Autism in Heels (O'Toole)

[cahn]

2/5. This is a rare ranking for me, as usually I don't finish books I dislike. And I would absolutely not have finished this book either had I not been reading it for a friend (who thinks her daughter may be on the spectrum). It's one of those irritating half-memoir-half-pop-nonfiction books. (I first wrote "pop science" but I don't think it rises to that level; O'Toole occasionally cites a paper but it's mostly her pontificating.) I think this book could be reasonably useful for a person with ASD who is exactly like O'Toole, or who has a child with ASD who is exactly like her, but wow am I not that person.

I think if it had just been a straight memoir I would have liked it rather more; the thing that bugged the heck out of me was how I got the distinct impression O'Toole was often making the assumption that her story (which was traumatic in a number of ways, including pronounced bullying, lack of support from parents/teachers/psychiatrists, serious self-esteem problems, sexual abuse, and eating disorders) was the ur-story of every Asperger girl ever. I mean, a lot of the book is in first person plural ("we" are like this and "we" feel that). And I suppose that could be read as shorthand for "many girls could be like this, and you should watch for it," which I think is a really good message -- I had no idea that there was such a large correlation between ASD girls and eating disorders before reading this book -- but that's not the message she actually said. She's at best really sloppy about her pronouns, and I don't mean in the he/she/they sense, but in the I/we sense, often giving the sense that she is assigning all her traumas to all ASD girls ever (and honestly I think she actually believes this). I think if I were a parent reading this book who didn't have marked ASD tendencies myself, I'd be super panicked that my kid was doomed to all these horrible traumas.

(I'm not panicked, because even those of us growing up in the 80's like O'Toole and me weren't necessarily doomed. Like basically everyone else, I found middle school to be horrible, but no more than anyone else really, and had a bout with poor self-esteem/caring too much what other people think in my teens-to-20's (again, as far as I can tell, totally typical) but all things considered I honestly have had a pretty great life. I won't deny that quite a lot of that is probably due in large part to luck (including luck in my family, my personality, and what kinds of lessons I learned earlier than her, and early diverting into math/science, which is much more welcoming of certain types).)

To be honest, I kind of feel like the main point of the book is "let me spew my insecurities at you and assume that you share them," which is not at all my favorite kind of book. And I could have done with way fewer inspirationally-angsty sections where she pontificates about how she gets what it's like to be an autistic woman because we've all had those experiences and feelings! (We have not all had those experiences and feelings.)

I also feel like she is irritatingly prone to ascribe every single thing about her and everything that ever happened to her (particularly if it's bad, or if she has negative feelings about it) to ASD. She's also (by her own admission) extremely smart, and a lot of the stories she tells about "see!! how hard it is to grow up ASD??" I feel could just as well have been told about any smart child with a lot of peers (and a mom) who didn't know how to deal with her. For just one example, there's a story she tells about how she knew that menstruation involved an egg (and not much else), and so she asked her mom if she could see the "period egg," and then apparently to this day feels embarrassed about it, which... uhhh... okay, I'm not exactly NT, but that sounds actually like a really smart question given that she didn't know the egg is a single cell?? And one that any reasonably intelligent child growing up thirty-odd years ago who only knew that might ask??

In another example of how Everything Is ASD, she also blithely claims that her inability to do geometry is because she's autistic, in a passage that is just stunning for its wrongheadedness.

Neurotypical minds (and geometric proofs) work... top-down, based on deductive reasoning, which is usually thought of as a skill that develops without any teaching or training. And for nonspectrum thinkers, that's mostly true. They see a fact -- maybe a facial expression, maybe a social situation -- and easily link it to a clear, logical conclusion. Our spectrum minds operate differently... Generally, we [spectrum minds] understand things, people, ideas -- life -- using inductive reasoning. We go from the bottom-up, starting with specific, concrete experiences, facts, and examples. Then we spot trends, notice patterns, and discover bigger concepts that link it all together.

WHAT
NO
I mean... nothing about this makes any sense at all?? I've never heard of NT people learning social rules via deductive reasoning, or really with a formal reasoning process at all?? And NT minds (generally speaking, of course! and of course I know a lot of exceptions) are famously bad at deductive reasoning and good at (often fallacious) inductive reasoning, and if deductive reasoning is not taught or trained it's because it's kind of hard to do so! I will not go as far as to say that Aspergers minds are deductive reasoning minds -- that would be falling into O'Toole's terrible fallacious generalization habits -- but E's mind, at least, is a deductive reasoning mind; she's always been really good at it, but earlier in her life it was really hard for her to reason inductively (it wasn't a rigid rule! she might be wrong!), and this was a big problem for her. (She can do it now, but it's definitely not her most natural mode.) I mean, O'Toole is clearly flamingly bad at deductive reasoning, but I... don't think she can say it's because she's on the spectrum.

