the stars of track and field are beautiful people

the daily blague has a good post about malcolm gladwell's talk on, i guess, how precociousness early in childhood is not a reliable indicator of "success," whatever that's defined as, later in life. the post becomes personal, which is always fine, and especially fine here because it's well written and relevant, but it does make it a little harder to extrapolate the honest line of the lecture. i think the gist was that kids who are naturally sharp don't always learn how to learn, so if their talents level off as their peers catch up, they'll remain average instead of working harder to stay as far ahead of the herd as they had been before. basically, it's counterproductive to praise young kids profusely for being naturally good at something.

this makes perfect sense to me, but adults can be very, very strange when it comes to things like this. i, for whatever reason, learned to read at a very young age--i was fully literate before i turned three. when i started kindergarten, around the time i turned five, my teacher didn't want me to be limited by the rest of the class, who, with the exception of one other student, couldn't read yet. her solution was to routinely exclude and isolate us. any time she handed out a worksheet that had written instructions on it, she would send me into one corner of the room and that boy into another so we could read to ourselves, while she read the instructions aloud to the rest of the class and they worked on the project together. it was completely inane, to start with, since there was no part of the room far enough away from her that we wouldn't have heard her reading and been distracted by the other kids. but more important, when you're five and you want to color with your friends, being sent into a corner is always a punishment. i did everything i could to hide the fact that i was intelligent because i hated being singled out, but at the same time, schoolwork was pretty much all i was good at. i wanted to impress my teachers and my family, but i didn't want to be the nerd in the room. the result was that i wound up turning into a restless, unmotivated, semi-problem student who could either get straight As or Ds and incompletes, depending on my mood and how closely i was watched. (none of this has anything to do with malcolm gladwell or the daily blague, and i realize that, but i do so love whining about how terribly maligned i was as a child. it's actually how i began this blog: "and then i turned my back on dinosaurs forever, wah, wah, wah.") this went on until high school, when other kids started to care about grades, too, and being smart wasn't so stigmatic. i finished high school first in my class, but i refused to make the valedictory speech because i didn't feel like i had worked as hard as the girl who had been second. i got yelled at for that, by a lot of people, who felt like i was spitting in their eyes, but i really felt that it was a case of recognition being given where it was due. maybe i had gotten better grades, but i wasn't a better student. i'm sure our first-year college transcripts would verify that. i'm also sure that if i hadn't been so focused on impressing those other people, i'd have made some very different education and career choices. so it goes; i'm plodding along a more natural track now, like a good little tortoise. i'll never own a house, but i'm happy and rested, and that's a lot more important to me these days.

anyway. if i've misinterpreted things please tell me so, i'd hate to be putting an inaccurate spin on it. i'd love to hear from other people who were there, too, who had different or additional points to make. you know me, i can't get enough of that gladwell. and for the record, it's more than a little rude to keep asking me why.