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

[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.

[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

[mildred_of_midgard]

Another anecdote of just how big a deal class rank was in high school and why not bragging was not a thing for any of us:

In the last days of senior year, the principal invited the top ten students to a McDonald's breakfast in a faculty lounge, in order to reveal the final rankings. While we were sitting around the table eating, the principal read aloud from a sheet of paper.

"#1: Mildred."

No surprises there.

"#2: Makoto."

Everyone sits up and takes notice. Makoto has been third until now! Erik gasps, Makoto lets out an exclamation of joy.

"#3: [Someone who is not Erik.]"

Jaws drop.

"#4: [Someone else who is not Erik.]"

Erik's face is turning bright red. Everyone is looking around in confusion and shock.

"#5: [Someone who is still not Erik."]

Erik goes an even deeper shade of red.

"Oh, wait, this is the alphabetical list. I'll go get the class rankings."

Erik exhales involuntarily, in a way that tells you he hasn't been able to breathe through all this. Suddenly everything makes sense: my last name begins with B, Makoto's last name begins with B, Erik is an R!

Mutterings about what a travesty it is that the principal is so out of touch it didn't even strike her as weird that Erik wasn't anywhere near the top of the list. Everybody knew exactly where they and everyone else were in the pecking order.

Later it occurred to me that alphabetically by last name, I was second on the principal's list. She must unconsciously skipped over the girl before me to read my name first (I'm sure it helped that my first and name had almost twice as many characters combined, so it would have been more visually striking), and then just read mindlessly from there.

In other words, she didn't know how any of the other students were ranked, but she damn well knew I was first!

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.

It was a deliberate strategy (and unquestioned way of life) that paid off, because academic success was set up to be a zero-sum game, and I got special treatment by raising awareness of how much I both needed and deserved it.

Said principal did not know me that well (we knew each other to talk to, but that was it), but I know she knew a lot more *about* me and my situation, because people talked about me. I know this not just because she skipped over the name before mine because only I could possibly be valedictorian, but because she was the one who had an aunt who did philanthropy and got that aunt to pay for my correspondence courses in Latin and astronomy senior year. I had never asked for this! I didn't know it was possible! I just went around broadcasting my need to study these things and the travesty of not even having a teacher at the school who was qualified to do an independent study (unlike European history). One day, a teacher informed me that something had been set up via the principal and her aunt.

I suspect I came up at a faculty meeting! I had celebrity status at that school (in that school district, actually), and that reflected the hard work of not just the academic side but also the PR side. :P

Exhibit A:

The librarian and I are working behind the circulation desk at the library, scanning and sorting books. Some girl I don't recognize comes over.

Her: "Are you Mildred?...I heard you [accomplishment 1] and [accomplishment 2] and [accomplishment 3] and you're writing a novel [the only one I specifically remember her enumerating]!...Okay, I just wanted to meet you."

Librarian, after she's out of earshot: "I thought she was going to ask for your autograph."

Me: "I thought the same thing!"

Exhibit B:

I've long since graduated. My mother is walking down the hallway of a different school in the district. My sister is with her.

Some woman comes over, with a similarly fannish attitude. "Hi, you're Mrs. Midgard, right? Is this Mildred?!"

Mom: "Oh, awkward. Uh, no, this is my other daughter."

Some woman: "Oh. Well, nice to meet you."

I wouldn't have gotten this just by making good grades. I got this by being clear on the fact that my parents were not going to meet my intellectual needs, and that I needed the outside world to make up as much of the difference as possible.

So no, I was kind of the opposite of E in this respect. ;)

[cahn]

Lol!

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.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, see, I grew up in the South. You did not talk about things like that outright, in front of other people!

But what all this reminds me of are math contest rankings. Because that was interesting!

Ah, that is interesting and makes sense! State contest rankings were one of many accomplishments that got broadcast to all and sundry at my schools, but since contests were only once a year and there were only a few contests, and since only a handful of people from your school would compete in a contest and you never interacted with the people from the other schools, that only gave you a few days' per year worth of bragging time, and only with the few people from your own school who competed. Whereas everyone had grades to talk about, every day, all year. ;)

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)

Ahhh, yes, that makes sense! And that's the thing: my parents did not see poverty as something to avoid. Homelessness, yes, and education was the key to making sure you didn't starve and could support yourself. But I was getting an education, so they had nothing to worry about! All they cared about was us finishing high school with passing grades, and then maybe getting some kind of post-secondary vocational training or community college if that made sense.

