maythegnome: dignitywhatdignity:duskrobin: sablesides:propertyofmarvel:seethestarsalittlecloser:prop
maythegnome: dignitywhatdignity:duskrobin: sablesides:propertyofmarvel:seethestarsalittlecloser:propertyofmarvel:mango-pickle: rimi-lekak: frogdaduntitled: troylerpokely: yourdailyfandomupdate: bubbly-flamingo: lovethisotp: maxxxie74: that-taiwanese-bitch: sarcastic-fish: funnyandhilarious: There Is One In Each Classroom I hope you realize there are some kids out there where their parents don’t settle for anything less than the best. That A- might seem good to you, but that kid could have a whole series of degrading comments and ‘you could have done better’ thrown at them at home.It’s the way they were raised, anything less than perfect is a failure. Repost for the comment Yeah, lemme tell you about the time I got 99% on an exam, and my father bellowed at me, “WHERE’S THE OTHER ONE PERCENT?????”. It broke my heart, and almost thirty years later, it STILL hurts. You know what one of my most vivid memories of Year 7 science is? Throughout the year I’d gotten 96%, 98%, 99%, 99.6%, which was my teacher’s way of saying ‘I know you know your shit, but don’t slack off, I want to push you to be great’. Well FINALLY I got my prized 100%, and I packed it in my bag especially to show my grandpa. You know what he says? ‘So you ARE smart. Why couldn’t you get this mark on all those other tests then?’The next year I had such high expectations on me, when I got 80% I was shattered. Every time I get a report card, my dad points at the lowest grade and says “what happened there? Maybe we should start working on that next semester.” One day, I get ALL As except an A- in English. I had worked hard for that A-, English was my worst class, and I had been getting consistent Bs and B-s for the past few semesters. He sees my report card, points at the A-, and says “what happened there? Maybe we should start working on that next semester.” This, friends, is why I will be VERY stressed if I get an A- on a test or a paper, even if you got a lower grade. Because if all my grades aren’t perfect, I will get constantly harassed about it by my parents. Can I talk about the fact that teachers will do this too? You get some good grades at the beginning of the year, and then whenever you have a bad day or slack a little they go “well look at that, why couldn’t you have done better?” Or the kids around you who happen to get a better grade than you on something and go “YES! I GOT A BETTER GRADE THAN ___ I MUST BE AWESOME!” Seriously guys, this is fucked up. What you guys don’t know is that person has probably put extreme pressure on themselves already, and you have just made them feel like shit. Also, if you raise your hand in class and get the wrong answer when you’re the “smart kid, goody two shoes, teachers pet” the entire class makes a joke out of it. It really hurts too when you are the “Gifted” kid in your household. You are held to a higher standard than most of your friends and siblings. I am not allowed to get a B. Ever. Period. My little brother? He got at least 2 B’s last year and it’s totally fine. I got an 89% in Psych 2 last year that I didn’t know about and I was torn a new one. Why? “Because you are smart and you can get an A.” It took until 9th grade for 90-95% to be more acceptable. I took an AP class and the moment I dipped below an A I was banned from interactions with friends outside of school. All because I was “gifted” as a child. Because I was told I was smarter by default. And where am I now? Every failed answer I berate myself and then spiral, and spiral further because “I’m too smart to not control myself”. With every test that I get less than an A on I want to cry. And the best part is that my parents are teachers and refuse to listen to me tell them that all of this screws with my head. How can I love myself when my standards are tests and grades? Sorry I went on a rant, but when people make comics like op did I get really heated. There is a reason people do that. And that reason isn’t pretty. This hurts to reblog because it’s so damn relatable. I relate to everything in this thread :/ The one on classmates pressurizing you is such a horrible experience, “I bet ___ did better.” “I got better than ___!!” “My goal this year is to get a better grade than ___” “If only I were as smart as ___.”And then classmates constantly asking you what your grade was because they want to compare their grades to what “the smart kid” got. My parents don’t give a shit what my grades are, one barely got through highschool and the other was good in a few areas but struggled in many others. I got my first C in the eighth grade and I sobbed for hours. And you know what? My classmates were the ones who hassled me. I remember another class where I raised my hand to give the answer, and got it wrong, by one number. Everybody in the classroom broke down in laughter and that was the joke of the day. I will still hesitate to answer questions in class 4 years later, because it wasn’t just the once. Remember that the “smart kids” are people too I am a disabled autistic kid with no social skills and yeah, I was the “gifted” kid all throughout primary and high school. My parents, my friends, my teachers all told me I was smart - that’s all they ever really complimented me on - or at least