Now, this is what I call a meme

Courtesy of tragicsupergirl, who also likes Neubauten and therefore is Good People, this gem of a meme. And hell no, I'm not cutting it. I'm considering re-posting it on a daily basis, so your friends page is never without it.


The Thirsty Drainpipe


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The curse of the gifted child

Last night, at the cost of my sleep, I finished Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game.

I identify way too much with Ender.

In the introduction, Card tells about a letter from a gifted kid, who also identified with Ender, and of negative reactions from adults, claiming that gifted children don't think or act or talk like Ender and his peers. Card's comments to the latter boil down to "shows what you know".

Well, I was a gifted kid.

Thanks to physical isolation from other children (a long way to the nearest kid my age), I entertained myself most of the time, and thanks to intelligence and a thirst for knowledge I developed mental isolation as well. I had enormous problems communicating with other children when I met them, because I knew so much more than them. They couldn't interpret what I said, due to my extensive (for a kid) vocabulary, and I got impatient with them for not understanding what I took for granted. I wasn't good at playing with them, thinking their games were simple and not particularly entertaining, and when playing things like cowboys and injuns, I kept correcting their factual mistakes, which didn't go down very well. When playing games based on strategy or memory, I got bored because I beat them too easily. To this day I prefer games which depend at least somewhat on luck, like backgammon instead of chess, because if the game is based on thinking or remembering, I usually don't get much of a challenge.

When I was four, I got bored with waiting for my parents or my much older siblings to have time to read to me, so I demanded to be taught to read. I picked it up easily, and I have no memory of what it's like to not be able to read. There is a picture of me where I'm reading a comic with a comforter in my mouth... My parents, being bookworms themselves, were only too happy to supply me with books and magazines, bought or from the library, and I devoured everything I was given access to.

At seven, I started school, excited and nervous. Excited about getting to learn Stuff, nervous about other children. I knew very well by then that I interacted badly with my so-called peers, and I was all too aware of them being the majority. I worried a lot about their physical games, which I was absolutely crap at. I didn't really anticipate getting friends. The concept of friendship was fairly foreign to me.

Big surprise that I didn't make any real friends until I was 14, eh? Real as in people I could communicate with without getting the feeling that I was lowering myself, making myself seem more stupid and knowledgeable than I actually was. Well, without getting that feeling to the extent I was used to.

The disappointing thing was that I wasn't taught all that much new, exciting stuff. While the others were taught to read, I daydreamed or doodled (which, unsurprisingly, I was scolded for). We drew and painted a lot, which I liked and was extremely good at (when I was five, my aunt who was a teacher told mum that my drawing was on a level with that of a regular 12-year old). I learned to write, which was fun, and we learned some adding and subtracting, which I took to intuitively and didn't really have to learn.

Speaking of maths, I made the mistake of working ahead in the exercise book, and accidentally taught myself multiplication. That led to me getting the worst telling off of the entire school year, and I was made to erase all the multiplication exercises I had done, because we hadn't been taught it yet and hence I shouldn't be doing it.

Way to attempt to destroy a kid's yearning for knowledge.

Primary school was, all in all, pretty uneventful. I enjoyed English. I hated PE with a vengeance, and discovering that my eyesight was disastrously bad and getting glasses didn't really help - I still have problems judging distances, which is quite important in a lot of sports. I was by far the best in my class in every theoretical subject, but getting a little competition in maths from a couple of boys. Reading was torture, because I had to suffer through hours and hours of listening to the others struggle their way through little snippets of text, taking ages reading a simple paragraph aloud.

Of course, I got bullied. I was above average intelligent, and smart kids get hazzled. It hurt, but my reaction was to get all haughty, yell at the bullies using words they didn't understand but that they grasped were derogatory, playing my inborn arrogance for all it was worth.

I was, and to some extent still am, a master of turning things to my advantage. On top of being a smart kid and no good at PE, my parents had little money and I didn't get a lot of things that are extremely important to children. I didn't get expensive Barbie doll clothing, for instance. What I did was sew Barbie doll clothes, and then declare that it was much better making the clothes instead of buying them, and actually convincing the better-off girls to agree. I suppose it helped that my mum gave me and my play mates unlimited access to her sewing machine.

Playing with Barbies was just about the only thing I could do with other girls, but I preferred playing by myself anyway. Other children were just a disturbance. Their imagination, and their grasp of how things work in reality and how that must steer the imagination, simply wasn't up to mine. I always came up with Barbie scenarios they didn't understand, like Barbie-is-an-amazon-and-Ken-is-Hercules, and it usually ended with the tired old Barbie-is-a-hairdresser or Barbie's-getting-married-and-she-and-Ken-are-doing-the-nasty they came up with.

So I dragged myself through six years of primary school, trying not to die from boredom, doing without any encouragement whatsoever from my teachers besides getting some extra work when I had read ahead and finished the year's mandatory work before Christmas.

See, that's the curse of the gifted kid. They always manage on their own, so there's no need for teachers to pay special attention to them.

I remember, all too vividly, the desperate hunger for acknowledgment. I wanted to be seen, to be praised, and what I got was fuck all. I also remember how bitter it was watching the teachers gushing over some idiot class mate who had managed not to muck up his math test too badly, when I hadn't made any errors at all and just got it handed back without a word. I thought it was tremendously unfair, how kids who could barely spell their own name got praised to the sky for their work while I, who deserved praise, never got any.

