Of course.
Of course I go back to the Internet and get greeted by that Wednesday Addams video. It bothers me because it's not Wednesday Addams.
Wednesday gets her revenge personally. She doesn't need a middle man, she doesn't need an excuse. She just does what needs to be done.
In Addams Family Values, when someone wants Wednesday Addams to smile, she smiles, and THEY'RE the ones who regret that choice.
The other day dredged up a memory of a common conversation among Talented And Gifted kids (TAG, at the time. Presumably someone later disliked the implication they were labeling all of us and changed it to G/T later, but, TAG'd we had been). Put a bunch of us smart kids in a room together and eventually, we always got around to asking who was in the pool or if we'd been identified. I had no idea what this meant at the time, but it always came up and we all knew.
I'd forgotten about it entirely until I happened to be reading Moab. When Stephen Fry was about 12 years old, he found a note that categorised him as "approaching genius" with the added epithet from his headmaster, "that bloody explains everything." Many years later he took the MENSA entrance, proving that he didn't simply approach genius, he embodied it, and discovered he didn't actually want to be a member of MENSA. Anyway, at 12, he'd hated the knowledge, considering it the worst thing he'd ever found out about himself, when what he wanted to be was good at sports and swim in the pool with the other kids. Stephen's childhood rejection of this idea reminded me of how this same thing was my identity, hold, on, wait a minute... Identified. Pool. These words mean something, and led me Googling.
Identified students are, by definition, top 3%, 97th percentile and above on tests and highly gifted. Pool was everyone else, students who were maybe developmentally a little bit ahead and might eventually hit against a wall and begin to approach average. I was identified in Kindergarten, I knew that. I didn't know that it was so unusual to be identified that early. My state, from what I can tell (though individual districts are different) doesn't formally test until 3rd grade, and under normal circumstances, *won't* test before 1st. Anyway, I was identified, not pool. Top 3%.
Of course, I was miserable in school.
Thinking back on it, if any environment groomed me to accept abusive, unhealthy situations, public education did. It was a necessity to be endured. You went every day, you were told you had to go, you were the problem, and you tried to survive, hoping that, maybe, next lesson, next semester, next year, next grade, next school, things would be better. They wouldn't get better. And you couldn't leave.
It's fucking cruelty. It's not how life works, it's creating a cycle of accepting being treated as less than a human being all the time.
I wonder to what extent teachers are in the same scenario, unleashing that stress and pressure on their students. I wonder if anyone has ever looked at the problem that way before. I wonder if anyone has ever looked at a school and considered whether it was a healthy environment for students, or individual students.
They wonder why people commit acts of violence at schools, this is why. You don't see the administrators or school board or local government in charge of reinforcing this useless environment, you see the day to day results, a building full of miserable people more then 50% of whom are there against their will or better judgement because where would they go if they could? Leaving isn't allowed. There are no alternatives because you're not good enough, not well-behaved enough, not smart enough, not sick enough, not enough to warrant anything but the cycle of abuse.
It's a thing I'm learning as I struggle to get my life into a new place. I am capable of changing my environment. I can positively control the world around me in a way I hadn't realised was possible, because up to now, it hadn't been. I got out of high school and thought, "now," while I was living on a college campus. It was better, but it wasn't autonomous.
After spending a decade living with someone who doesn't know what to do and to whom all ways are shut and barred, I'm figuring out that, no, it doesn't actually work like that.
Does anyone tell a victim of abuse, "It gets better, just stay in that marriage, job, relationship?" No. But they tell that to teenagers. It gets better? No. You learn to make it better.
You do your thing, loudly, and regardless of anyone else. Be an Addams.
It's fucking cruelty. It's not how life works, it's creating a cycle of accepting being treated as less than a human being all the time.
I wonder to what extent teachers are in the same scenario, unleashing that stress and pressure on their students. I wonder if anyone has ever looked at the problem that way before. I wonder if anyone has ever looked at a school and considered whether it was a healthy environment for students, or individual students.
They wonder why people commit acts of violence at schools, this is why. You don't see the administrators or school board or local government in charge of reinforcing this useless environment, you see the day to day results, a building full of miserable people more then 50% of whom are there against their will or better judgement because where would they go if they could? Leaving isn't allowed. There are no alternatives because you're not good enough, not well-behaved enough, not smart enough, not sick enough, not enough to warrant anything but the cycle of abuse.
It's a thing I'm learning as I struggle to get my life into a new place. I am capable of changing my environment. I can positively control the world around me in a way I hadn't realised was possible, because up to now, it hadn't been. I got out of high school and thought, "now," while I was living on a college campus. It was better, but it wasn't autonomous.
After spending a decade living with someone who doesn't know what to do and to whom all ways are shut and barred, I'm figuring out that, no, it doesn't actually work like that.
Does anyone tell a victim of abuse, "It gets better, just stay in that marriage, job, relationship?" No. But they tell that to teenagers. It gets better? No. You learn to make it better.
You do your thing, loudly, and regardless of anyone else. Be an Addams.
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