See, my parents (my mother, speaking on behalf of the parental team) gave us long lectures about how rich people aren't any happier, and if you go to someone's house and you see lots of fancy things, they could have bought all that on credit and the bank is about to repossess us, and so forth.

We were told that being a garbage collector was a fine respectable job that would make them proud of us. (And it is and that's good! It's just their particular application of this laudable belief intersected badly with my particular unmet intellectual needs.) Living at home until 30 like my mother did, and getting married and becoming a stay-at-home mom like my mother, totally fine, as long as we had enough education that if our husbands died or left us we could find an emergency job and keep from starving.

My parents were so explicitly anti-classist in so many different aspects of life that it just permeated my entire upbringing, sometimes in surprising ways. My wife and I talk about this sometimes.

Perhaps the most surprising knock-on effect of my anti-classist or reverse-classist upbringing: it took me until I was 25, staying at a friend's house (which as I'm sure you can guess, almost never happened), to get a shampoo that kept my scalp from itching. Because I had been told that paying more for more expensive products was a waste of money that people did just for conspicuous consumption class status symbol reasons (not in those words, but that's what the lecture meant).

When I complained about my scalp itching, my mother said that was because I had gotten my hair used to being washed every day, and I should only wash it every other day. I said I couldn't, because I was going crazy scratching by the end of each day and wouldn't last a second day. She shrugged at me.

Stayed at a friend's house while attending a conference in grad school, used what she had, realized to my shock that my hair was not only shinier/healthier looking the next day, but it was not! itching! anymore. I then decided that no matter what my mother said, paying $3/bottle instead of $1/bottle was worth it for me. (Even though I felt bad because I wasn't just paying a little more, I was paying three times as much! Which felt borderline immoral and was definitely something I felt defensive about.) That was also a huge eye-opener in which I discovered that sometimes if you pay more, you do get better results.

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)

So my parents grew up with plumbing and electricity, but my mother's parents did not. They grew up in rural areas, poor in different ways. And my mother always talked about how my grandfather's mother sewed their underwear out of flour sacks, and she would go to the river to do their laundry and have it hanging out on the line by the time the sun came up, and such stories of farm/ranch life in the early twentieth century. And she talked about how her father and his family didn't feel poor, because all their neighbors lived exactly the same way, and since they grew their own food (and weren't like in the Dust Bowl), they always had enough to eat and didn't even notice the Great Depression.

There's a country music song that goes, "Well, somebody told us Wall Street fell, But we were so poor that we couldn't tell," and everytime I hear that, I think, "Hey, that's Grandpa's childhood!"

My grandmother grew up in a more varied poor childhood, born in a log cabin and then moved to different small towns as her mother found work to support them, and they might have had more electricity at different times, but she also didn't have enough to eat. Like at one point there was nothing in the house to eat but popcorn, and she had to see a doctor for digestive issues (probably hunger/malnourishment).

And so the only thing my parents cared about was whether you had a roof and food! Everything else was a luxury, and you better not act like it was anything other than a luxury.

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??

As far as I can tell, they literally considered it immoral to divert resources from other children to the one child who was already going to be self-supporting. It would have been a waste of resources.

It was interesting because they were stuck with an either-or situation at one point:

- One child is almost certain to end up dependent on others, in diapers, unable to speak up or defend himself if he's being abused, for the rest of his life, no matter what you do.

- One child is pretty certain to end up independent, and even successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone in your family, no matter what you do.

And to my parents, the dead obvious choice is to throw body and soul into the tiiiiiny chance of finding *some* treatment that might help the first child become independent.

Right as we moved to Arizona and my parents were faced with a choice between a school system that would be good for my brother and good for my sister, one of my teachers apparently (according to my mother) told them they didn't need to worry about my education, as I was already on top of it.

I FELT SO BETRAYED. I liked that teacher!

So my parents explicitly told me that, since they agreed with that teacher, they were picking a school district with a decent elementary special education program at the cost of me going to a high school that was primarily training the future farmers of America. All I had to do and all they had to make sure I did was stay in school and make passing grades until I graduated. At which point I would be on my own and could do what I wanted.