the one thing I actually believed (hello, trauma!). It got to the point where I would start believing that’s all I could do, all I was good for. Then, when I was 7, my teacher degraded and embarrassed me in front of my entire class by forcing me to do extra maths homework instead of quietly disappearing off to the extracurricular creative writing session I was supposed to go to, just like every Friday morning before that. She said it was because I was “falling behind”. My maths level was pretty much the higher end of average for my class so I was doing just fine in that department, but she was a teacher and I was 7 years old so there was nothing I could do except cry (and then get yelled at in front of the class for crying).When kahoot became a thing right at the end of my high school career I would win without breaking a sweat. It got to the point where if I slipped up and came second, the whole class would cheer, burst into applause, treat whoever scored higher than me like a hero. So I started losing on purpose. I calculated how long I’d have to wait to select an answer, how many answers I needed to get wrong to stay in the top 5 but stay out of the top 3 because it was easier that way. Eventually, the cheering whenever I didn’t come first stopped. I didn’t have my classmates celebrating my failure anymore, but it would still leave me feeling sick to my stomach for having to play dumb, to feel like nothing because all I was good for was my smarts and that was what made my peers hate me the most.Fast forward to 2 years ago. I’m a student at uni and suddenly being smart is a good thing. Finally I can go from being nothing to being smart again! My first ever uni essay got an A+ and I was so excited because I had missed feeling like I was worth something. Except then almost every essay or project I got assigned after that ended in tears because I was so terrified of not getting an A or an A+ because, in my mind, if I did then I’d be back there, back when I was nothing, no one, worthless.I’m a lot happier now by the way. A shit ton of therapy and a lot of work on developing self-love and I don’t have a breakdown over every grade, but I remember what if felt like to have your self worth so intrinsically tied to your grade. It’s not healthy for anyone, whether you have a D, a C or an A average. The student complaining about an A- isn’t being an asshole, I promise. They likely have their own insecurities being triggered by the mark they got. Uni is stressful for everyone, regardless of their IQ. And like @propertyofmarvel said, the smart kids are people too. Even if they didn’t have parents who punished them for failure, brains are weird (yes, even extremely smart ones) and the social stigma about being smart can be crippling. Bringing this back because it’s report card time for a lot of people. This term my average dropped by 2% and guess who is getting hassled and told “so what its still the highest average in the class.” This term was about two months, and I was sick at home for half of it. I had 26 absences on my report card. Oftentimes I will get sick for long periods of time during the school year, but this is by far the longest. What I don’t think people realize is that me getting sick is almost definitely tied to my stress levels. Every single “gifted kid” I know cycles in and out of burnout or is constantly on the edge of it. The hassling and the rude comments are not a one off thing, they feed the fire of stress and anxiety about school that we have. And eventually that does accumulate and leads to a damaged psyche and sometimes physical illness. For everyone else who just got report cards or will be, you are not your grade. Your grade does not reflect who you are. You do not lose worth when your grade goes down. Just keep going, you got this. My parents have pressured me so badly about grades that I ground MYSELF over an 81Anything less than an 85 is considered close to failure in my mind, despite the fact that they say as long as its not a C I’m fineThey’ve thrown me into panic attacks at the mere THOUGHT of being grounded, because it takes away my only contact with my friends until Friday nights-Sunday nightsAnd I hate it. I’ve started wishing on a nightly basis that the doctors who said i was going to be an idiot when i was born were rightBecause idiots dont have expectations I never saw myself as being smart. I actually saw myself as being extremely dumb even though I was mostly getting Bs in school. The only class that I did get As consistently in was my literature class.And then one day, I got an essay back that was a B. In any other class, I might have been fine, but this was my literature class. I was supposed to be good a this class. And that thought haunted me the rest of the day. That I must have been stupid, because I was failing the only class I was good at. That I was irresponsible for letting this happen. That I was useless for not doing something as simple as getting an A. How I was falling behind. How I would always be a child and a burden on people.By the time I got home, these thoughts had mixed in the ideas that “creativity was useless and childish” which I picked up from bullies and a bad group of friends. So I immediately started to destroy anything creative in my room. My art, my story writing, pretty much the things that