I am good with knowing my deficiencies. What sucks is being told that they are my fault because I should be “smart enough to overcome them”.
Agreed 100%, being a specialist in something always has led to someone taking a pot shot at your deficiencies.
Or being a jack of all trades and getting potshots for not being an expert in everything just because you pick up the basics quickly.
It’s actually insane how many teachers and other education professionals waved me off with ‘you’re smart enough, just try harder’ while I was obviously suicidally depressed and extremely dysfunctional. Having undiagnosed autism because I was a teenage girl in the '00s was fun.
Girls, undiagnosed autism, and suicidal tendencies? Name me a more iconic trio!
You’re gifted enough to cruise through the first few stages of your education without trying, so you forge an identity as “the smart kid” but never build up skills in learning or studying, so when you finally get to a level where your natural intelligence can’t carry you anymore you can’t keep up with the people who did learn those skills and you start to fail and lose your identity as the smart kid which causes you to break down because that’d how you defined yourself for so long… or so I’ve heard.
That’s the cost of designing education for the worst students.
This is actually the reason. Because there is no such thing as “natural intelligence”. Not more than there is “natural strength”. There are natural predispositions, yes, but what you get is function of what training effort you put in. Whether you realise, and/or like, putting effort into training your intelligence, is is another thing. So people who are “above average” were in a favorable environment that fostered their development without it feeling forced, or unnatural. And then, when the environment was replaced by the school’s, it sadly didn’t foster personal development anymore. I would argue we would need to redesign education, now that we have internet. We don’t have to design courses around physical limits.
I feel like you watched me grow up. For a long time I was smart enough to pick things up naturally, I was even offered to skip grades.
Then the math got complicated and I didn’t know how to learn it. I went from being the smart kid to being the stupid one in remedial math. Being smart was all I had at that point, so when I “lost” that, I lost everything in my eyes. I was stupid and I was never going to be anything because of it.
I ended up getting my GED as an adult and I now have a promising career in insurance- so I didn’t really lose everything, but when I was 15 it sure felt like I had.
Did you know that 80% of people think they’re above average intelligence?
The creator of this comic is a self-described pro-sweatshop neoliberal, which explains the “woe is me, I’m too smart for my own good” delusions.
Do you have a source for that? I cannot find anything about it online in Google, Wiki or even in ChatGPT delusions.
Yeah the comic reeks of PMC brainworms. I say that as someone with PMC brainworms. “You’re special enough to make decisions, but make sure you cultivate too much self-doubt to make true change.”
I don’t think he’s ever come out in favor of sweatshops? Maybe you’re think of Matt ygelsia from vox.
Sure, because something so egregious would definitely show up in a Google search for “Zach Weinersmith sweatshop”, right?
Unless…you’re exaggerating on the Internet to stir up outrage?
I like the term “twice exceptional”. All of my biggest strengths are aspects of myself that come with tradeoffs. For 20 years straight, I was praised for the strengths and scolded for the tradeoffs. Motherfucker, you can’t enjoy how quickly I learn things I’m interested in and also treat me like I’m lazy when you expect me to sustain equal amounts of interest in 10 different things that bore me and I fail. You can’t enjoy all the art and tech I make and then get annoyed when it’s difficult to break me out of a hyperfixation.
I firmly believe that the tortured artist stereotype is bullshit. There’s nothing about being an artist that requires you to be miserable. But we sure do treat people like shit when their brains work differently.
IQ is bullshit. The gifted kids were just the kids that had supportive homelives
Human intelligence definitely varies. People in remedial education are not there just because they have poor home lives.
There’s that joke about wearing regular clothes on Halloween to go as the “gifted kid”, and when people ask what you’re supposed to be you sigh and say you were supposed to be a lot of things.
“I’m a homicidal maniac. They look just like everyone else.”
The guilt that “you could have done more with your life”, despite being a successful engineer with a happy family.
I still suffer from this. Promising early start, intense self-confidence issues and depression by the end.
Fun fact: programs for gifted kids have historically been far more underfunded than programs for other exceptional students.
By the way, the euphemism of “exceptional children” pleases my autistic brain way more than any other word for Special Education students. It has all the compliment-sounding qualities of “Special Needs” but is even more literal than any previous euphemism. It literally means “kids that teachers need to make exceptions for”
“well if those kids are so smart surely they can do more with less right?”
-average conversation at an budgetary meeting for education, probably
I don’t mind being aware of everything, but I do mind that nobody else is
As you get older, you sort of get used to the fact that the majority of your fellow passengers are oblivious to the fact we’re on a bus speeding towards a cliff, driven by depravity and delusions of grandeur. And you realize short of a miracle, nothing is going to change it. It’s either that or you go mad. ¯\(ツ)/¯
Gifted kids aren’t necessarily smarter than anyone else. They just develop their adult levels of intelligence faster than normal. So there is no guarantee that the amount they will be able to maintain that performance gap going forward. Indeed, they are likely to do worse as they never had to develop the skills to do well in school. So once school gets hard enough for them to need those skills they don’t have them.
was just joking around with a sibling about how some of the most intensely “being highly intelligent is my identity” people from high school with supportive families grew up to be dumb as hell.
the gifted valedictorian became a nurse, then went full “iraq had WMDs, but it was classified” chud, quit the workforce to have 4 children, is a god-tier horder with rooms full of actual garbage, and now is entangled in several MLMs shoveling a spouse’s very high income into a blackhole.
the “actually, i have a 160 IQ” inherited a bunch of $$, bought a bunch of vehicles, had 5 kids, went full blown “dance mom” facebook+social media freakshow, and spends most of their effort trying to cultivate inappropriate relationships and fabricate dramas with other married spouses in their neighborhood.
excellence and success are subjective. a life of curiosity, personal enrichment, family, and friends can be excellent without needing accolades or other features of careerist striving. but i’ll be damned if some really “smart” people don’t take their potential and, in defiance of the odds, turn it into a shit smoothie.
You sound bitter and cruel. Nursing is a wonderful profession that requires a lot of intelligence. There’s nothing wrong with having children. Hoarding is a fucking mental disorder and one of the most intelligent men I know struggled with it.
Boy I sure wish I had a 6 hr video explaining the incredibly racist origins of the Bell curve which has no value at all scientifically speaking, perhaps even by a Liverpudlian narrator of sorts
a bell curve is just a normal distribution lol
do you mean the BOOK “The Bell Curve”? the frenology book? yeah i think most of us here get that frenology is racist
do you mean the racist origins behind IQ?
Let’s be honest, most of us think we’re in the blue zone, when we are probably in the red zone
No, people in the red zone think they’re in the green zone.
Most likely most of us would be in the yellow zone
Look at the mathematician here
I had to do an official test along with a psychological examination for reasons when I was almost 18 years old, so I know at some point I was in the blue zone or above, but it doesn’t really fucking matter when you have autism, a mood disorder and have been neglected by your parents so you never learned things like determination or frustration tolerance. I think I shaved a solid 10 IQ points off anyway from almost a decade of substance abuse issues, so now I’m just autistic and dysfunctional without the gifted part.
Serious question: what kind of drug abuse does it take to shave off 10 IQ points? I’ve done my fair share and would prefer not to have that happen to me - if it hasn’t already.
A ton of amphetamines and other stimulant research chemicals and a fuckton of alcohol. I think probably the latter is mostly to blame.