I was a solved problem in their mind, and all my insisting I wasn't a solved problem was just ingratitude and undeserved accusations of inadequate parenting.

It didn't always need to be as either-or as my parents made it, there was a lot of anxiety playing into their refusal to put in more effort for me* than they already were, but the school district choice was an either-or, and their values made it clear to them that choosing me would be a waste of resources because I was a solved problem.

* I've said this before, and I'll say it again: this was not avoiding work. This was avoiding scary things, because the motivation to face the fear of the unfamiliar wasn't strong enough. In my brother's case, the motivation was strong enough, so they did all kinds of work. And when neither the process nor the need for it was unfamiliar to my parents, like calling to get school records transfered to keep me from repeating classes I'd already taken, they did the work. Not repeating classes you had already passed: something my parents saw as familiar and understood why it was necessary! Skipping classes when you could just take them like everyone else, or taking extra classes: not something my parents understood why it was necessary, because they never did it nor did anyone else they knew.

I think the difference between my parents and yours is that they both see education as key to success, but because mine see survival as the goal and yours see upward mobility and outperforming the average as the goal, and mine see poverty as a perfectly fine situation and yours don't, my parents' idea of the necessary amount of education is"average amount", and your parents' idea of the necessary amount is "as much as humanly possible."

And that's related to why your parents supported your education on the one hand, but on the other were extremely invested in certain outcomes for you and hostile when you had goals that didn't match theirs, and mine were accepting of whatever goals I chose and whatever outcomes I got, but saw investing too much in them as a waste of resources.

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.

Yeah, mine came from a family where any of my mother's success was shot down immediately because it made *her* mother look bad, and then my mother and I got into a dynamic where my obnoxiousness (which was driven by my need to fight for my needs) about my success made *her* feel bad about my success, so...yeah. Not like your family.

In contrast, I'm sure a child as disabled as my brother would have made your mother feel he reflected badly on her, but not mine! She was more emotionally comfortable with a special needs disabled child with an obvious medical diagnosis than a special needs overachiever child who was constantly demanding that her parents do more. I've posted before (second half of this one) about how I think my parents were more mentally prepared for and thus more emotionally comfortable with my one sister's out-of-control disobedience and my other sister's normal disobedience than my pathologically obedient and obnoxiously argumentative self! One was "Well, kids do wrong things, being a good parent is teaching them and being patient," and one was "Kid is not doing wrong things and saying WE'RE doing wrong things??! NO! We're not bad parents!"

(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.)

Yes, please do! As noted, I've read a bunch of memoirs about growing up in North Korea, including during the 1990s famine, so I have an idea of how bad it can be, but I have no idea about South Korea. I'm super curious about your father's experience.

(My dad's father worked in a steel mill, his mother worked in an office, his brother was not quite as disabled as mine, but still living at home and heavily medicated. The whole idea of a mother who worked was prevented to me as a perfectly valid life choice, but a super unusual one. Especially since she was the grandmother I had virtually no contact with. In being a woman with a career, I was basically trailblazing in my family. Especially as my sister had no career ambitions either and promptly got pregnant at 16.)

I've noticed most USians don't have the (very common Asian) idea that one's family is all in this together

Indeed, and my family is especially good at breaking up into splinter groups every generation, even beyond the usual American individualism. (Usually you have a dysfunctional family that gets together at the holidays and then remembers how dysfunctional they are. You don't just cut each other off promptly and permanently, which is my family's tradition.)

[mildred_of_midgard]

- One child is almost certain to end up dependent on others, in diapers, unable to speak up or defend himself if he's being abused, for the rest of his life, no matter what you do.

Alas, as I predicted then, no treatment has been found, and he remains dependent and at the mercy of his caretakers.

Sadly, I have since found one treatment that I suspect might help, but the only person I would trust to be able to apply it properly would be me.

If it were just a matter of forwarding the reference to my mother, I would, estrangement or no (I maintain a minimal level of communication for sharing medically necessary information, as you know), but:

1) I don't have a concise explanation, just a book that happens to say somewhere in the middle, "This experimental technique for teaching language that worked for chimps and bonobos had better success with non-verbal low IQ children than other techniques in this one small group that we tried."

