so i was having some Deep Thoughts in the shower earlier (because who doesnāt have Deep Thoughts in the shower?) and i kind of figured out why the word āgeniusā bothers me so much. aside from being a ridiculously elitist word, itās inaccurate. and itās misleading.
when i was a kid, i read a lot - and i really mean a lot. in the bath, on the bus, after lights out, under the desk at school, everywhere. as a result, i developed literacy skills a lot earlier than most of my peers. and as a result of that, i was told constantly that i was āgiftedā - put into special classes, sent to child psychologists, allowed to read books instead of doing actual homework, all the rest of it.
why? because in the end, i really wasnāt all that gifted. i was an average kid who just happened to be an early developer. so when i went to senior school, it was a massive blow. not only had the people around me caught up to me (and in most cases surpassed me) but but iād gone from being a big fish in a small pond to a medium-sized fush in a fucking enormous pond. additionally, because iād spent my whole life thus far being told that i was Naturally Smart, iād never actually learned how to do any work. iād never needed to.
as a result, my grades plummeted. i developed anxiety. i procrastinated endlessly out of fear of not beingĀ āperfectā. i was stuck in this weird place where i desperately needed to be better than everyone else, but actually having to revise and study felt like a kind of weakness. my later diagnosis of adhd went a little way towards explaining this, but at the time it just felt like iād lost the one thing that made me special. it wasnāt enough to be sort-of good at stuff - i had to be the best. and because that clearly wasnāt ever going to be possible, i just stopped trying.
hundreds of kids go through this. hundreds of kids are told they are geniuses, prodigies, gifted, and so on, just because they can do certain things that their peers canāt. and itās bullshit, because ultimately, there is no such thing as a āgeniusā. or rather there is, but itās not a noun - itās an adjective. (for example, you can be a genius at cooking, or at writing poetry, or at debating a point.) there are people who have excellent logical and critical thinking skills, which bumps up scores on an iq test (another grossly inaccurate way of measuring intelligence), but who canāt write an essay to save their lives. there are people who can successfully argue their way out of any situation and write a kickass final paper, but can barely do their times tables. these are skill sets. the word genius has become an almost mythical term - a separate class of beings who can do incredible, inexplicable things like multiplying four-digit numbers in their heads or solving rubikās cubes in the time it takes to fry an egg. sure, these are pretty cool talents, but why should possessing them automatically elevate the person to a higher level than the rest of us? why are they more respected than being hardworking, or kindhearted?
so hereās a concept: letās stop praising kids for the stuff that theyāre naturally good at, and start praising them for what they arenāt. praise them for working hard. or for getting a good mark in a subject they hate. teach them that itās okay to not be good at stuff, so long as you try. because - and i wish my parents had told me this when i was younger - intelligence really isnāt everything.
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