“He is not smart enough”
Have you ever engaged in a bit of harmless self-deception in order to try and make yourself feel better about something? I have, and to tell the truth, I just plain suck at it. Self-deception is a skill that I could never quite master. I still try to do it sometimes, though I have no clue why; I inevitably end up making myself feel worse about the issue at hand.
I recently blogged about an issue at work that has, to be blunt, really made me angry. I keep telling myself that it is not a big deal, and that I should not get myself worked up over it. Naturally, as with any previous attempt at self-deception, I keep failing miserably.
The truth is that I am angry about it, and no amount of self-consolation seems to be able to assuage that anger. In fact, I had to stop and evaluate the cause of the anger. Only by determining the cause would I be able to properly address the issue and force myself to accept the situation in a more rational manner. The self-analysis did not take long given the speed at which my brain processes and analyzes information.
The source of the anger goes back more than three decades.
I grew up in a small and heavily Baptist East Texas town where the only two things worse than being black was being Jewish (the Jews killed Christ, after all), and being homosexual. Sameness was the order of the day; a cookie-cutter community where everyone looked the same, worshipped the same, acted the same, and most importantly thought the same. Being different in any way was to be ostracized by the community. This lesson was paramount in the churches and the schools, and was enforced harshly.
Yet, despite the vigor the lesson of sameness was beat into everyone, I was different. I was able to read and write long before I entered kindergarten. While the other kids my age were puzzling out the infinite intricacies of the letter “K”, I was reading (and understanding) books that kids more than twice my age could scarcely comprehend. By the time everyone else in my class had grasped the concept of the letter “B”, I had finished my classwork and had moved on to some other activity. This resulted in my workbook being taken up, having a big red “X” drawn across the page, and I was sent home with a note to my parents accusing me of cheating.
I was never able to figure out how, exactly, one cheats on learning the alphabet.
That is the earliest memory of my educational experience, but it was far from the last. At least once a week over the next three years, I would be sent home with a note to my parents accusing me of being a cheater. The most common phrase I heard from my school was “He is not smart enough to learn the material, so he has to cheat.”
Finally, when the school was at a complete loss with how to deal with an irredeemable cheater, the decision was made to put me in Special Ed classes with the rest of the morons. To justify moving me to the Special Ed classes, the school had to administer an IQ test. In their own arrogance, the school administration was not prepared to deal with the results.
At age 7, my IQ was higher than that of any teacher at the school. But the damage had already been done.
I had already decided to never again do my classwork. Why should I? Every time I did my work, I was publicly called a cheater and given no credit for my work. I figured I would just save myself the aggravation of having to deal with such public abuse; it simply was not worth the trouble.
In my seventh grade year, my family had moved to a different town. The teachers at my new school immediately recognized that I was far smarter than I ever let on – yet I steadfastly refused to do my schoolwork. The teachers lectured and ranted about how special I was, and were frustrated at my continual low grades that resulted from not doing homework.
It was in the eighth grade that the situation really boiled to a head. One of my teachers publicly called me a moron in front of the class, to which I responded, claming that, compared to me, the teacher was an idiot child who had been lobotomized at birth. I then proceeded to prove the truth of my statement.
That was not the most diplomatic way of dealing with the situation, but it did get quite a few laughs from the rest of the class.
So, here I am, some thirty years later, still being told that I am not smart enough to learn new things by people who have absolutely no clue of what I am truly capable; still being told that I am a moron by those who are, in all probability, my intellectual inferiors.
And that makes me angry.
I have spent many years training myself to not take such things so personally, to not get angry over things of little significance. However, despite that effort, despite the vast amounts of armor I have built up around my emotions, I still have a sore spot in my personality that flairs up whenever I feel someone is insulting my intelligence – whether or not that person realizes he or she is doing so.
There is a bit more to the situation that rubs salt into the wound, but I have ranted and raved long enough for this post, so I’ll come back to that issue in the very near future.
Comments
Comments posted on this blog to not necessarily reflect the opinions of the blog's owner. Please refer to the Blog Policy for details.
3 Responses to ““He is not smart enough””
Leave a Reply
I encounter that a lot as a member of the Army. A lot of times people assume that I’m not going to be bright, or they try to dumb things down for me. They think that if you were smart, why would you join the Army, especially as an enlisted person? I scored in the top one percent on the ASVAB, and many others did just as well or relatively as well, but that fact doesn’t seem to register with them. You can’t tell us from our MOSes. But the perception is so much that if you were smart, you’d have another job, that the idiot treatment is out there, and maddening.
I say don’t let it get to you, but if you’re anything like me, it will anyway.
Thank you for the comment, Army Sergeant.
I like to think that I have pretty thick skin. In fact, I am often telling people they needs to get over themselves and to not take everything, least of all themselves, too seriously. I have been called every name in the book, plus a few that are not in the book. They are just words to me, and words only have as much power over my as I allow.
That said, being called an idiot does not bother me over much. However, being called an idiot who is incapable of learning by the same people who give an actual idiot who has proven himself incapable of learning the same opportunity they are denying me really stabs me deeply in a sore spot.
[...] at least things have not changed much in last 30 years. [...]