2) Implementing the technique requires a level of attention to detail and understanding of the concepts that neither my mother nor the people who've worked with my brother have ever shown any signs of being able to wrap their heads around.

So I'm pretty sure what would happen is that they would do it wrong, *if* they tried it, even if I wrote up a concise step-by-step manual. And even if it were implemented perfectly, there's no guarantee it would work. (It's just that from a methodological standpoint, it makes *so* much sense to me. And it describes the flaws in the traditional method, which is the method that's used with my brothers, and the problems it describes are the same problems I've seen with them! It's frustrating.)

I suppose I could research if there's some professional practicing it, but my impression is that at least when the book was written, there wasn't.

Meh.

[cahn]

(It's just that from a methodological standpoint, it makes *so* much sense to me. And it describes the flaws in the traditional method, which is the method that's used with my brothers, and the problems it describes are the same problems I've seen with them! It's frustrating.)

I'd really be interested in knowing more about this, especially this part: what makes sense and what are the flaws and the problems in the traditional method that you've seen. (I am a bit haunted by the idea that we might in fact have gotten a low-functioning ASD child, and I know that my kids have a better than average chance of having a low-functioning ASD child, which I know is still probably quite low-probability, but...)

Is the "traditional approach" ABA? And what book is this?

[mildred_of_midgard]

It's one of my favoritest books! Kanzi: The Ape at the Brink of the Human Mind, reviewed (at length!) here. It's short and easy to read, at least at our levels (my dyslexic mother would struggle, unfortunately).

Caveat, though, that all my praise of the author's treatment of animals in those posts was based on the author's respectful descriptions of how she treated their minds and granted them the status of human children and her descriptions of their interactions. There has since been a huge controversy over her physical neglect and endangerment of them, in which she lost her access to them. Which is hugely disappointing if true. (She rejects the accusations and says the apes are now being treated with no dignity and have reverted to being animals in a zoo again. Both could be true--god knows there are plenty of neglected human children.)

Is the "traditional approach" ABA?

ABA is deeply problematic, but the only aspect addressed by this book (or at least the part I'm talking about) is that the stimulus-response conditioning approach to language used with apes and disabled children does not teach them that language is a symbolic tool for communication if they don't already grasp that. And thus they never do anything that could really be called language. At best, they end up like rats pressing levers to get pellets, and at worst, they end up doing random things that researchers desperately want to find evidence of language use in.

What they *don't* do is initiate communication using language to convey their needs and better their lives. Which, if you think about it All so-called "language" use among these apes is prompted by the researcher, and the subject reacts as they've been trained, if they've been successfully trained (and usually that's not even the case).

And that's exactly where my brothers are. At least one understands and can react to a handful of phrases, less than your average dog. Neither of them initiates it. One initiates communication in different, non-linguistic ways, like bringing his sippy cup to my mother when he wants it filled up. (The other one was only 3 when I went to college, so I have fewer data points. I have no memories of being told he did anything like this, but it might have just flown under my radar.)

What's interesting is that my mother always told us that there was no way to tell if my brothers understood everything they were hearing and were possibly doing advanced physics in their heads, and were just lacking the ability to talk, or if they didn't understand anything, or somewhere in between.

Having seen my one brother's use of his picture board, and having read this book, I'm now 99% sure communication via language as symbolic vehicle is not taking place, and thus they're not understanding anything either, any better than a dog.

His use of his picture board is totally random as far as I can tell. When he presses buttons and words/phrases come out of the device, my mother struggles to interpret what he's saying. (I think this is equally true of the other brother too.)

You can hypothesize all you want that they're thinking all sorts of things that you and I would think and pressing the buttons that best communicate that--but the button pressing is indistinguishable from random. Commmunication is literally not taking place. There is no evidence that they are using it any differently than they use a toy piano keyboard: press a button, a sound comes out, that's cool.

Here's an example of an exchange with my mother that I witnessed:

My brother: sitting and chilling out at the dinner table, no apparent emotion other than contentment. Pressing buttons on his picture board with no evidence of intent, changing strategies, or frustration that he's not getting through.

