Last week I was working for a couple days at the University of Minnesota bookstore. I stepped outside of Coffman Union to have a smoke, near the Washington Bridge. There were three police cars blocking off one lane of traffic, and in front of the police cars was an old Chevy Van, conspicuously parked at a perpendicular angle to the actual lanes. There was something about the perfect 90 degree angle, and absence of any detritus, that led me to believe that it wasn’t an accident, and my first impulse was that someone had jumped.
I’m not sure what that says about my state of mind that I first thought suicide. If it was, there was an element of tragic poeticism about the scene–mid-morning on the coldest day in Minnesota in five years, a silent, unmessy death (if they hit the river), the weekend before the beginning of a new semester, right underneath the sign that welcomes people to the University of Minnesota.
Granted, I have no idea if that’s actually what happened. But the scene should have represented so much hope–a new beginning and a temperature that could only go up, at a place of learning. But often, education isn’t viewed as hope and rather as insurmountable pressure, and this country needs to find a way to fix that.
I was a precocious kid. My parents had me in a multitude of classes starting when I was two–sports and stuff at the Y, music classes at MacPhail, etc. etc. I started reading when I was three, and since my birthday is in the early fall, just a few days after the August 31st cut-off date for starting school, they pushed for me to start school a year early. In order to do so, the school had me take an IQ test. I don’t remember anything from the test except for one quick moment–the teacher (or whoever it was) sat across a table from me and asked questions, and one question was “do you know what it’s called when lava comes out of a volcano?” and I said, “you mean an erruption?”
My IQ was pegged at 168, and I started school. But I was pretty bored and got in trouble for coloring trees purple. The teacher thought I might see the world in a different way from everyone else in my class. My parents thought I was just being creative. I didn’t actually spend a lot of time in the kindergarten classroom, but instead was pulled out to work with the gifted instructor every day, helping me out with things that I had difficulty with (it took me forever to understand how to read a clock, for instance), and then guiding me on learning about things I was interested in.
After that first year, I was in the high potential programs at the school along with a number of other students. And these are the best memories I have of those elementary school years. I remember a unit on Ancient Greece that fueled the fascination I have with western philosophy and ancient cultures. I remember lessons on Big Foot and the Loch Ness Monster, and being absolutley bored with what was going on in the regular classroom. I remember being encouraged to write what I wanted, about any subjects I wanted to explore in the library.
The problem was that, back in the classroom, the learning environment was totally different. I remember always being paired for group work with the students who needed the most help, functioning as a mini-teacher’s aide. And for my developing brain, I didn’t have the capcity to understand why the people around me found this stuff so hard. I began to resent working with other students because it was always so much quicker, and easier, to just do it myself. Things just made sense, and I didn’t have to work at it.
Inevitably, there comes a point in any educational career where the student hits a wall. Things become hard and they have to work. I began to hit that in math and science classes in high school, and I didn’t know how to study. My parents didn’t help–there was the constant reminder that my IQ was 168. I should be able to do it. I just wasn’t working hard enough. I was lazy. I was never going to do anything because my problem wasn’t my intellect, but my motivation. And obviously I didn’t have any. So on top of the long-seated belief that the only person I could rely upon was myself, I added the layer that I was nothing more than a lazy disappointment.
That’s when my body rebelled and the Graves’ Disease developed, which targeted my brain and memory (among other things) and added a physical impairment that went undiagnosed for two years. I couldn’t remember things, my ability to understand was greatly diminished. The problem was I had never been taught how to study because I never had to do it before. And suddenly academia wasn’t that source of hope and comfort it always had been. Instead, it was agonizing pressure and stress.
So why am I writing all this now, trying to get my brain around how my academic experiences as a child affected me?
Because the district that I grew up in, Minnetonka, is planning on opening a school for gifted elementary students. And I’ve got some thoughts not only on the school itself, but also the user comments that were left on the afore-linked article.
Which I will try to post later today.
