Do You Think You're Better Than Me?!!! (Well...yes!)

If you criticize me about something I know to be false, or bust my nads about something in the same manner, I'll just blow it off. In fact, I'll exaggerate just what you accuse me of. It's false and I don't care.

“You're a sheep ravisher!”

“Yep! I sure am, I accost sheep all night long! I have my own herd!”

But, if you point out something in my character, criticize me for that and it's true? I'll get very quiet and can feel the smoke curling around my shirt collar. I know myself to know if I get that reaction, then it's true beyond a doubt.

One night chatting it up with Liz she says. “Ya know, you can a snob at times.”

Cue the collar smoke and dead silent reaction.

So, am I a snob? Yep. I have to admit I can be at times. I also know where I learned this too. File this reason under “still having issues about it still” at my age.

Up until I was 8 years old, my school career was dead average or nearly so. Any other endeavor I had was that as well. Passing, boring average. Then something happened when I turned 8 and I started to rocket upwards in my school grades, wonderfully so.

Why 8? Easy. Most kids go through the “5 to 7” shift where they begin to understand and use reason. It's also why Canon Law of the Catholic church sets your first Communion after you have passed 7 years of age, never before. The following is from Jean Piaget, top child psychologist that ever was so far.

“The transition from preoperational to the more advanced concrete operational thought. Many contemporary researchers see a major transition around 5 to 7 years of age, called the 5 to 7 year shift, with refinements of cognitive skills that are present in preschoolers continuing into middle childhood. Here are some coggnitive changes from early to middle childhood:

1.Capacity for logical, systematic thinking using multiple pieces of information, due in part a marked decline in centration.

2.Ability to perceive underlying reality despite superficial appearance (the appearance-reality problem).

3.Domain-specific knowledge or expertise.

4.Information-processing capacity and control over attention and memory.

5.Ability to think effectively about own knowledge and processes of thought, metacognition.

•Cognitive limitations that remain include:

1.School age children still lack the broad base of knowledge that adults possess.

2.They sometimes have trouble using a skill they possess as part of a larger problem-solving system.

3.They cannot reason maturely about abstract and hypothetical problems.

When I hit 8, I pretty much flew past my peers when it came to schooling. It became silly easy to me. Where they had to struggle, I might have had to read/learn something three times before it stuck, and for years too. I also found learning to be entertaining, not drudgery. Granted, there were some subjects I was bored silly with so there was no motivation on my part to dive into it deeper, just doing enough work to get a decent grade was fine by me. Hell, it's why I can find documentaries on certain subjects amusing, even now.

You can't hide being a brainiac. When we got our weekly test scores back from the teacher, kids would flaunt their grades over someone who did less as well. Everyone did this. I routinely hit 85 or above. After a while, I began to be hated for that because it was so easy for me.

Now, some teachers would use me as a tutor for the others. I'd blow through whatever busy work she had assigned to us and I'd sit there bored, waiting for all the others to finish. Miss Enos, a fourth grade teacher, had the bright idea of pairing me with the more 'tupid kids in the class, in hopes that I might rub off on them. Or at least my transferable skills. I was cool with naturally helping others, but I began to discover what a lot of those others were really like.

Bill T. was a kid who routinely got every answer wrong no matter how hard he tried. Also, he was what would be today called “ADHD.” Back then it was called, “a disruptive, spoiled, unruly kid.” I once walked home with Bill to his house when I was 7. When we got to his house he went inside and I immediately heard his mother SCREAMING at him about something. Then a loud crash. Then silence. Then Bill running out the kitchen door with his mother shouting at him to come back. I didn't know what to make of this at the time. Now I understand. She was a single mom with shitty parenting skills and an equally shitty low wage job. Her life was nothing but stress and not enough money. Her kid bore the brunt of that. If your planted in shitty soil, you grow up to be shitty plant.

So I was paired with Bill and in a few short days I began to hate him. All he wanted were the answers and never wanted to do the work required to get them. I would try to tell him that he ain't getting any help on the test as he would be all alone for it and he'd fail. Also, I asked him if he was sick and tired of being wrong all the time. I had told him there was an easy and sure way to avoid all the crap he put up with in the classroom, if he'd only listen to what I had to say.

“I don't care! Give me the answers!” cries Bill.

“NO! Why should I do ALL the work and you get the credit? I return.

“Just GIVE ME THE ANSWERS” he tries again.

I got up an left him there. In my mind I was saying “FUUUUUCK YOUUUU.”

Friday comes, we take the test and Bill fails spectacularly again. I sat there, quietly gloating.

I'd run into these types of kids again and again; dumb, lazy and no future. These same kids hated my guts because again, school was a no brainer to me. They also hated me because I wouldn't give them a free ride.