Picture board: "Apple."
Mom: I don't have an apple. Do you want a cookie?
Picture board: "School."
Mom: Uh, school is tomorrow. Yes, you'll see your teachers and friends tomorrow.
Picture board: "I'm mad." [Context: when he's frustrated or upset, you know it! He is frequently frustrated or upset precisely because he can't communicate his needs.]
Mom: Are you mad about something? [Highly skeptical.]
Picture board: "Dog." [Context: we have no dog, there is no dog at school, I'm not sure he's seen a dog in 15 years.]
Mom: Okay, I think you're just playing with that. Or if you're not, I'm sorry, I can't figure out what you're trying to tell me.

Any scientist would have to say that this behavior shows no evidence of being statistically significantly distinguishable from the null hypothesis of random button-pressing.

And the fact that the method in the book was successfully used to take intellectually disabled children/teenagers from exactly that level, to using language for its actual purposes, makes me think that this technique is the one thing that has a chance of getting my brothers to understand what communication is for and use it to better their lives.

If we were on speaking terms and they were still in school, I would ask to go to an IEP meeting and present the technique and see if I got any signs that anyone grasped the difference between "language as symbolic vehicle for communication" and "stimulus-response" well enough to implement the plan correctly. Or at least someone who understood which parts of the plan were important enough that they can't be deviated from for it to still be the same plan that does the right thing.

Unfortunately, understanding why this technique works the way it does requires a lot more technical understanding than the collaborate problem-solving approach in Lost at School, which is why I can rec the one book to anyone and everyone and the other one I kind of sigh and am not optimistic about. It took me a fair bit of college-level linguistic and philosophical education to get to the point where I could grasp the concepts involved; high school me would not have, I'm pretty sure. And I am 99% sure if I tried to explain the plan to my mother, she would be convinced that she understood it and wouldn't.

Tangent: I understand why she wants to believe her children understand everything that's being said to them, but this is the same woman who decided that an infant got upset when her brothers started fighting because they were breaking the rules. The infant does not understand the rules! She's either scared, or she's upset because she wanted peace and quiet and they were disturbing her rest.

She would also dramatically overestimate my nephew's cognitive skills. Now, he's a sharp kid! But no, at the age of three, he could not compensate for my sister's educational neglect by memorizing a Dr. Seuss book that I read to him once on one of my visits, and then reading it to himself subsequently. He couldn't remember a word from one page to the next. (I tried the whole-word method that my mother tried with me, but his patience was less and I only had the one visit. Mom had far more time with young me!)

I know that my kids have a better than average chance of having a low-functioning ASD child

Yeah. :/

Just from anecdata, my Dad's side looks like this:

Dad: high-functioning ASD.
His two sons: extremely low-functioning ASD.
His brother: somewhere in the middle.

Perfect illustration:

Dad: Salts his own food.
My brothers: There's no point in giving them a salt shaker, they wouldn't do what to do with it or why.
My dad's brother: Can salt his own food, but his mother has to tell him when to stop.

My sister who died, the only one of the daughters who was Dad's and therefore might carry that gene, would have been advised not to have children, according to my mother.

Oh, speaking of that, and speaking of things that are too difficult for the average person to grasp and apply, my parents saw a professional about whether to have another child after the last one turned out so disabled. They were told that the odds of having one low-functioning autistic children were small, and the odds of having two were *even* smaller, and they already had one, so the chances of having a second one were vanishingly small!

Leaving aside the fact that the genetic component was unknown then, I'm sure you can see the problem. Even if those are independent probabilities, once you've had the first child, the odds of having a second one are the same as having the first one! That's the gambler's fallacy. I accepted this logic when I was thirteen and my mother was pregnant, but I grew up to go, "...Wait a minute." I would be amazed that a genetic consultant (I hope it was just a regular MD or even PA, but still) was giving this advice, but the MIT-hosted web page that went up about Boston weather after the big Snowpocalypse of 2015 said that our chances of having a second snow season like that in the near future was vanishingly small, because we'd already had one!

Leaving aside the fact that these are dependent probabilities, because CLIMATE is a thing, omfg, even if they were independent, that's the gambler's fallacy again!

I remember ranting to my wife about this one when we found it. MIT! I ask you!

