Joe90 wrote:
What sort of child were you?
I was never referred to as a little professor. However, I was considered a tad unusual. I scored above average on reasoning tests but I didn't score as high as my sister. For a while I was a rather opinionated and curious kid. I'd debate and ask questions if things didn't seem right.
My school stuck me in counselling and told me that it would help me think more inside the box. I found this puzzling as I wasn't sure why I'd want to do that. My counsellor was a horrible woman. She'd tell me what to write and would yell at me if I ever questioned or rebelled. I found the sessions rather pointless as she never tried to understand me and seemed to just be ticking boxes. However, I did eventually understand why they stuck me in there. It dawned on me when she yelled at me to pick the obvious choice and I replied saying both solutions seemed equally obvious to me and that there was no way of knowing which answer she wanted. The people around me were likely not following my train of thought and assumed I was talking nonsense. I realised that I shouldn't assume others think like I do and that I need to take time to explain my process and connections. The issue wasn't that I thought outside of the box, it was that I needed to improve my explanation skills. I tried my best to explain my thoughts to her but she wouldn't listen. One day she snapped and asked why I couldn't just be normal. She told me that I'd never amount to anything in life. That I was lazy, stupid and worthless. It took a toll on my self-confidence. She broke down and ran away. At the time I blamed myself since she blamed me, but over time I realised I wasn't at fault.
It took me a while to build up my confidence again and get into the habit of asking questions. A shame really since questions used to come so naturally. My teachers found me annoying for overthinking the stories we would read in class and I would be scorned for challenging implications or debating the moral. I understand why it was annoying though, they'd planned a simple lesson plan and there I was disrupting the plan.
Generally I was average in most areas and under average in subjects such as maths. I did well in IT, Art (not at first, but I kept at it), English and Marketing / Business studies as a teenager. People tend to assume I was a well-behaved teacher's pet as a teenager but that's fairly inaccurate. After regaining my confidence, I had a bit of a rebellious streak. I spoke back to my teachers, helped out class clowns by expanding their vocabulary to help them insult teachers I didn't like and doodled during boring classes. I disliked RS and preferred to spend my time drawing optical illusions of my own design. Sometimes other students would ask me to draw a piece for them if they were also bored in that class. The bottom RS set in my school never did an exam so as to not tank the scores, so I didn't see much point in paying attention in that particular class since we weren't being graded.
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25. Near the spectrum but not on it.