In somewhat more shallow news, there's a lot about O'Toole's style that just grates on me, it's very breathless and all over the place and she uses italics like they're going out of style, and she will be making one point and then just start talking about something else, and just keeps going even when she's only talking tangentially about the point that she was making earlier -- well, okay. As you can see, this is the way I naturally write (and speak) myself! (D had to repeatedly ask me, when we dated/married, to add some context/transition words when I completely changed the subject during a conversation, because I was totally not used to doing that.) So I didn't have too much trouble reading it, but I do think that this is what editors (betas, lol) are for, and an editor should have edited the heck out of this and structured it a lot more and taken out a lot of italics. (Okay, I'll... mostly... stop with the italics now. But that is kind of what it felt like.)

As you might have expected from that last paragraph, the book is extremely disorganized, with her flitting from random story to other subject, often without clearly saying what she's talking about. I think she thinks she's being ~genuine~ and ~individualistic~, but really she's mostly being disorganized (which again! I write like this! This review is kind of like that! I get it! But this is why I always go through a bunch of drafts, because being able to communicate with other people is a Thing that is Useful), and an editor should really have gone through this. There's one chapter that's entitled "Predators and Fandom Families," and if you're scratching your head wondering what the connection is and if she's going to talk about, oh, idk, fandom scandals of the past, you would be wrong! She just... decided... she wanted to talk about predatory behavior that happened to her and also about how fandom is nice for ASD kids to meet other people who share interests. In the same chapter. I think the common thread is that... ASD kids want to fit in too?? (E only vaguely wants to fit in, but I certainly did when I was a kid and didn't know how) and that can lead to vulnerability to predators, which happened to her, but also a better solution to this is for them to find fandom "families." I think. Mind you, she never draws these connections very clearly, so you have to kind of infer it from the stream of consciousness.

I'm not sure what her main thesis is given the disorganization, but I think it's that we should ~celebrate~ every individual person as being individual people and each having differences, but also that ASD explains everything about Asperger girls, who are all Exactly Like Her. Yeah. It's kinda inconsistent.

With all that, as I've mentioned in places above, there were bits and pieces here and there where I did find out things I didn't know, or that made me think about things a little differently. ASD kids not being good at context -- I've seen that before, but not phrased quite that way, and, yeah, that's me.
This bit was interesting to me:

For many girls, "showwomanship" [sic] skills far exceed comfort with spontaneous or one-on-one social interaction. Intuitive use of this sidestep around social anxiety can lead to excellence in teaching, narrative presentation, litigation, and performance.

Because, huh. I wouldn't say I had social anxiety exactly, but I have always been much better at performance skills than in social interaction, and I've discovered this late-breaking talent of actually being... quite good at giving talks at church and teaching adults at church. (Not kids; kids are too unpredictable, lol. But adults are reasonably predictable! Also, sadly this doesn't magically make me better at giving talks in general, it's just that I've had more experience in figuring out the specific rules for church talks. And also, this was only once I figured out the rules; I was an extremely terrible teacher the first time they called me to do it, in grad school, to the point where my poor home teachers had to stage an intervention.) E is probably better at performance skills than social interaction, but she doesn't particularly like it.

Also, this passage. She's talking about doing research to figure out what was wrong with her daughter's GI problems (which is a harrowing story of how doctors wouldn't listen to her and thought she was just complaining about "too much laundry," omg -- and again, when she talks about her own experiences, they're often quite compelling!):

Back then, much as later on, I did serious, responsible research and spoke with enough authority that every single physician we met asked if I'd gone to med school. Not rudely. They just figured I must have. Oh, how I wish I'd known to have said, 'No, I'm not an MD. I'm autistic, so I can absorb, retain, and access vast amounts of information. In a way that I've only ever encountered among others on the spectrum, my mind grabs onto something, like a little ankle-biting dog, and until the pieces make sense simply will not let go.'

Okay, uh, aside from the irritating part where, again, the wording implies that she ascribes her ability to absorb information as something that one can do if and only if one is autistic (both sides of which I take issue with), mildred_of_midgard, you know whom I thought of :P

(Also, this is just one two small but super annoying bits: she brings up drapetomania (an 1851 hypothesized mental illness causing enslaved Africans from fleeing plantations, because why else would anyone ever do that??) to (I think, because her writing is super unclear) make the point that doctors don't look at the whole person... and then later talks about and appropriates Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a woman?" speech (she even uses the word "hijacking"!) to ask why other women drag on her for being (she quotes a critic) "smart, pretty, popular." I don't disagree that she should still be able to talk about her trauma without getting slammed for it even if she is attractive and intelligent! But argh, in a 2018 book about a white upper-middle-class profoundly-gifted ASD woman, I think these particular analogies could 100% have been left out. And yes, I can see that this is not being able to do context/not reading the room/mind-blindness at its peak, but like. Again: Don't you have a NT editor?)