[mildred_of_midgard]

my parents were faced with a choice between a school system that would be good for my brother and good for my sister

Argh, that sentence came out entirely wrong. A school system that would be good for my brother and a school system that would be good for ME. My sister was determined to fail school no matter what. :P

[cahn]

See, my parents (my mother, speaking on behalf of the parental team) gave us long lectures about how rich people aren't any happier

My parents: Well, we don't actually believe that, but supposing that's true, wouldn't you rather be a rich unhappy person than a poor unhappy person?
(I got this lecture a lot when I was thinking I might go into academia.)

- One child is almost certain to end up dependent on others, in diapers, unable to speak up or defend himself if he's being abused, for the rest of his life, no matter what you do.

- One child is pretty certain to end up independent, and even successful beyond the wildest dreams of anyone in your family, no matter what you do.

And to my parents, the dead obvious choice is to throw body and soul into the tiiiiiny chance of finding *some* treatment that might help the first child become independent.

My parents would a) absolutely have made the opposite choice, but probably with b) also the absolute imperative that the successful child would be financially and logistically responsible for the dependent child to the extent that they (my parents) were unable to do so. (I mean, I should append that they would have tried, and probably succeeded, to set things up so that the successful child would not in fact have too much burden on this point. They're really good about stuff like that.) Both of which sound incredibly foreign to your parents!

In contrast, I'm sure a child as disabled as my brother would have made your mother feel he reflected badly on her

DING! YEP. I'm really glad they didn't have an intellectually disabled child, because WOW that kid would have had a super tough time. I mean, my sister and I consider ourselves verbally and emotionally abused to a certain degree (to be fair, a degree that wouldn't have registered as anything too out of the ordinary in the 80's, and definitely not as much as you were, but also to a degree that wouldn't fly these days for sure); I can't imagine what an actually intellectually disabled child would have gone through.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Given the circumstances under which my mother's father grew up, I still wonder if the saying "If you were hungry enough, you'd eat a rat," that my mother said she got from him came from actual family tradition vs. just being something parents say to get their kids to stop complaining. My mother and I always wondered if somewhere, someone on that side did have to eat rats if you went enough generations back--because they were poor enough and rural enough that it would have been plausible!

The other thing we wondered about was the "Thank god for the good clean water" said by my great-great-great-grandmother (different lineage, not Grandpa's), who came over in the Irish famine, every time she took a drink. Did she grow up thanking God for the water because of a time when there was no food and water was all they had, or was there a time when they didn't have potable water?

...Actually, it literally just occurred to me typing that: the coffin ships. It might not have been in Ireland that she started saying that/repeating what the adults said. It might have been from the trip over! Potable water is notoriously hard to get on ships, and the ships that brought the Irish over were called coffin ships for a reason, namely not because they were concerned with passengers' survival!

Too bad I didn't think of this while she and I were still speaking, damn.

Another book rec

[mildred_of_midgard]

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!)

So this sounds extremely like the growth mindset of Carol Dweck's Mindset, another book that I'm recommending to all and sundry, including at work! (If I had been New Guy's aka Incompetent DBA's boss, I would have made this book mandatory reading for him, because he's a walking textbook case of the extreme failure mode of the fixed mindset.)

It may because of E's autism that she can naturally take that stance in the face of social pressure to do the opposite, but I think it's healthy regardless: in fact, I agree with Dweck that the approach E's teacher is using shouldn't be a workaround but should be how we teach in schools by default. I would encourage it and, if you read the book and agree, maybe use that vocabulary when talking to teachers. Spread the word! (I mean, it is how we do things in salon, the terrestrial paradise. ;))

One of my former grad school colleagues, who taught Latin in high school for many years, published a paper recently talking about how he applied the growth mindset in the Latin classroom as best he could, given that the entire school system is structured around a fixed mindset and he had to meet state requirements. I can send you that if you're interested.

[I emailed him immediately to go, "YES! Let's reform the school system together! Start the revolution! Here are my thoughts on pedagogy!" So far crickets, but hope springs eternal.]

A note on Mindset: it's a book that should have been a blog post, so once you get the basic concepts and have read enough illustrations that they've sunk in, there's no need to read the entire book. It's just repetition of the same ideas. Lost at School has a much better content-to-word count ratio.

