Who else got the "You think you're so smart, stop trying to show off" thing?

I think I've told this story before (and the fact that it still rankles is something that, perhaps, indicates I should Let It Go). When I was no older than 5, the whole extended family -- including cousins aged 7, 9, and 10 -- were gathered for some reason, like you do.

The cousins had a book on Why You Should NEVER Get In A Car With Strangers, and the adults thrust it at me to make me read it. Perhaps I was prone to glomming on to strangers; it's possible that as a child I didn't hate people the way I do now.

So I read it. Come on, it was written for 5-year-olds. I read it in a couple of minutes. When I announced I was finished, every adult in the house told me that I was lying and I hadn't really read it, that no child could read that quickly. Even my own parents, who goddamn well knew I could.

So I summarized the book, including the ugly fate of the poor fictional character who Got In A Car With A Stranger. Even though I demonstrated that I read the fucking book, the adults repeated that I couldn't possibly have read it, and thrust it at me again and told me to read it "for real."

33 years later, I'm still planning to pee on their graves.

Who else got the "You think you're so smart, stop trying to show off" thing?

In third or fourth grade, I went to India for my grandmother's funeral and missed the first couple weeks of school after winter vacation. When I got back, my classmates said, "People actually got to answer questions!"

What's that line from Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth teases Darcy by saying they're the same sort of person - neither of them will say anything in a large group unless they're sure it will delight and impress everyone listening?

Yeah. I resembled that remark.

Going to a math/science magnet for middle school (where I was in the top tier track, but nowhere near the smartest kid in the room at any given time) was really good for me.

There's so much power in just staying silent sometimes, even when you know the answer.

My fervent hope is that one day I will learn this and not NEED to be the one who always has The Right Answer.

(It would help if my dad didn't have the habit of always contradicting me. ALWAYS. [Which might explain where I got my need to be right from. Hmm.])

I did. I went into school able to read (learned at age three or four out of boredom, like many others) was identified as gifted by the district by 1st grade and sent to a program at another school two days a week. Teachers tended to hate it, so they'd make a point of singling me out for material covered in class the days I wasn't there in hopes of tripping me up. The times that I did have trouble, they enjoyed pulling out the old "not quite as smart as you think you are, are you?" End result was I wound up hating "regular" school, but loved gifted, because the learning was so much more fun and relevant.

By the time I got to Jr. High, I'd adopted the strategy in my math classes of not raising my hand unless no one else knew the answer.

This was me, but in history and English, not math.

I did relish chances to show off, though. In 7th-grade American History, Mr. Clarke would occasionally have a history-equivalent of a spelling bee, where we'd line up along the wall and answer questions until we couldn't and then have to take our seat. I was the only one to get "The Claremont" as Fulton's steamboat.

My prep school and my English high school were savagely and publicly competitive. Grades were a throwdown--in prep school we all competed to see who'd come first in class every year from age 5 on up, and the big enchilada was the national high school entrance exams whose results were published in multiple newspapers. Which they didn't let me take on time because they thought that year's competition was too strong, so they wanted to hold me back a year because they thought I could come top of the country in a weaker, later pool.

My mother talked me into high school on the basis of her grades instead. She kinda rocks.

English high school was an Oxbridge mill. No one would ever get annoyed with you for being too bright--being coy with your brains would make you as unpopular as being snotty about them.

eta: On the other hand, we were told to dumb it up around family. We didn't. That ship has totally sailed.

I have a friend who both loved to read, and did not have a great childhood. She was a wonderful mom who adopted several older children when her biological children were grown. She was just an awesome caring wonderful mom. Once she told me that she started out being a little sad because her own biological children did not love to read as much as she did, but then she realized a huge part of why she was such a voracious reader as a child was that she needed some escape from her life. She ended up being glad that her children did not have to turn to books in that way.

Obviously, this isn't true for everyone-- it isn't even true for me, I am a reader because my mother is a reader and shared that with me. However, my mother was a reader because her childhood needed to be escaped from.

My fervent hope is that one day I will learn this and not NEED to be the one who always has The Right Answer.

I think "power" might be the wrong word? What do you think? Maybe "grace" is more accurate? In any case, it's definitely something I still work on, depending on the context.

Steph, my 7th grade English teacher gave our class a placement test at the beginning of the grammar unit. Since I knew to capitalize the word "I" and other such details, I was exempted from the grammar unit and sent to the library to read a book and write a book report on it. He thought I'd be gone all week. The next day I'd finished "Of Mice and Men" and written a 3-page paper. He was floored. Did I mention he was a gym teacher, filling in as an English teacher for the year? No offense to gym teachers, but this guy had no clue about scope and sequence for English.

As for reading, I have to have something to read in front of my eyes, always. I can't just sit and not read. I've read the cereal boxes at breakfast, the toothpaste tube (when I forgot to bring a book into the bathroom), anything, anywhere basically. Can't ride the bus or train without a book. (Lift weights - Carry Stephen King books to work!)

Is reading in the bathroom normal, or is it just my family? My college roommates thought I was nuts (for that, among other reasons).