zenosanalytic:

ajanigoldmane:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

batmanisagatewaydrug:

gifted student™ brains are about as functional as horses when you get right down to it 

which sounds like a shit post but consider: horses? hypothetically MADE for running. look at this magnificent muscle beasts. look at those legs. they must be so good at running, right? wrong. horses are fragile as fuck. horses break their gotdamn legs so so easily, and if they break their legs you just have to fucking shoot them. if they run, the thing they are MADE FOR, too fast their lungs will start bleeding. I just googled horses to see if I was missing anything and apparently if they lie down for a day their organs start collapsing or something so they can’t rest from their One Horse Purpose even when they’re hurt. they’re made to do one thing but they can only do it under Very Specific Conditions and if a single thing changes they just die.

 which, you know. gifted students™ get applauded for being naturally smart when we’re five or whatever and then develop a terrible inflated sense of self that makes us highly averse to anything we’re not naturally good at, because it challenges our fragile childbrain egos and if we wait too long we’ll develop mental fences around entire subjects and skillsets (mine are math and studying) because we think we’re Bad at them, when in reality we just need to practice but are frustrated by that because it’s harder than being ~naturally talented~ was. we get applauded for doing One Thing but the second we run into slightly different things that our brains don’t comprehend as readily? it’s a Bad Time. I still have so much anxiety over things I don’t feel Naturally Talented at that I’ve been sitting here writing this post for like 10 minutes rather than read the feedback on my religion paper. I got a 100% on it, but I’m still That Scared of anything other than straight heaps of praise because that’s what my childbrain was acclimated to. just send me to the glue factory already. 

Its important to note that a lot of horse problems are because of how they are exploited by people, pushed too hard and made beasts of burden that they were never meant to be. I think this strengthens the analogy

This is good, but there’s a larger structural aspect to it that I don’t think gets talked about enough so I’m going to bring it up now. This is a simplified model that cut out some significant aspects(for instance, social investment), but it gets at the general idea:

• 50s kids(Boomers): Educated without any formal “Gifted” program to focus school resources on “best” students, graduated into a thriving economy, generationally over-confident.
• 60s kids: Educated while “Gifted” pedagogy was being developed but before it was systematized and widely implemented, graduated into a depressed economy, generationally cynical and rebellious.
• 70s kids: Educated with early “Gifted”&Aptitude testing regimes, graduated into booming tech-driven 80s-90s economy, generationally disaffected but confident; “got mine” libertarian strain prominent.
• 80s-90s kids(Millennials): Educated with fully formalized and implemented “Gifted”&Aptitude testing programs segregating school resources, graduated into worst economy since The Great Depression, generationally anxious, insecure, ironic, and self-doubting, but also community-oriented and politically-minded(Occupy, BLM, etc).

The common narrative of the Millennials is that they were coddled by an “everyone’s special”, “participation trophy” theory of parenting and teaching. But the reality is that, during the 80s and 90s when they were growing up, school divestment was at its most intense, district-level integration was being rolled back through housing resegregation, and US schools were undertaking a nation-wide experiment in internal segregation between those the schools had decided would succeed(the “Gifted and Talented” students who were given smaller class sizes, the best teachers, first-pick on textbooks and supplies, faculty attention, and who “just happened” to be overwhelmingly well-off and white) and those the schools had decided were a lost cause(the “Normal” students who found themselves in increasingly larger classes, with increasingly disinterested teachers increasingly able and willing to turn to the police to enforce “classroom discipline”, who “just happened” to be  overwhelmingly precarious, and black and brown) more radical than any official action or policy seen since Brown v. Board of Education.

Those “Gifted” kids weren’t unaware of this. They might not have articulated it this way in the moment, but their position was fundamentally a precarious one: perform and you get the comfort, investment, and safety found in AP classes, don’t and you lose all that. So this generation -over-policed, over-tested, over-surveiled, raised constantly aware of the disdain adults held them in(all that “snowflake” “participation trophy” culture war talk), and the severe punishments for not pleasing them(police in their schools, the rise of trying juveniles as adults, the “Normal classes”)- then graduated into a collapsed, deunionized, off-shored, vulture-capitalized economy where they couldn’t find any jobs.

Is it any wonder that, rather than turning out more capable and prepared and individualistic as “Gifted” pedagogy predicted, they turned out more anxious and insecure and group-minded than previous generations? And is it any wonder that, as “Gifted” pedagogy and the student-policing which surrounds it has grown more developed, entrenched, and severe since then, and as the US economy has failed to pass its recovery onto workers’ standard of living, that pattern has continued with the “Gifted” student of the next generation?