Re: Another book rec

[cahn]

Dweck! I haven't read the book but I'm familiar with Dweck's work and with growth/fixed mindset. And actually her school is very familiar with it too (one of the reasons we chose it for her).

I agree that in general the approach her teacher (who is actually not at her school -- does enrichment/math competition) takes is a good one! It's just that I have never before met a kid who likes math competitions but doesn't like to find out what her score was, and her teacher was surprised by that too, as she generally doesn't have trouble (with those kids) with "okay, here's the answer to #1."

Hmm -- I am thinking now that there is a sort of implied "I'm telling you the answer so you can figure out how to do it for next time" that most (math competition) kids get but that E doesn't unless it's explicitly stated. Because for basically all the serious math competition kids I know, if they got a problem wrong on a competition and then they go over it afterwards, they have the growth mindset to figure out that they should pay attention so they can figure out how to do the problem (which the teacher does always go over, no matter how the answer is presented) and be able to do it better next time. Kids who don't go into math competitions with that mindset don't usually last very long. (E both does very well and finds doing math problems relaxing, which compensates.)

...hmm, this may go some way to explaining why there are a lot more boys in math-competition world than girls. Present company excepted as always, and of course I'm making generalizations that don't apply to everyone, etc., my perception is that girls tend to have a lot more trouble with identifying getting stuff wrong as a problem with them ("I'm not good at math!" -- classic fixed mindset) rather than as "eh, I know I'm awesome and this just means I just need to work on it more," which boys will tend to do.

Though... I'm now going to contradict what I said before, but in E's case, she actually doesn't seem to either think she's not good at math or think she just needs to work on it more when she gets something wrong, she just gets super stressed, so she's a weird special case. Relatedly, she almost always won't even guess, even though she knows perfectly well that for tests that don't have guessing penalties this is a smart strategy. I think just the concept of "wrong answer" is stressful for her, even if intellectually it's clear that it's because she guessed and got it wrong.)

One of my former grad school colleagues, who taught Latin in high school for many years, published a paper recently talking about how he applied the growth mindset in the Latin classroom as best he could, given that the entire school system is structured around a fixed mindset and he had to meet state requirements. I can send you that if you're interested.

Yes! I'd be very interested in this!

Re: Another book rec

[mildred_of_midgard]

I'm composing a long reply, but for tonight, just a quick question: how did you respond emotionally to math competitions?

Re: Another book rec

[cahn]

Ah, that's a very good question and has a longer answer than you might expect.

In high school, I had a pretty unassailable self-esteem. I knew I was really good, and although there were a few people better than me at math in the state, I was definitely of the "all right, let's see if I can take you next time!" mindset. (With the exceptions of the two guys who were, I believe, top 5 and top 1 in the nation their senior years, which were my sophomore and junior year respectively. We all knew that they were untouchable. And I knew it was likely I wouldn't beat the guy who was #1 at all the math competitions in my state my year, but it was more of a "but why not try?" sort of thing.) And yep, I did do things like try to make sure I knew the answers to things I got wrong or didn't know how to do because I knew that would make me better for next time. (I will say that it did not occur to me to practice in addition to that -- but I would have if I had known to do so; I was pretty dumb about this kind of thing until I failed quals in grad school the first time because of it, at which point I had to learn in a hurry.) I would have totally considered myself as having a growth mindset during this time (though in retrospect it's clear that I did base a good deal of my identity on being good at math contests, in a fixed-mindset kind of way).

Then I went to college, and a) was confronted by a number of people who were (sometimes arguably, sometimes inarguably) better at math and math contests than I, and b) had classes that I didn't just breeze through. (I got good grades, they just weren't trivially easy for me any more.) Then I took the Putnam, and did really badly. I mean, even at the time I understood it wasn't that bad for a sophomore who hadn't really done stuff at that level before! (1) But interestingly, that time it just destroyed me in terms of technical competitions. I gave up. I avoided the Putnam, and tried to avoid technical competitions in general from then on.

