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).

I was the only one to get "The Claremont" as Fulton's steamboat.

Huh. See, I would have guessed "The Savannah."

where I was in the top tier track, but nowhere near the smartest kid in the room at any given time

This was high school for me. Junior high, I was either 3rd or 4th in my 250-person class, depending on the day, but in high school, I got nipped out of being in the top 10 percent in a class of just over 100 girls.

My sisters taught me to read when we played school so I went into kindergarten reading but I don't remember showing off in class. I know that getting pulled out of regular classes to go to gifted ones made me a target. I do not have fond memories of school.

Is reading in the bathroom normal, or is it just my family?

I used to read in the bathroom a lot. I think it's fairly normal. There are even bathroom books!

In late elementary school, they started giving pretests for each math section, and if you aced the pretest, you didn't have to do the homework and take the test for that section. I think. I just remember acing a lot of pretests. I think.

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.

It is so hard. When I am tired, it is almost impossible. The thing is, I do tend to have the right answer even if I am just noodling through and thinking of a likely answer.

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

I didn't have that, but I found out in high school that a boy who had been at my elementary school had thought I was dumb back then because I was always so quiet, until we took a test and I finished way before anyone else. He switched his opinion at that point to "fast dumb girl".

Not that I had any idea at the time, I was oblivious to other people's opinions of me.

I still do this.

There are many words that I'd use in writing that I wouldn't say in conversation because I'm not sure about the pronunciation. Many.