In sixth grade, I was elected again to “help out” by being the “go to kid” if you wanted help. I forget the dullards name but he comes up to me with his math homework and wanted help. I looked at what he was trying to do and I saw it was simple addition problems. 540 + 103 = ? kind of stuff. I looked at him in amazement.

“You can't do addition on your own?” I asked. Don't forget, this was sixth grade and we left “addition” way in the past in SECOND grade.

He gave an embarrassed smile and turned around and left. I then thought, “You lazy, worthless bastard...can't DO simple addition? You so damn lazy and you want ME to do it?”

Again, I ran into these types again and again, way too often. I was easily building a disgust for them. They were everywhere!

Miss Mara, our sixth grade teacher, later on admitted to me that there were a lot of “lazy kids” in our class and some of them really should have been held back a year or two to catch up. She'd personally torture the lazy kids by doubling their work and help the slow ones. What I didn't know about that addition kid was that he really couldn't do addition. I wonder if he even could read. I found out that most teachers then, had to teach the slow kids as well as the smart ones. Just because we were ALL reading Johnny Tremaine didn't mean all the kids could understand it..or even read it. She had to tailor her teaching to each kid. I kinda thought we all were moving along in the same boat at the same speed.

What my experience with all of this, from my perspective was: “GIMMIE! GIMME! I WANT THE ANSWERS NOW. YOU DO IT! I DON'T WANT TO DO IT! IT'S EASY FOR YOU!” Multiply that by 12 and have them “come at you” constantly without so much as a thank you if you helped them. Have people coming at you all the time wanting things...see how much you like them after a while?

See? I have had ugly experiences with this.

What topped it all off also happened in the sixth grade and really made me feel a hell of a lot more superior than the greedy, thankless bastards that were trying to leech off of me for free.

This really happened:

Each year back then all classes had to take the national comprehensive tests. You remember those, fill in the circle with your #2 pencil. You even had to fill out your name by circling those dots. These tests were for some committee in the US Department of Education in order to the tweak teaching curriculum or what not.

I took the test in sixth grade like I had always taken it, but this year something was different. I scored a 98 on it.

It got out that I had scored a 98 and by doing so, really fell outside the curve on this. Valmour Collette, our principal, thought I had cheated. On top of that, he thought Miss Mara had given me the answers. I heard there was a heated argument with her and Collette over the score when it was proposed by Mara that I retake the test again but in Collette's office, under supervision where I couldn't cheat. He agreed.

Before that happened though, Miss Mara talked to me privately in the coatroom. She was quizzing me about that test and she came to realization that “you weren't really trying at all to pass it...you barely put any effort into it and you aced it.” To tell the truth, it wasn't hard at all.

Miss Mara then, and w/o my figuring her plan out just yet, told me...

“Ronnie, I want you to really try hard this time around. I want you take your time and get EVERY answer right.”

What I didn't know then was that she had confidence that I could do it. With this newer score she could shove it up the ass of Valmour Collette who suspected her of giving me the answers in the first place. This would be her vindication.

I retook that test in his office, under the four eyes of Mr. Collette and his secretary, Mrs. Slyvestre. There would be NO accusations of cheating this time around. I am sure Collete thought I'd bomb wonderfully on this retake.

A few weeks later the score came back, 100%. This got around the school as Miss Mara brazenly told everyone she knew there and in effect, shoved it so far up Collette's ass that it came right out his mouth. I was amazed that I managed to do it. I then felt pretty damn proud of myself too. I hit it out of the park.

Well, many of the other kids weren't so proud. In fact, some others were down right disgusted that that first attempt to label me a cheater and stupid didn't stick at all. I was hated even more still by them. A few others had “patted” me on the back but guess which type of kid they were? Successful students who would go on to college one day. The lazy prick ones just fumed.

I had talked to my Dad about that, why is it when someone succeeds it just brings out the wrath in others? I was 12 and just learning all about the shitty people in this world still. He had told me they are always present and always will be present. You can't get rid of them. He told me to hold my head up high for batting this out of the park. I wasn't to give into the other's disgust. I didn't. I didn't by being smarmy and stuck up as shit to them. Why? Because it infuriated them to no end.

**

Never in my life, was I proud of being ignorant of something. Never in my life did I hide the fact that I didn't understand something. I would ask questions w/o any feelings of inadequacy. NEVER in my life did I think being stupid was a badge of honor. I know many who do seem proud that they are dullards.

I don't respect that, nor them. I never did then and don't do so now. And if I come off as snobbish, well you know where it all came from now. If I turn my nose up at you by mistake, sorry.

See how childhood experiences shape who you are today?