D went through a similar path, where he bombed the Putnam the first time, but then his response was something more along the lines of, "huh, these are interesting problems! I should do more of them!" (Now, I should say his university did not have such a density of highly-ranked people that mine did, but I don't think it would have made a difference.) He then went on to score in the Putnam top 100 his junior and senior years of college. (I didn't know this until now, actually -- I had never really thought about it before, but just now I thought, "I bet he scored well enough that it was recorded," and just found this out by doing a google search, lol.) He still does math competition problems for fun, and as you can imagine he's done them for so many years now that he's really good at it. While I never learned how to do math contest problems at that level.

E. knows these stories (except for the top 100 thing, which I just now found out), and I constantly tell her she should be more like D and less like me in this particular respect :) (This is a message that resonates with her, as she likes very much thinking that she can do things better than her mom.)

(1) A couple of my upperclassman friends at the time (who were male) tried to reassure me by saying that when they first took the Putnam, they'd done even worse than I had. And we had a bet going that all three of our scores added together would be higher than our third friend, and we won that bet, and those guys did a lot of affectionate mocking and trash-talking to Third Friend -- which was of course immensely tongue-in-cheek, because of course Third Friend had done (almost) three times as well as we had. (I think our total score came to more points than was possible to get; Third Friend was in the top 5.) The thing I'm trying to get across here is that my friends treated the Putnam like a game that they'd play again and hopefully improve and do better at the next time, but which said nothing about them intrinsically as people, even if they weren't particularly good at it. (I believe neither of these guys scored in the top 100, although I remember one of them doing reasonably well.) Which is (mostly) how I treated math competitions in high school, but not this time.

Re: Another book rec

[mildred_of_midgard]

Another question: is this just on math competitions, or also homework and tests? Does she have graded homework and tests, or just problem sets?

[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.

[mildred_of_midgard]

because in my case the usual reason I was doing that was because I thought the teacher was wrong about something.

That was one of the ways I showed the teacher I was smart! I was instructed to do exactly this by my mother and not worry about anyone's feelings.

ETA: I just remembered running into one of my college professors in grad school, when we were both at the same conference. I didn't expect him to recognize me, because the class I'd had with him was a lecture with 300 students, and furthermore was 6 years ago at that point, but after we said hi, he went, "You're the one who taught me not to teach off the cuff," i.e. I had corrected him a lot when he strayed outside his area of expertise. LOL.

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.

Oh, lol. Were you bored a lot? I at least was aware that they were supposed to be teaching me things and vocal about the travesty (I keep using this word, because, yes, I was very melodramatic about it) of the fact that they were not.

[ethelmay]

I was bored a lot, having learned to read a bit before turning four and then not starting kindergarten until I was nearly six. Kindergarten was the only year I wasn't bored, because everything was learn-through-play, general-exposure activities, and it didn't matter that I could read because they weren't bugging us with reading lessons (possibly alphabet, I can't recall). I'm not sure my kindergarten teacher even knew I could read. And I did know my grade school teachers were supposed to be teaching me things - I just didn't realize until maybe fourth grade that the worksheets were part of it. I thought those were just in-between activities to make us be quiet, like handing a kid in a waiting room a copy of Highlights magazine. Well, actually, I think I must have known the math worksheets were lessons, but not so much the endless word searches, coloring all the things that begin with R, etc.

At that stage I didn't think what I did in school made any difference, though, it was just something to be scrambled through as best one could. I figured most people learned most things at home. By the time I was sent to private school (eighth grade on) I had a whole raft of skills I was behind on, because they were the sort of thing everyone just assumed I must know how to do, and it didn't occur to most of my teachers that I might need some systematic instruction. I was quite grateful to the one teacher who realized I had missed all the formal grammar instruction and set me to working through grammar exercises on my own. She was otherwise the most boring teacher I ever had (she was close to retirement and I think may have been suffering chronic pain - possibly in better health she was more fun), but she was sensible and fair and had the right insight when I needed it.

That said, my oldest sister went to private school for her whole education, with quite good teachers and a lot of personal attention, and was grade-skipped to boot, so not lacking in challenge, and she still had a whole lot of trouble getting consistently good grades until her second time through college. We both had stellar achievement scores, and some of our grades were very good, but neither of us could have gotten straight A's any more than we could have flown. Much much later (well after getting a PhD) she had an adult ADHD diagnosis, which explained a lot about both her and me.

[mildred_of_midgard]

This was a really interesting read, thank you! Like and yet unlike my experience.