made me happy. I was going to get rid of all of it.And that was when my mom found me. She helped me calm down and asked me what was wrong. So I told her that I had gotten I bad grade on my essay and that I was getting rid of my creative stuff because it was useless. I said that I was sorry for being a dumb daughter.She didn’t ask me what the grade was. I honestly don’t think she cared what it was. She just saw me prepared to throw away a part of myself and that that part was important to me. She told me two things that I remember to this day. One which I wish more people had someone tell them in their lives.She said that:1. my creativity was one of her favorite things about me and that it wasn’t wrong for me to keep it. It was important to me which made it unique. That was why she cared about it.2. That a bad grade doesn’t make you dumb. There are so many skills and talents that people can had that can’t be measured by a number or a grade. What matters is that you try. You will make mistakes and you will have bad days where you don’t do well, that’s ok. That is a part of learning and a part of being alive. And if you’re not good at everything, that’s ok too. Do you know how much I envied the student in red in OP’s comic?Oh, to have a life where a C+ is “terrible” and not soul-shattering. Where an A- is a cause for celebration, not sighs and, “You should have studied harder!” (I’m 38 and still don’t know how to study. Gifted Kid Syndrome is a bitch)But those expectations are for normal people, and I was never going to be normal. And somehow I picked up the idea that if you’re not normal, the only way to be liked is to be perfect.And Husband wonders why every piece of constructive criticism feels like a personal attack to me… Adding onto this, coz it all just sucks to be honest.*long rant incoming*I used to be one of the highest achieving kids in all of my year levels, and that led to other people viewing me as someone who would always be “great in school with everything she did”And in that pressure to keep up with looking good, I always worked myself overboard. I had no friends for quite a few years, because I was always busy with studying and trying to better my grades, which were already constantly at Above Level standards anywayEven though I know I don’t have to be perfect, it still breaks my heart a bit when I get something like a 70% for assignments or exams, or I don’t get medals or high-standing positions at awards events.Overall, it’s because I was so used to being that good as a kid I put a lot of pressure on myself as I got older.Anyone who got better than me generally went, “Wow, I did better than her, I guess I’m just that good.” Or something along those lines I am always happy for my friends, whenever they do better than me, because it’s really good for them to get the grades they work for, but there’s always this little seed inside my head that says “Wow, even they would do this, why can’t you?”Furthermore, during a science exam that I struggled with because I was having a hard term, I couldn’t even answer half the questions and then quietly cried for most of the exam, pretending to write whenever a teacher walked past. I saw other people who were struggling throughout it too, but my thoughts were just full of hate directed at myself for “not being good enough”, and were just generally rubbish: “Wow, you’re crying?”, “___ is struggling too, though- Yeah, but you’re *you*. She’s allowed to struggle and you’re not.” I passed that exam, though with the lowest grades I’d ever gotten: a B+ C+ and D-I cried for hours afterwards, and I still think about itAt one point I had an English teacher who said “Well, you might get something like a B and get upset, but remember, there are kids out there who are happy enough to get a C and pass - you should be happy with what you get”And honestly? It really hurt.Another teacher pulled the old “I expected better of you” when one day I was so tired and stressed I said “I can’t pay attention, because the material is boring” out loud in a class, because I’d had enough and everything was getting to meIt’s also really hard for me to take constructive criticism - not because I think I’m perfect and no one should look down on me, but because I’m so used to never having anything “wrong” with my work.Still to this day whenever I get stressed about exams, people’ll say “Oh, but you’re you, you’ll be fine.” And I mean yeah tHaNkS fOr ThAt; ReAl HeLpFuL, but**PAST PERFORMANCE IS NOT ALWAYS AN INDICATION OF FUTURE PERFORMANCE**and I seriously can’t stress this enough - you shouldn’t expect yourself to be perfect at everything you do, even if you’ve seemed to be great your whole life (also saying this to myself) You shouldn’t put unwarranted stress on yourself to be some perfect achieving god, and even though I say this, I know it’s still really hard to let it all go. I still hold onto the ideology of “I could do all this before, why can’t I do it now?”And honestly this next advice sounds like classic cliche stuff, but just surround yourself with good people - people who can relax while still getting work done. I’ve been doing it for around 3 years now and it’s helped a bunch. Still haven’t fully left my “attempt at perfection” phase, but I’m slowly getting there, and I think that’s better than nothing -- source link