“You are reading at college level.”
Translation: “You are baseline literate.”
Advanced classes means slightly less stupid. This makes me think of Beijing University. A lot of kids who were considered the brightest and the best in their little towns their parents would go into debt and borrow money from others in the town to send them to Beijing University.
When the kids arrived they’d discover they weren’t as smart as they thought they were and they’d flunk out despite studying as hard as they could. And instead of returning home and embarrassing their parents in front of the other townspeople they’d kill themselves.
Did no one make the effort to publicize these stories to prevent this from happening?
These are well known stories but like with every tragedy everyone always thinks: “This won’t happen to me, because I’m different.”
I, personally, would never think that because I’m different.
Well, growing up in Oklahoma has definitely caused me a God complex. Being able to read instantly makes me more intelligent than most people I’ve ever met, so it’s very difficult to not assume I’m more intelligent than everyone else. The weird part is that I’ve always felt kinda dumb, but looking at everyone else, they take it beyond dumb. Everyone else is just completely illogical, like they simply do not think at all.
So very relatable, if I met a room full of people on my level I genuinely don’t know how I’d handle that socially
Oklahoma has to have something in the water. I had a parent teacher conference the other day and wrote “x+4=7” on the board as an example of something their middle schooler was struggling with, and I might as well as written 汉子.
Ok, so I know I’m not smart but that feels like it has to be made up, they seriously didn’t understand that equation?!
Yeah, absolutely no comprehension. She copied it down into her notes to look into it more.
In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king
Hey! Don’t call me out!
You know I heard a quote one time that said if you’re the smartest person in the room you’re in the wrong room. But at the same time my parents always told me whatever I did I needed to be the best at it. Like they put me in tutoring because my math skills were only one year ahead. My family is all engineers, computer scientists etc. Everybody’s a bachelor’s or above except my one sister who’s specifically disabled.
When I decided on nursing school I was like OK I’m just going to aim for something achievable for me. The content should be right at my level, at least I’ll be able to excel at that like they’re expecting. And the coursework itself was super easy. I had all the chem physics and bio I needed for the conceptual groundwork. I had all the Greek and Latin roots I needed for the terminology. Even the math was actually right on my level (basic algebra, ratio and proportion, PEMDAS equations), I just needed to up my accuracy when I had previously optimized for speed.
But they absolutely humbled me in people skills and emotional resiliency. I actually flunked out the first time for being too emotionally immature. They made me cry on the regular and I just couldn’t get a grip on what they wanted from me interaction wise. It was actually my first shitty job at a psych hospital + going through therapy simultaneously that fixed me. It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did. I learned so much about respect and what it really meant to uphold a promise through adversity and how to keep my stupid mouth shut.
So. I thought I was aiming low, and I still wound up being the dumbest person in the room.
As an engineer from a family of engineers, yeah i wholeheartedly believe that you learned better people skills from the criminally insane than engineers. I had a real tough time learning people skills and emotional resilience
I also work in healthcare. The science was challenging, but achievable with effort. The hand skills took practice and repetition. But the people skills are truly never mastered.
I’ve been in my field for 17 years and it’s still a daily fire walk trying to avoid setting expectations too high, setting expectations too low, or somehow inadvertently inviting litigation with the wrong choice of words. The same verbiage doesn’t work on everyone, and you have about 20 seconds to decide which variation of unreasonable you have to sidestep on every person.
I feel like I am fortunate to have employment and not worry as much as many people about affording groceries and the mortgage. And yet, I really hope my children don’t choose patient care for their career.
☝️
Yeah 10 total years and a dozen Daisy noms in and I still feel like my foot is constantly in my mouth. You also have to walk this horrible tightrope of remembering this is the worst day of someone’s life then emotionally file it under your 400th Tuesday. The cognitive dissonance of that alone is enough to drive you bonkers.
It doesn’t help that in psych a lot of the time there’s no solution for keeping the person safe that’s not going to horribly traumatize them. I’ve had to do things to people to keep them alive and as unharmed as possible that are still probably gonna feature in their nightmares. I try not to but sometimes they’re already so traumatized that they just won’t be able to see what I’m doing as beneficial. We’ve got people with past sexual assault traumas who are so out of it they don’t realize that urine has been sitting on their skin so long that the acid is dissolving their genitals. They can’t put the steps in order to clean themselves but they also can’t safely accept me touching them to help. The other day I did something as simple as trying to help someone dial the phone and when we finally got through they got it into their head that I’d replaced their loved one on the other end with an imposter.
Some days you just Will Not Win but the fact that human bodies and social interactions have so many uncontrolled variables (and infinitely more when combined) will leave you wondering every time you think about it that maybe there was some right answer you just couldn’t find. Maybe I should have waited longer. Maybe I took too long. Maybe I should’ve played music. Maybe the environment was too loud. Maybe I should’ve been kinder. Maybe I wasn’t straightforward enough. The list just keeps going.
Daisy noms?
System for writing thank you notes to a nurse. They give you a little enamel pin to put on your badge that I’m not comfortable possibly accidentally losing on an acute psych unit. Then about every quarter each hospital gives an award to one of the nominations (although usually an employee with better optics than one of the night shift psychiatry goblins). So like, objectively, at least a few of my patients feel cared for. It’s just hard to feel that way sometimes.
Thanks for the info; I’d never heard of that.
i have had a nurse i have wanted to thank for decades (i had major surgery, my mother wanted to stay overnight in my room and this kind nurse let my mother get cleaned up at her place. we were going to get a gym membership but she would not hear of it. she almost got in a fistfight with a radiologist for me. all i ever knew was her first name, she was the best). i had no idea there was a formal system. how widespread is this? (is it just psych?)
is this? (is it just psych?)