Anyway -- if you can sort of disassociate the interesting and compelling stories she tells from either needing them to have structure or from the extreme tendency to group all ASD girls together, or from the bits which are either offensive or flat-out wrong -- there are some good things here! It's just that, oof.

Comments

[brainwane]

Today I Learned about "drapetomania"! WOW.

[mildred_of_midgard]

In the interests of getting stuff done today that is not ranting, I'm just going to reply to the part where you mentioned me. :P

my mind grabs onto something, like a little ankle-biting dog, and until the pieces make sense simply will not let go

Lol, yes, there are not and have never been any non-spectrum terriers, and certainly not in the 18th century.

[thistleingrey]

Wow, that sounds like a lot.

I have cheerfully borrowed coping bits from advice written for folks on the spectrum, though I think I'm not on it, because they're useful coping bits! But that's ... respect for the utility and thoughtfulness of someone's approach, not trying to belong with/to them, their modes of thought, etc.--whereas it sounds as though some of O'Toole's generalizations are from a wish for community.

[rushthatspeaks]

I see what you mean, as both the eating disorder info and the performance skills thing were click moments for me just now, and she sounds kind of insufferable.

[(Anonymous)]

When I wish to talk about inappropriately pathologizing normal human behavior, my go-to analogy is "tank sickness" from World War II, which was the disease suffered by inadequately trained and equipped Soviet soldiers when facing heavily armed Nazis in tanks. The disease presented itself in the form of an urge to cower, run away or even surrender.

[likeadeuce]

Isn't geometry based on inductive reasoning anyway???

[cahn]

I gotta say I learned about it from this book, so it taught me something!

[cahn]

See, this would have been a LOT BETTER of an analogy! (Which I also did not know about, thanks!)

[cahn]

Ha, you are wise, I have already spent way too much time ranting about this book :) (I actually have even more rant that I wrote up but could not figure out how to shoehorn in a way that even kind of followed any kind of flow.)

But yeah, the whole book is like this! I mean, I know there's a lot of her issues showing up -- it makes her feel special, I think, and gives her a unifying Answer to Everything to ascribe everything about herself to being on the spectrum, which seems comforting to her. And also she's probably suffering from a really skewed sample set -- she's apparently become a bit of a spokesperson for female autism, so I imagine she sees a lot of people who are on the spectrum or spectrum-adjacent, which would help her make assumptions that properties that can totally be found in the typical human population are actually spectrum properties. And is not around tech people at all, which would falsify some of her hypotheses pretty quickly. But still, argh.

[cahn]

Oh, yes, O'Toole seems to have a lot of things she's working through -- I hadn't recognized the wish for community until you said it, but now that you have I do think you're right, that's part of it. And also a skewed sample set, and I think she has a lot of self-esteem issues that are soothed if she can view all of it from the unifying lens of being on the spectrum. (She actually says in the book that when she was diagnosed it was a huge relief because then she could think of herself as not a failure. Which makes me sad for her!)

[cahn]

Right?!

I do feel like a lot of her insufferable-sounding-ness is, in fact, spectrum-ish behaviors (including a seeming total lack of self-analysis) coupled with her other issues that she still hasn't figured out how to rein in. For example, she talks a lot, in multiple places, about how incredibly smart she is, which is rather offputting, and then at some point in the book mentions how she got the idea at an early age that showing off how smart she was was the way to get approval from adults, and didn't realize that this was not effective with other kids. She makes it clear that she has realized as an adult that this isn't a desirable thing to do with peers... but she does it anyway. I do feel sorry for her, but she does also have to live in this world, especially if she's going to write books that a wide variety of people are going to read.

[cahn]

Well, kind of? In the sense that it's supposed to mimic what we see in the real world. But the actual reasoning processes in geometric proofs are all "here are some axioms which we take to be true, now let us derive all the theorems from the axioms" which is all deductive.

[mildred_of_midgard]

(I actually have even more rant that I wrote up but could not figure out how to shoehorn in a way that even kind of followed any kind of flow.)

Lol, yeah, I could never read this book, I would still be ranting 10 years later. You're right that it would have been much better as a straight up "here's my experience" memoir.

And is not around tech people at all, which would falsify some of her hypotheses pretty quickly.

Like, deductive vs. inductive thinking. I ask you! Is she not familiar with even basic stereotypes?

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, the whole point of geometry is that proto-geometry started off as people making observations about the real world, and going, "This is probably a valid generalization!" and then the breakthroughs came when people started doing *deductive* logic and proving that, for example, the square of the hypotenuse will *always* (given axioms of Euclidean geometry) be equal to the sum of the squares of the sides. Always always, not just "For the 49 triangles I checked before I got bored, and I don't know if the 50th would have been a counterexample."

[mildred_of_midgard]

how she got the idea at an early age that showing off how smart she was was the way to get approval from adults, and didn't realize that this was not effective with other kids.

