat her, I should start doing unassigned work." It was all "It will be a cold day in hell when anyone beats Mildred at anything--she actually *likes* this stuff and does it voluntarily!"
Well, I think some of that is "I don't care enough about beating her to do unassigned work." Most people don't! (Though my parents would definitely have been "So Mildred is doing unassigned work? You'd BETTER be doing that, then!")
It also seems like it was likely that they still couldn't have caught up with you even if they did do extra work (there's a certain synergy of loving a subject and how much you get out of it, plus a LOT depending on natural ability of course, plus if you knew they were doing extra work your competitive spirit would have kicked into high gear), in which case the way they thought was a very healthy way for them to think :P :) My poor classmate in chemistry that I referred to above did do unassigned work, way more than I did (yes, she was Asian), and she was never even close to beating me. (Though she probably wasn't trying to beat me so much as beating the other kids -- we were in different grades, so we weren't directly in competition for class rank even before I changed schools.)
Ha! I can still remember everyone who didn't give me the awards I had earned and who got them instead and am still disapproving. :P
Oh, if it had been another kid who had gotten the award, I would have remembered that! (I still remember the kid who beat me out for research camp summer after junior year.) The chemistry award didn't bother me because everyone knew I would have gotten it had it been given out! Btw, I talked to my mom and she doesn't remember about AP Chemistry, which leads me to believe I must have gotten the award that year, because I am sure my mom would have remembered if I hadn't. (She did remember about the previous year.)
Honestly, they didn't see me as struggling or going through a lot. They saw me as coasting and complaining about it. They specifically told me they didn't need to invest in my education, because my grades proved I was doing fine and would do fine in life without any investment. All the investment of resources went to my siblings, whom they could identify as struggling.
I didn't mean kid struggles, I meant adult struggles! There is a whole family story with my family, starting with my father's grandmother, who identified education as the way to get out of the horrible living conditions in rural Korea (e.g., no indoor plumbing or electricity, that's just for starters) and made sure my dad's dad could train as a medical doctor, so he could get OUT. My dad ended up in those same conditions for a while -- and then was dependent on the kindness of strangers to provide him room and board in high school when they moved to the US -- and had the same reactions, that he was going to get OUT and that if/when he ever had kids, his kids were NEVER going to be in a position where there was any chance they might go back to that. (To be fair, simply not being a colossal jerk like my grandfather and my step-grandmother -- who kicked my dad out both times -- would have been enough to ensure the vast majority of that, but that's not the only lesson he got from it.) And when I was a kid my parents were always, while not as desperately under the poverty line as when my dad was a kid, always struggling to figure out where to put every penny. (By the time my sister came along, they were more secure. My dad had a good job which he was hyper-competent at, it was just that he started with literally nothing, so it took time for them to get a financial cushion.) Honestly, what my dad would have really liked is for us to be hedge fund managers or CEOs and pull down seven figures a year and have a family who was never EVER insecure about money. And they saw education as the key to that.
And also because my dad lived among rich people in high school and aspired to that, I think he understood, without being able to articulate it, that there was a class element involved and that educational accomplishments were the key to that. I really resonanted with
Like -- I guess your family got by, and maybe they didn't have the kind of hard life my dad had, but it sounds pretty hard to me! Why wouldn't they do all they could to help their one kid who had a chance of getting out to a better life to do so?? I mean, I guess i know why -- and actually this was a pretty common way to think in the small town I grew up in -- your parents clearly didn't think it was as bad as all that, plus it sounds like they had anxiety about not being thought good enough (for my family, totally not an issue -- obviously not their fault they grew up in the aftermath of the Korean War, or that my grandfather was a jerk) plus they're not Asian, lol -- I've noticed most USians don't have the (very common Asian) idea that one's family is all in this together, which we've talked about re: the Tillermans; my mom fought for me a lot, but she was also fighting for herself because any glory that came to me also reflected on her.