Now that I'm somewhat grown up, of course I understand how important it is to praise all children. A child that makes progress, no matter how abysmal their results are, deserves praise. But back then, all I saw was a bunch of numbskulls being fawned over and one brilliant, clever kid who was consistently ignored.

What about my parents in all this? Well, they took my results for granted too, but somehow that was okay. I may have found it quite natural because my parents had brought up four children with above average intelligence. All my siblings did brilliantly in school, so my doing so too was only to be expected at home. Being ignored by the teachers, who could compare me to the knuckleheads (read: average children) in my class, was much, much worse.

Once, my math teacher gave me back a test, and beamed at me while telling me that this time I had actually made an error, and it was so good to see that I was human. I nearly cried my eyes out. It's one of the most vivid memories I have from primary school, finally getting something like praise but getting it because I had failed in something.

Six fucking years of being ignored by the teachers, hazzled by the school mates and frantically reading, reading whatever I could lay my hands on, escaping my sorry reality whenever I could.

Finally, in my last spring there, I got proof of my abilities being noticed and appreciated. The next autumn, we would be starting lower secondary school, going to another school altogether, and my teacher and the headmaster in my primary school took me aside one day to tell me that they had been in touch with the new school about me. It had been arranged that in Norwegian and arts, I would be taken out of class and given special one-on-one tutoring, because I was so incredibly much better in those subjects than my class mates. I was stunned, I was overjoyed, I almost couldn't bear the delight of both getting the acknowledgement I had been needing so desperately and not having to sit around being bored in those classes anymore.

Knowing the Norwegian school system, it's nothing less than amazing that they had pulled that off. Equality is important in Norwegian schools, so everything's adjusted to average kids, and the extra teaching effort goes to those below average, of whom there are plenty, seeing as Norway also makes a point of integrating particularly challenged children instead of sending them to special schools. There is simply very little money, not to mention will, to teach gifted children in accordance with their abilities and learning speed.

One brilliant teacher, a painter and published writer to boot, was to be my special teacher in those classes. His name was Arvid Malme, and I even knew of him before being told that he was to teach me. I could hardly wait.

Naturally, Malme got cancer that summer and left his position...

So no special tutoring for me at all. I spent the next three years being alternately bored and rebellious, giving my teachers a lot of shite whenever I could and winning the arguments with them on several occasions. I was bullied in this school too, but far less so after starting to hang out with allegedly unstable punk boys. I immersed myself in music, revelling in the quirkiness of XTC and the dark pop of The Cure, the complex musical structures of Einstürzende Neubauten and the fury of Dead Kennedys. I stopped painting and drawing and started playing the bass guitar.

Much to my dismay, I soon discovered that my unbelievably crappy English teacher couldn't teach me anything beyond some new words, so at 14 I started reading novels and short stories in English, realising the importance of mastering today's lingua franca. I started with buying Coling MacInnes' Absolute Beginners, because I already owned the Norwegian translation, and worked my way through the original with the aid of a dictionary as well as the translation, studying syntactical differences and vocabulary.

It was already years since I first started doing my homework in class, after finishing the work we were supposed to fill a lesson with (and, might I add, I nearly always had some time to twiddle my thumbs despite doing the regular work and the homework during class), now I honed that skill to perfection. The only homework I actually ever had to do at home was essays, which I enjoyed writing and wanted to concentrate properly on.

I started learning French, and with an unusual stroke of luck got an absolutely brilliant teacher. The French classes were about the only classes I ever enjoyed, I was never bored and I learned something new every time. My teacher was a master of the fine art of dragging the learning-challenged along without boring the fast learners. French class was bliss.

All through secondary school, I got top marks, which never failed to surprise my teachers, since I turned out a notoriously bad girl. One teacher actually told me to make new friends, as the boys (and the few girls) I spent time with were hash-smoking, punk-looking troublemakers. I never bothered to tell my teachers that these boys were almost without exception intelligent, politically active, well read and caring. We were gifted children, almost all of us in my inner circle. When we wondered about something, we went gathering and sharing information and making our decisions based on facts, striving for understanding. We talked for hours on end, about subjects too important to breach in front of teachers. We drank a lot and smoked a lot of hash, because we were constantly bored to tears by our surroundings. Not all of us bothered to do well in school, but most of those who didn't could have.

Eventually, after having been routinely ignored by my teachers, I stopped giving a damn. I didn't give up on learning, I simply took it away from school and into enclaves of other gifted kids, and into my own habitual isolation. The other kids could and did provide challenge, questioning my knowledge and my conclusions, which was gratifying in and of itself. I had never, ever met a challenge in school. I had never had to actually work hard to gain anything there. I didn't view school as irrelevant, I simply knew that what they wanted to teach me was not enough, not by a long shot.

I envy Ender the challenges set to him.

Cruising through school, and to some extent through my university studies (never having to work as hard as others), cruising through my work (struggling with workload, but not with how I do things), I never had to particularly put my mind to anything but the discussions among my friends.

Sometimes i wonder what might have become of me if I had gotten some challenge, some praise, some attention in school. My marks from upper secondary school and from the university are above average, but nothing special. I mostly read for entertainment now, and I rarely delve into hardcore non-fiction anymore. At some point I suppose I got all too used to never being challenged, and started avoiding the challenges that actually came my way. I've seen and resented that in others, and it depresses me a bit to see it in myself.