See, I knew it was the way to get approval from adults (modulo my inconsistent mother), and knew full well that it wasn't always effective with other kids (except I was kind of surprised by how often it was--I was pretty popular, to the annoyance of both me and my sister), but as you and I have talked about, the adults were my in-group and the only people whose opinion mattered.

Like many people, I did tone it down as an adult, but not because I suddenly had the social skills to realize it was not the thing to do with my peers. For other reasons.

But then I also didn't have anything like the sense of failure or longing for community that you describe of O'Toole. Which is a common thing I see among people on the spectrum, the "I didn't realize!" or "I want to, but I don't know how!" or "I don't understand why I'm not getting the outcome I want!" phenomena. Whereas for me it's almost always "I know what you all want me to do, and I perfectly well could, I just make different choices, and I'm comfortable with the outcomes of those choices."

Which, as we've discussed, is why I have a hard time identifying as on the spectrum. By and large, it doesn't feel like a disability. It feels like having different psychological needs than everyone else, whether spectrum or NT, and getting those needs met my way.

[regshoe]

That sounds like a very frustrating book! I have often been annoyed by over-generalisations about What Autistic Women Are Like, which this seems like a particularly strange example of, and that writing style sounds very irritating. But it's good that you found some useful bits of insight in there as well!

[cahn]

There are some very strange bits, and a lot of frustrating things! But yes, a few interesting/useful bits in there too :)

[cahn]

Right??

[cahn]

So I learned the "don't brag" rule very early on, but not from my mother (who was always very frustrated that I was as modest as I was) -- I suspect it was from books, especially ones written before the (then) present day. (E.g., Nellie Oleson, the Great Brain, etc. It was never portrayed as a good thing.)

We've talked about this before, but as a kid I definitely had some "I'd like to have friends, but this isn't quite working?" going on. (Though this got way, way better after my parents put me in gifted camps.)

As an adult, I don't have a sense of failure or longing for community particularly, at least partially because I feel that I'm able to use my brain to analyze any social skills I would like to learn. I don't think I'm nearly as good as it as people who were naturally born with those skills, and I constantly am running algorithms on how I might have optimized previous conversations as well as learning new techniques, but I'm good enough that I can get by reasonably well (as long as people are reasonably accepting), and sometimes it's useful to have an analytical viewpoint on it. I would much rather have an analytical brain that can figure out societal rules than a brain that could easily do societal rules but... those aren't usually that useful for doing more academic analysis?
(As for the community aspect, I'm also a member of a couple of RL communities that I enjoy and find mutually beneficial and accepting, and also I get a lot of other needs met by DW -- though I suspect that's not exactly NT ;) So I don't really need to go looking for other communities. Especially autistic communities, omg. I actually find it hard to talk to some other Aspergers-like people, even ones I really like, because we (the ones it is hard for me to talk to, that is) just tend to be kind of quiet in person, and my skills aren't good enough for running a whole conversation by myself. But the ones who will just talk basically in parallel, as we've discussed, are rather easier!)

Like many people, I did tone it down as an adult, but not because I suddenly had the social skills to realize it was not the thing to do with my peers. For other reasons.

LOLOLOL to this, because after reading this I thought, "E doesn't ever talk about her accomplishments, not because this is a social skill she has mastered or anything, but because then it's possible someone would want to TALK to her about them!" and I thought it would be entirely consistent if that were part of your reasoning as well!

(The one exception is that if you mention her violin playing, she WILL correct you that it's really VIOLA.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

So I learned the "don't brag" rule very early on, but not from my mother (who was always very frustrated that I was as modest as I was)

I learned to brag specifically from my mother! When I was a kid and about to start a new year of school, she would always tell me to make sure the teacher knew how smart I was, that that was what led to success. It didn't matter what the other kids thought of my showing off. Only the teacher mattered.

A few years later, when she was feeling threatened by my intelligence, showing off, argumentativeness, and surprise!intellectual needs that she wasn't prepared for, it was all about how GOD didn't care how smart I was and on judgment day he was going to send me to heaven or hell based on how NICE I was to my mother.

Unfortunately for her, she had already told me it didn't matter what other people thought of my showing off!

She had also told me that showing off was what led to success at school, and told me that success at school would lead to scholarships, which would be the only way I could go to college. So the more she verbally abused me and told me I was on the fast track to hell, the more "show off -> make good grades -> afford college -> get the hell out of this house" became the dominant paradigm in my brain.

So that backfired. :D Like many things she did: she was really not prepared to have a child like me.

Note 1: I never would have seen any connection at alll between what Nellie Oleson was doing and what I was doing. Nellie was being a class snob; I was making sure I could go to college.

Note 2: I've put the pieces together as an adult and can tell you exactly where my mother's reasoning came from. She always said a teacher would look at the classroom on the first day and make subconscious decisions about who the A students and who the C students were. She's not wrong! Unconscious bias in teaching is totally a thing.

And she said you wanted to make sure you got pegged as an A student on day 1, because it was hard to impossible to overcome the bias later on, just by being quiet and submitting good work.

