#pg rant saga

[vanessa-cyndrial]

I invite anyone who wants to know what being a child prodigy is like to read the book Ender’s Game. It was handed to me when I was nine and I’ve never stopped loving it and reading it occasionally because I found so much to identify with in it, as a gifted kid. Notice how authority doesn’t give a shit about anyone’s health. Notice how everything positive someone is given is solely to get better performance out of them. Notice how fucking reckless they get with a LOT of these kids they claim to value so highly, and how hard they’re pushed when there’s no one else.

[downtroddendeity]

(Sorry, @deadquaintrelle, I just didn't want to leave more notes on that post where the OP would get angry about them. I'm the person who first commented about how wrong they were.)

I certainly know a lot of gifted kids who identify a lot with Ender's Game, but personally I'd say that the companion book, Ender's Shadow, might be a better one for people trying to understand the whole "misbehaving PG kids" thing, since Ender himself is a very artificial character in-universe, and ultimately ends up serving exactly the purpose that authority wants from him for the majority of the book. Bean, on the other hand, spends far more time being subversively, inconveniently intelligent, and is treated by the authorities as much less useful and much more worrisome than Ender because of this.

[downtroddendeity]

fairyring replied to your post “I wouldnt say I was smart, but I can see where you were coming from for the rant. Thanks for shedding more insight onto murica education system. :'D”

Thanks for sharing--I was pretty happy in the public school system since it just meant I spent all my time drawing in class, but I do know others that had the same experience and went for homeschooling, though I know that option is not easy.

I did a lot of that too; I remember one year a teacher gave us a year-end assignment where we were supposed to say the most important thing we'd learned in school that year, and I wrote, "The best time to draw dragons is after a math test." By which I meant the ~29 minutes left over of the 30 minute exam period after I got to the end. But there are enough teachers out there who will scream at you for not paying attention and there were enough tortuously boring assignments given that that didn't always help much.

[downtroddendeity]

quicksilver-ink replied to your post “I wouldnt say I was smart, but I can see where you were coming from for the rant. Thanks for shedding more insight onto murica education system. :'D”

I am so, so very glad I got through K-12 before NCLB.

I didn't get hit that hard by NCLB myself (since, like I said, I was in a school that was already well-funded and scoring well; for anyone not aware, one of many lovely side-effects of NCLB was deepening educational inequalities between districts even further), but I know (and know of) a lot of people in similar situations who were. The opposition to me skipping a grade was actually before NCLB- I imagine we would have had to make even more of a fuss if it had been a few years later.

[downtroddendeity]

I wouldnt say I was smart, but I can see where you were coming from for the rant. Thanks for shedding more insight onto murica education system. :'D

Like I said, this is just a personal issue for me because I know so many PG people (as I mentioned in the rant, it's 'cause of an organization I was in- a lot of my oldest, closest internet friends I met through there, and that community was my lifeline through high school). And pretty much all of them have some sort of horror story about the school system, and particularly trying to wrangle accommodations out of them.

It's one of the reasons I'm always so angry when NCLB comes up. Because when schools are trying to cut budgets so they can afford to teach to the test so that they can keep getting funding, supports for a group that's already scoring not just up to par, but well above average are generally among the first to get cut. After all, they're already scoring well, so they don't need more support, right?

Problem is, when you've got someone like second-grade me, who can't keep their breakfast down in the morning and is having sobbing breakdowns over going to school because it's an ~8 hour torture chamber every day of the week except the one day I get to spend an hour reading about mythology in "gifted" class instead of doing math worksheets alone in the back of the room...

Well, they could have put me in a strait jacket and shoved me in a closet out of the way every day of the school year except for when they gave standardized tests, and I still would have gotten high scores on them.

But it sure wouldn't have meant I was getting an adequate education.

[downtroddendeity]

So I have been informed that both of the people who got mad at me over my PG kids and grade acceleration (and Newt Geiszler) rant from yesterday... are siblings.

For some reason, this makes it even funnier to me.

(Of course, the funniest part is that I'm pretty sure I gained a couple followers over it. Hi, new people! Hope you don't mind occasional Radiant Historia spam! :::DDD)

[downtroddendeity]

Tez, you have gotten Tumblr to set the bar for "disgusting" so low that none of us could ever trip over it again. Like, I'm pretty sure it's buried underground yet.

Much as I would like to accept these accolades, I don’t think I can take credit for that. I mean, this is Tumblr. Between the anti-SJWs and the overenthusiastic teenagers who want to be SJWs and think that means lecturing other people about their own culture, I’m pretty sure that “describing things that happened to you, your friends, and your family as counterexamples to an argument someone made about a group you’re part of and they’re not = DISGUSTING” is a depth that was reached long, long ago. :::PPP

[downtroddendeity]

WHERBL WHERBL WHERBL I AM AN ANON AND I AM FILLED WITH HATE WHERBL GLERBL GLERBL

The anon hate doesn’t count if I know it’s you, putnamspuppeteer. :::PPP