I have signed up for class with the somewhat-overdramatic juris doctor from previous posts. It is... interesting.
Not getting too far into the amateur psych profiling, he shows every sign of being someone who was tracked into every gifted and talented program they could find as soon as they figured out he could read. Which was probably before anyone else got around to teaching him. He is pathologically observant and terrifyingly smart. I like him, a lot.
The popular concept of what happens when you tell a kid they're exceptional from day one is basically House, the intolerable asshole genius. I won't say that never happens, but it's pretty rare. Getting that result involves a lot of confounding factors, and, let's be honest, some significant inborn asshole tendencies. More often, you get someone who is no better or worse a person than anyone else, but is really oddly calibrated in many regards.
One of the earliest things you learn as The Gifted Kid is that the other kids in your grade are not your peers. They are your age cohort. By the time your school day is divided into actual subjects, you're not working on even remotely the same things anymore, so comparing your progress to theirs is meaningless. In theory, you can measure your progress by comparing what you're doing now to what you did before, but the adults get in the way of that -- unintentionally, I think -- in a couple of different ways. Number one, a lot of them go out of their way to not give you accurate feedback on how spectacular your results are. They don't want you getting a swelled head. And number two, they are for some reason dead-set on convincing you that you will never be able to just coast through life on raw intelligence (note: they are lying), so the moment you finish one thing, they hand you another, slightly harder thing, and tell you to get cracking. You never get time to reflect on the past, they won't ever give you a solid "when you attain this you get to stop" goal for the future, so your only reference is the one in front of you in the present: The teacher. Who is, hopefully, an expert.
This very quickly spirals into a dark little corner of East Hyperspace where you lose all reference for what normal people can be reasonably expected to know, or be able to do. The farther you get in whatever you're working on, the more expert-y the expert they send you to, which is great for learning but kinda bad for staying in radio contact with Earth. Literally no one ever explains to you how normal people work, which makes life very frustrating when you leave school and have to go deal with them.
The slightly-overdramatic juris doctor absolutely melted through some fuse in his brain in class one day, when he just. could. NOT get us to do one specific piece of choreo the way he wanted. I asked him about it again later that week when he had cooled down some and gotten a grip, and eventually figured out the reason it didn't work was that, in order get what he wanted, we would have to count according to a section of the music that wasn't playing at the time, while a different section of the song was. In other words, the audio equivalent of the dot plates they use to test for eidetic memory. He genuinely had no idea that other people could not do this.
Which, honestly, fair -- I was probably close to his age when I figured out what I had was what people called a "photographic memory" and was supremely unimpressed. I legitimately have no idea how anyone functions without it. I'm not knocking anyone, clearly seven billion people do get along without having all those snapshots cluttering up their brains. But seriously, how do any of you ever find your keys?
Another chunk of that conversation involved him trying to explain time signatures to me, from slightly before A to a tidge after Z. He didn't think I was an idiot; when I didn't seem to understand what he wanted, he just figured that I was missing some big chunk of foundational knowledge that would make it all make sense, which is a really common backup assumption for people who almost always know more about everything than everyone else in the room. He didn't blink when I countered his overly-general 'pop music is in 4/4 time' with 'excuse me my Arabic and/or Balkan pop collection has something to say', because obviously having eight or nine languages on your Google Music playlist is a thing normal humans do.
[He has asked, and does know that I admit to speaking five languages. He likes to shout 'hello' at us in a bunch of different ones while we count off push-ups at the start of class. It... does not make more sense in the context of the class, but makes perfect sense in the context of him, so far as I can tell. I don't know if he properly speaks any of the non-English ones, but my bet is yes.]
For schedule reasons, I couldn't make his beginner class, so I emailed him asking 1) would it be okay if I signed up for a session of intermediate/advanced to see if I could hack it, and if so, 2) did he have a slot open that week? The answer I got was essentially 'yes absolutely course progression means nothing I will hold a slot for you forever'. I was like, not quite what I asked, but thank you? It was not what I expected. It's unusual for an instructor to offer to reserve a comp slot for anyone; I'm taking the class with studio credit, and generally teachers have a cap of 1-2 of those per class session, only available if they're not already full of paying students, and they are first come-first serve on a weekly basis. His assessment that I'd do fine in advanced was based on the one time I managed to show up to the beginner class, months ago.
I'm honestly not sure if the offer was because he sees me at the desk weekly and knows who I am, or if it's something he'd do for anyone who cared enough to write him a whole email about it. Either way, clearly in his world, Interest + Aptitude = Arrangements. Which makes perfect sense when you are The Gifted Kid, because that is how learning things works. When the adults think you can do anything, they don't want to stop you from doing anything. The moment you show an interest in something, they throw themselves forth to start clearing obstacles out of your way.
[An incomplete list of things The Authorities have ignored in the interest of letting me sign up for various classes:
- Age requirements
- Grade level/credit requirements
- GPA requirements
- District boundaries
- District policies
- School policies
- Department policies
- Attendance policies
- Course prerequisites
- Course co-requisites
- Major requirements
- Minor requirements
- Enrollment caps
- Money they were absolutely supposed to be charging me (or my parents) for all this
In retrospect, my IEP while I was in public school could only have been achieved by so many people conveniently losing so many pieces of goddamn stupid paperwork, it's unreal.]
[People don't stop doing it when you grow up, they just get less consistent about it and start getting mad when you don't dribble all over yourself in excitement at this once in a lifetime opportunity. It might well be that they only stick their necks out for someone like that once or twice in their entire career, but people have been doing that for you literally as long as you remember -- it's more of a "Aww, you didn't have to do that, thank you for being so accommodating!" level thing than a life-debt. It often comes with the expectation that you Make Something Of It, of course, but that's its own problem.]
The last instructor who was so persistent about going "no, really, just come to class," was Maestra. I don't know enough about the Japanese educational system to guess at her academic history, although she's certainly bright enough to have been in class with me if she'd been here. Dance-wise, I do know that she moved from Japan to Spain to study at Amor de Díos in Madrid, which one of my classmates once (accurately) described as the Harvard of flamenco. That somehow ended with me performing in an extract of "El amor brujo" at the Hatch Shell, backed by the Landmark Symphony Orchestra.
The juris doctor got his formal training at Alvin Ailey. He's making noises like he just wants me to show up to all his class sessions. Who the fuck knows where this is going to end up.
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