Again, not wrong! But since her knowledge of psychology and interpreting other people's behavior was so hit or miss, it's a priori kind of surprising that she figured out unconscious bias like this.

Well, in this case it's because she was the victim of unconscious bias. She was 1) Hispanic in a very racist society, 2) undiagnosed dyslexic. She had a handful of teachers that decided that she couldn't make better than a C, and one that decided to outright fail her, no matter what work she submitted.

So she decided to give me a leg up by preparing me for this, especially since I did have the brains that I could hit the ground running aka showing off. (I don't actually know if my sisters got this lecture.)

Now, I neither had an undiagnosed learning disorder nor was I ever the victim of anti-Hispanic racism (literally no one other than my mother ever even thought of me as Hispanic), but she had no way of knowing that she had a learning disorder, 100% believed I was going to be targeted by racists at school in the same way she was, and wasn't wrong even without those two factors. Who knows what unconscious bias the teachers would have had? And besides, showing off did make my school experience better.

For another child, it might have had the effect of alienating them from their peers and making them lonely or even bullied. For me, showing off was the single best part of an otherwise stressful, intellectually starved, and sometimes verbally abusive childhood. :D And it did help get me a lot of support, special treatment, letters of recommendation, etc. from my teachers in high school, which did help with the whole scholarship endeavor.

and I thought it would be entirely consistent if that were part of your reasoning as well!

Lol, no! That would have been the total opposite of my reasoning. Talking about my accomplishments was one of the few conversations I was prepared to have at the drop of a hat! Even when the other party wasn't necessarily. :P Talking enthusiastically and frequently about my accomplishments actually continued well past the age when certain other showing off behaviors had tapered off.

(The one exception is that if you mention her violin playing, she WILL correct you that it's really VIOLA.)

Hee. Good for her!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Anecdote about one of my mom's abusive teachers:

She had a teacher once, I think of French, who decided that no matter what my mom did, she wasn't going to get a passing grade. My mom ended up arguing with her friend, who was making an A in the same class with the same teacher, that it wasn't her fault she was failing French. Friend was understandably skeptical.

"Fine!" says my mom. "You do my homework tonight. I'll hand it in with my name on it, and you'll see, it'll get an F."

[Mom telling this story later: "This wasn't cheating, because I wasn't having someone else to my work to get a better grade. I was having someone to do it to show her I wasn't going to get the grade I deserved no matter what."]

Friend does my mom's homework that night, Mom hands it in, and sure enough, it comes back unread with an F at the top.

"Wow," says Friend.

Eventually, this culminated in an F on the report card.

Now, my family, as you know, was as unintellectual as they come. You had to go to school, behave yourself, work hard, and pass your classes. As long as you did that, there was no difference between bringing home all As and bringing home all Cs.

But bring home an F, and there was a problem.

My grandfather took the day off work, called a conference with all his daughter's teachers (and possibly the principal?), and sat them down.

[Mom: "Dad! But French is the only class I'm having problems in!"

Grandpa: "Doesn't matter. As long as I'm taking the day off work, I might as well get everyone in so we can talk about any and all problems now, so I don't have to take another day off later."]

Grandpa: "Why is my daughter making an F in French?"

French teacher: "Because I don't like her."

Grandpa: "Really? So no matter good the work she does is, you're going to give her an F?"

French teacher: "Yep!"

Grandpa: "..."

At home, to Mom:

Grandpa: "Well, the teacher admitted in front of me and all your other teachers and the principal that the F isn't your fault and there's nothing you can do differently, so for this one teacher, you won't get in trouble at home for failing. Keep doing what you're doing."

Given that another teacher (I *think* it was a different one) said that she let my mother get beaten up at school because she didn't approve of my Hispanic grandfather marrying a white woman and my mother being "mixed race," and given that my mother said yet a third teacher said that my mother just wasn't that smart, and generally her teachers just decided that she was never going to college, I'm willing to bet racism was at play with the whole public "Because I don't like her" and everyone else just accepting that.

Because Mom was an incredibly shy, pathologically rule-following child, as she was when I knew her, so it's not like I can see how a teacher wouldn't have liked her on the grounds that she was difficult. I'm guessing racism, and the undiagnosed dyslexia probably reinforced it.

Mom made sure to instill the pathological following of rules in me, but she relentlessly combatted my shyness (which I did have as a toddler/very small child!), because she said shyness held her and her grandmother (Mildred) back. "Everyone thinks shy little girls are sweet, and they'll grow out of it. You don't grow out of it! You have to fight it!" And that's what led to the yearly "Don't be shy! It doesn't matter if the other kids don't like you! You have to show off in front of the teacher so you can go to college someday!" talks.

She got a lot of things right! But others not so much. (My latest post this morning, about my uncle, was from thinking about Mom's childhood, as a direct result of this conversation we're having, in which I explain why her childhood led to me showing off my brains in my childhood.)