Not at all, it originated in medical iirc
I hope that someday if I need the care, that you are the one doing it. Thank you for being exceptional.
It’s wild to say but I feel like the literally criminally insane men I was working with taught me better people skills than my parents did.
That actually sounds pretty reasonable to me (not to excuse your parents, if applicable). It’s not the same thing at all, but I learned much better people skills from living with a boyfriend who had abandoned his treatment for and didn’t tell me about his paranoid schizophrenia than from anyone else. He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.
When you are working with people with a very different perspective on the world that you can’t change, and neither party feels entitled to acceptance because of family, you need to learn how to treat others respectfully and with dignity to succeed.
He read so much into everything I said, that I learned to speak very deliberately.
I have found this helps but also that a lot of people hear what they want to hear no matter how clear and deliberate you are, and recognizing who those people are is another skill.
Yeah I feel like it’s one of those things that sounds completely insane unless you’ve been through something similar. A lot of it was learning how to respond to crazy but I did actually learn a few positive behaviors directly from them. You’d be surprised how much please / thank you and sir / ma’am they use. I also learned to stand a lot taller, swagger a little, and speak from my chest. Like people will comment on how much confidence I display which is wild to me being actually in my own head.
¿Por que no los dos?
Everywhere is filled with absolute dipshits. Frankly the bar for “gifted” should not be looked at a praise-worthy state of those deemed such, but rather as a scathing rebuke of the general idiocy rampant across humanity.
The bar for “gifted” is so low, people keep tripping over it. thump
In my country there is no advanced people and you can’t really fast forward years of education. I know a couple of famous cases, but is not something that happens all the time. My family treated me as a special kid for so many reasons, and being “smart” was one of them. Had to travel to the big capital city to study a bachelor in science, there was no way around it, because the expenses were mostly covered by this public university, thank god.
The first year was hard. I failed some classes even, and seriously questioned myself if I had it in me to get my degree. Education is just better in big cities with museums, cultural activities everyday, bookstores and libraries. Back in the town I grew up we only had the little municipal library, others existed but weren’t open to the public, and one or two libraries with best sellers. In my university we had one library with several levels just for the students, there were books and journals, maps, a digital library too, etc. You need to be curious, yes, but the environment to pique that curiosity is very important too.
For me, it was realizing that while I was smart, the shit level of schooling was more an impediment to me gaining the skills needed to continue excelling and I continue to be surrounded by absolute dipshits wherever I go.
In school, I didn’t have to study to pass and there was no real incentive to learn how to. This bit me when it came to university because the lectures didn’t cover everything that was to be tested on. Turns out, trying is a skill I never needed until then.
Then, in the workforce, I’m constantly exhausted dealing with people who are at best functionally literate and I have to cater to their understanding of literally everything. No desire to either understand the problem or fix the root cause, just make the thing do what they want right then.
school is kinda bullshit to be honest
The infuriating thing is that it doesn’t have to be. It’s been gutted, filleted, and various other words of a similar effect over the decades to the detriment of the entire populous
The system was always fundamentally flawed. It’s conformity training where math and reading lessons are there to buy legitimacy. I don’t recall anyone actually caring about the subjects for their own sake. It’s all about the grades, the test scores, how prestigious the college, degrees as job credentials. You could replace the subjects with memorizing random nonsense and the machine would still function
Did I write this last night in my sleep?
I just told this exact story to my oldest yesterday, almost verbatim. Freaky.
There are dozens of us!
Growing up in a town can be rough if you’re considered smart, and I’ve seen plenty posing as a lot dumber than they really are just so they fit in. The people that will not dumb themselves down tend to stand out more because of this.
I remember as a kid my mom used to scold me for being “arrogant” even though I had no intention of doing so. Apparently I was arrogant because I liked to talk about the interesting things I read in my books (had a talkative streak, probably the ADHD)
Just watching people do normal tasks is depressing, like watch people at self checkout, it’s painful. Surely not every person is experiencing self checkout for the first time but it hurts to watch. Same with watching other people use a computer (they get a pass on this one, not everyone has spent hours optimizing their workflow…fine. It’s fine.) Seriously, just watch people do stuff, it’s rough out there. These people can vote or run for office and I wouldn’t take those rights away, it’s just scary and it explains a lot.
If a kid gets good grades in E-12 the teachers tend to leave them alone.
If a kid is good at sports they get a coach who helps them with their schoolwork, social life, and other areas.
My program was called ‘college bound’ and the only thing we did was prep for the SATs.
I feel like Lemmy and Reddit are filled to the brim with these “lazy intellectuals”, I’m starting to wonder if any other sort of people even exist online
Idk if I’d even call it “intellectual” so much as “smug”. You find this all over. People self-sort into cliches. And then they get high on their own supply, insisting everyone outside their group is inferior.
You’ll find it over in the Joe Rogan-verse, among the TradCaths, in every ethnic enclave from Cuban expats to the Taiwanese Diaspora. As common among Marxists as Fascists. As common among Americans as Iranians. As common in the board rooms as the barber shops.
Broadly speaking - and particularly as people get older - we develop this entrenched worldview that results from accumulations of vast amounts of personal and peripheral information.
I call it pseudo-intellectualism. These people 100% think that they know exactly what they are talking about.
I am realizing I were only good at tests… So sad that I am one of the dumbest and just managed to fool some people with grades. But that does not help with real life.
