Academic Pandemic

Being a recluse from the moment you start public school more or less guarantees an extensive vocabulary at a young age. That’s how it worked for me, anyway. And I remember these two completely awful boys in my kindergarten class who, whenever I used a word that contained more than two syllables would say “Ooooohhh, big woooords!” Which isn’t really an insult, but you hear it enough times in a day and it becomes the refrain that haunts your early intellectual years. I mean, these were the same boys who had to be carried out of the classroom during a fire drill because they had tied themselves to chairs with Lego chains, so it’s not like there was any real scope or merit to anything they had to say, but I remember hating them with every fiber of my tiny five-year-old being all the same. I remember wondering if maybe it would be better to use smaller words, to keep my ideas to myself, to avoid the sort of attention that went with it altogether.
 
In sixth grade, my class was yelling out adjectives as my teacher wrote them on the board, and when I suggested “bulbous,” I had to go up and write it on the board myself because Ms. Fisher didn’t even know it was a word, much less how to spell it.
 
That’s more or less my elementary school experience in a nutshell. Cut to my sophomore year of college, where I’m sitting in the dining hall talking to my friend, who is working on a paper. He is explaining to me and another girl the intricate process he goes through while writing for classes. He’s a pretty smart dude, but he learned early on that if his profs catch on to this, they will hold him to a higher standard, and expect more from him and maybe even grade him a little harder than other students. He doesn’t want that sort of pressure, so he told us he dumbs himself down intentionally early in the semester, so when it becomes crunch time later on, he can write at full caliber and really impress, maybe getting better grades than he could have managed just writing normally.
From an early age, we learn that is is weird and often frowned upon (at least by our peers) to be “the smart one.” Now, I’m no rocket scientist by any means, but I know there are certain things in the realm of academia that I excel at. But once I became aware of social interaction (sometime around third or fourth grade, I think) it seemed like I had to choose between being actively brilliant or having friends. It’s a tougher decision than you might think. Even now that I’m in college, sometimes I’m afraid of answering too many questions in one lecture because I don’t want to seem like a teacher’s pet or a know-it-all.
 
I guess what piques my interest the most is what exactly made the system this way. Why are girls who act dumb cute, while smart girls are lame, nerdy and often-times shunned? Why is it more socially acceptable to be ignorant? A future run by hair-twirlers and blank stares sounds like a terrifying prospect. Even in college, boys like my dining hall friend feel like they can’t unleash their full talent or potential for fear of being treated differently. I mean, it’s good to be challenged mentally, but the longing for acceptance (and not being ridiculed) is perhaps the most powerful force in the human psyche. Much more powerful than the desire to be recognized as a smarty-pants.
 
So we just keep our mouths shut? Pretend we don’t know a better adjective than ‘happy’ or that we don’t exceed an eleventh grade reading level?
 
I’m not entirely sure what to draw from all this, or what needs to be done to change the paradigm in kids that there is a positive correlation between coolness and failing grades. Higher education is getting more and more expensive all the time, and if you’re not going to go in attempts to reach your greatest potential both in and out of the classroom, why waste your precious time and money? This Just In: Not everyone is going to like you. And if someone shuns you for being brilliant or creative or a good critical thinker, then why would you waste your time with them in the first place? If people are going to tease you, it should at least be for something good. Years of bullying and the ensuing emotional backlash taught me that if no one else will accept you, the very least you can do is accept yourself. And as soon as you realize how fabulous you are, you’ll have a hard time finding a damn to give about those with a negative attitude towards you.
 
I guess what it comes down to is if you refuse to think for yourself, somebody else will do your thinking for you. And frankly, I don’t trust anybody else enough with my brain. Does that mean I’ll always raise my hand when I know the answer, or that I’ll always go the extra mile to create the works of literary art I know I could be capable of every time I have to do a reading response? Well, no. But dude, embrace your talents, even if you get made fun of for them. Remember, the limpdick making fun of you is the one being carried out of the kindergarten classroom by the teacher’s aid because he had the brilliant idea of tying himself to a chair.