Re Mom and college: despite a total lack of support from her teachers (I think at least one actually told her she'd never be successful), she went to the local community college in her 20s.

Her father said he would pay for tuition but not books.

Since her parents also wouldn't let her get a job (yes, in her 20s), she was in a pickle.

Her grandmother, good old Mildred, the only intellectual of the family, paid for my mother's textbooks out of her Social Security check. Which, given how little that pays (and I think she was only getting part of her bigamist husband's Social Security, because part was going to his second family), I gather was a non-trivial sacrifice.

When my mother started taking classes, her mother was actively hostile. Because, of course, seeing my mother succeed intellectually reminded her that she had dropped out in tenth grade.

I may not have gotten the extracurricular support I needed, but at least if I did well at school in a way that didn't make extra demands on my parents, I got praised for that and not "I'm not speaking to you"!

At the community college, she finally had good, supportive teachers and had good experiences. That was where her undiagnosed dyslexia became the thing that was really holding her back. She never managed to get an associate's degree, got pregnant, had me, had my sister, got pregnant with my other sister, and got married and *finally* moved out and escaped from her mother at the age of about 30.

Part of the reason I'm sharing all this is to give you some of the context for why and how my family does not care, not even a little, if their kids are successful. Which I know blows your mind! :)

[mildred_of_midgard]

Given that another teacher (I *think* it was a different one) said that she let my mother get beaten up at school because she didn't approve of my Hispanic grandfather marrying a white woman and my mother being "mixed race," and given that my mother said yet a third teacher said that my mother just wasn't that smart, and generally her teachers just decided that she was never going to college

Oh, right, and then there was the time one of her English teachers left in the middle of the year, and made notes on the students to the teacher who was taking her place. Her note on my mother was that she wasn't very smart and didn't have a good imagination. The teacher who started in the middle of the year told my mother that her predecessor had written this, and that it was very inappropriate for her to do so, because one, if it was true, the new teacher should have been left to observe this for herself, instead of the old teacher trying to intentionally bias her from the get-go, and two, said New Teacher, it wasn't even true! She told my mother that she was perfectly intelligent and her stories showed a good imagination.

In hindsight, I question telling the student the awful things her predecessor said about her, but since it seems the context was, "Your grades in this class are suddenly better in the middle of the year because the previous teacher was mean. If she made you feel bad, it's not you, it's her," I guess that's fair. I suppose this could even have come up at a parent-teacher conference, I don't remember.

Anyway, this kind of thing is why showing off was presented to me as pre-emptive self-defense!

[cahn]

Oh, okay, this is hilarious because I certainly never put "show the teacher I'm smart and am a good student" in the bucket of bragging! Bragging is what you do to other people your own age, like Nellie. :) I didn't focus on showing my smarts like you did, partially because of not having the imperatives you did, but also because by mid-elementary school I think it was kind of accepted that everyone knew I was smart, so I didn't really have to do anything special to convince the teachers except regularly answer questions (especially questions other students couldn't answer) and get extremely good grades. (I also pestered any teacher who would give me extra books to read, but that was definitely not bragging, that was getting extra books! And, as I think I mentioned, wrote little French notes to my French teacher, but I think that was just me being a lonely kid who saw her as a friend. Who would give me books!)

I guess the one exception was band -- I took band in 6th grade, played flute (this is how I know anything about the flute, lol), and was SO VERY BAD at it. Just abysmal. And every day I wanted to tell the band director, who was clearly very frustrated by me, that I was actually a really good musician who won awards, just not with this instrument! But I didn't, because I could see that it wasn't really relevant to the fact that I did, in fact, suck at flute.

Also, although I didn't know how to make friends as a middle schooler, I also wasn't ostracized. People just mostly left me alone (there were a couple of unfortunate incidents, but I don't think I had any more than anyone else had). Interestingly, there was a particular girl (also Asian), a couple of years older than I was; after I got accelerated in science I was in a couple of science classes with her, maybe one or two math classes as well. The way people behaved around her was different than the way they behaved around me -- people really didn't like her, and I remember people assuring me that oh, you aren't like that. I think that in her case she was much more fussy about grades and wanting to know what grades other people had made and comparing them to hers. I wanted very much for the teacher to know I was making the best grade in the class, but I didn't talk to other students about my grades unless they asked me! (And I was happy to help anyone who asked for help -- not sure where that tendency came from; I suspect I've just always liked that.)

...In a rather tangential story, this discussion is also reminding me of my chemistry teacher, Mrs. W, whom I took both intro chem and AP chem from (with the girl mentioned above, in fact) and who was a fantastic chemistry teacher. My mom was convinced Mrs. W didn't like me. At the end-of-year awards ceremony, each science class would give a plaque to the kid who had the best grade in the class. When I took intro chem from Mrs. W, she didn't give an AP chem award (because her daughter would have won it, which she said would look like nepotism) and she said that she was not going to give an intro chem award either for this reason (which I would easily have won), which my mom pointed out was a rather BS excuse, since her daughter was definitely not in the intro chem class! I'm trying to remember whether Mrs. W gave me an AP chem award the next year, or whether she pulled the same trick of "oh, I didn't give one last year, so I won't this year either." I'll have to ask my mom, next time we talk. (I guarantee my mom will remember if Mrs. W didn't. My mom does not forget grudges!)

Now that I think back on it, I absolutely adored Mrs. W's class but she never gave me any positive feedback (unlike my math and French teachers, who were delighted with me, or my 10th grade English teacher, who was the type not to give positive feedback but I think mostly just was distantly amused by me) -- so -- it's possible! Or possibly she just wasn't a very demonstrative teacher (which is true). At the time I didn't care, I just wanted her to teach me chemistry and she did, and occasionally gave an interesting challenge problem, and wasn't in any way overtly unfair, so I liked her! My mom does have a track record of being right about these kinds of things, which is the main reason I think that it could be true that she didn't like me. But my mom also is extremely cynical about human nature, so. (On the third hand, that's possibly why she's often right!)

Your mom's teachers, on the other hand...! I can see that that one teacher shouldn't have told her about the previous teacher, but man I can see why New Teacher did!

Part of the reason I'm sharing all this is to give you some of the context for why and how my family does not care, not even a little, if their kids are successful. Which I know blows your mind! :)

It just boggles my mind because... don't they want their kids not to go through all the struggles they had to go through? I mean, this was a major motivation of my parents as we were growing up! My parents went through a *lot* and they really did not want their kids to have to do that!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, okay, this is hilarious because I certainly never put "show the teacher I'm smart and am a good student" in the bucket of bragging! Bragging is what you do to other people your own age, like Nellie. :)

Wow, I would not have made the distinction, or, if someone had told me to make the distinction, would not have known where to draw the line. I guess if I was on the playground, there would have been no teacher within hearing distance? But most of these interactions took place in the classroom, where, if you were talking to a teacher, the student was the audience, and vice versa, and usually it was a three-way interaction.

When I stopped making my peers feel bad was also when I stopped prioritizing making sure the teacher had pegged me as the single most engaged and intelligent student of the class.

Eh, I suppose in grad school I started to have student interactions without a teacher around, because we had our grad student study rooms where we hung out, but I was still very much in "announcing my accomplishments at every possible opportunity" mode. I don't think it occurred to me that it had no practical purpose there, it was just how I interacted with people at that point.

also because by mid-elementary school I think it was kind of accepted that everyone knew I was smart

Ah, yeah, you grew up in a small town and stayed there? My mother grew up in a military family and so did I. Not until high school did I have the opportunity to build a reputation like that. (And that was a highly unusual circumstance, due to the fact that my parents had two disabled children so they kept making a case in writing that it would be a hardship to move every other year.) And high school was when the stakes were highest! (Scholarships.) So I definitely did not tone it down then.

I think that in her case she was much more fussy about grades and wanting to know what grades other people had made and comparing them to hers.

Oh HAI other student who was just like me. :P I think the competitive nature of school played a role here; it wasn't enough to be smart, you had to be smart*er*, and smart*est*, and you had to take remedial action if you felt like you were losing ground (if you were me).

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. Sophomore year, the school released class ranking data for the first time. You would go to the front office and ask what your rank was. From talking to other students, I gather like 10 of them had expected to be #1, because they knew they had a 4.0, and they got there and were told they were tied for second. Outrage and shock! Who was this mystery sophomore who was taking classes that would weight your GPA above a 4.0? That was for juniors and seniors! There was much whispering and speculation.

It was Mildred, taking honors junior-level English, math, chemistry, and physics sophomore year. Unprecedented!

After that, "Mildred = future valedictorian" was an equation in everyone's head (and this is where it matters that my brothers were disabled and so we didn't immediately move after sophomore year), and it was much discussed. Junior year, I walked into history class one day, and was met with, "Hey, Mildred! [Guy] is number 2 and he's gunning for your number 1 slot! He's gonna be valedictorian!"

I still think it's hilarious that I knew I was so far ahead that there was no way he was going to catch up, and I went, "Uh huh," and went on taking my materials out of my backpack, without even looking up to see who it was. Later on, based on my knowledge of who was salutatorian and knowing where that guy sat in that classroom, I can deduce it was Erik.

Believe me, though, had I considered him a viable threat, I would have paid attention and started talking smack, which was what they were trying to provoke me to do. I know this because one time, a new girl came from a different school partway through senior year. Rumors were flying that they had even more weighted GPA classes at her school, and so she was going to be valedictorian thanks to having started on a different playing field and being able to transfer her head start at the last minute.

People were agog! There was drama! I was in the front office the same day, arguing that this was an unfair practice! The school needed to weight her grades according to our scale, not her old school's scale! What was her GPA, anyway?

Counselors: "Can't tell you, but look, you have nothing to worry about."

Me: "But what is her GPA??!! This is unfair!!"

*rinse and repeat*

Counselors: "YOU HAVE NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT GO AWAY!"

They were right. Eventually she ended up not even placing in the top 5% and getting a full tuition waiver at the U of Arizona; she was ranked 16th, having missed it by one slot. (Notice how this was important enough that I still remember!) I also got a scholarship she had wanted. She also came up to me one day at the end of senior year to say that she was bitter about this, because I wasn't even planning on going to the U of A (I still had hopes for MIT in those days).

Then there was one guy I was kind-of friends with, and he ended up ranking, 7th, I think? Give or take 1. (I used to know this, but it's been 20 years.) He told me that he had originally planned to be valedictorian, but he gave up once I came along, because I was such a juggernaut he had no chance, and if he couldn't be first, what was the point in giving your all?

As for the year ahead of me, because I was taking senior-level classes junior year, one time I overheard the students behind me muttering about how Aubrey was going to be valedictorian, unless Mrs. W. (notoriously strict disciplinarian and harsh grader) screwed him over and gave him a B. Because--shock!--he'd gotten some Bs from her on assignments/exams. The other students, who were mostly in the top 10-20 (class of ~300), but not in the running for valedictorian, sounded outraged at her, because being valedictorian was Serious Business.

So, in a cutthroat environment like this, was there any chance I was not bragging at every possible opportunity? We had a pecking order! Talking smack was the order of the day! Future finances were riding on this!

It's also quite surprising, because these were not people who considered themselves intellectuals. Unlike me, they did not do unassigned reading or talk about intellectual topics or complain because school was too easy or have intellectual ambitions. I was the weird kid because I checked out books from the library and carried them with me and actually *liked* school. They happened to be good at completing the assigned work, but the cutthroat grade competition was for bragging rights and scholarship money for college in Arizona.

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!"

But I didn't, because I could see that it wasn't really relevant to the fact that I did, in fact, suck at flute.

Lol, I would not have been able to resist!

she said that she was not going to give an intro chem award either for this reason (which I would easily have won), which my mom pointed out was a rather BS excuse, since her daughter was definitely not in the intro chem class!

Now I am outraged on your behalf!

(I guarantee my mom will remember if Mrs. W didn't. My mom does not forget grudges!)

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

It just boggles my mind because... don't they want their kids not to go through all the struggles they had to go through? I mean, this was a major motivation of my parents as we were growing up! My parents went through a *lot* and they really did not want their kids to have to do that!

Well, the thing is, they did! They made sure I didn't go through the struggles *they* had had to go through. It was the fact that I was completely different from them that was the problem.

My mom's struggle was with teachers writing her off. So she made sure that didn't happen to me. Her struggle was never being bored at school or wanting to do more than just make good grades. She was dyslexic, school was too hard for her! So if I was having an easier time than her and making better grades than her and was all set to go to college and even get a job someday, what right did I have to complain? I was set up for success by her standards!

The standard for success in our family was "have enough education that you could find a job if you needed to." My mother: "I have some community college credits, so if your dad died, I could find work as a subsitute teacher." And then, "Well, now that we live in Tucson, which is a college town, you need a degree for that, but if he died, I could move us back to a smaller town and get a job. We wouldn't starve."

Also, keep in mind my parents' anxiety disorders. That's key here to understanding their behavior. Me asking for things that they hadn't thought of and didn't know off the tops of their heads how to provide was interpreted as me saying they were inadequate parents, which resulted in them shutting me down and saying I was bad for asking for these things. It did not (by and large) lead to, "Let us find out how to do this thing that no one in our family has ever wanted to do." It was all, "We never wanted to do that! Nobody we know has ever wanted to do that! That is an unreasonable thing to want to do!"

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.

Also, this is how sparing your children from your struggles often played out in my family:

Grandma: *takes band in school*
Grandma: *plays the marching drum*
Grandma: *is too small and weak to carry the big drum in the parade*
Mom: *wants to play the clarinet at school*
Grandma: "No! I did not succeed at this and therefore you will not succeed at this."
Grandma: *does not sign the paper allowing my mom to play the clarinet*
Mom: *later complains to me about how silly this was*

Also Mom: *tries taking an independent study once*
Mom: *does not make a good grade*
Mildred: *wants to take European history as an independent study junior year*
Mom: "No! Independent studies are too hard! You are forbidden."
Mildred: *is stressed the entire year keeping her independent study a secret*
Mildred: *makes a good grade, obviously :P*

MY FAMILY

[ethelmay]

I would have put "show the teacher you are smart" in the bragging category (in elementary school, anyway), because in my case the usual reason I was doing that was because I thought the teacher was wrong about something. But I didn't take school very seriously for the longest time. I would complete worksheets and what not because it was something to do, but I literally didn't realize that they were supposed to be teaching me things.