She sounds shockingly like me at that age, right down to the D in math. This is long, but I think it’s worth reading.
I was a gifted, artistic kid whose parents had high expectations and always did their best to further my education. I had so much promise. And yet I spent middle school slacking off, failing math, telling stupid lies and generally applying myself at mediocrity.
Why?
Because I’d never had anything of my own. I had a desperate need to assert my identity. For so long I had been pushed to succeed that it never felt like my own project. I’d heard so much about my potential that the only act that seemed to have free will left was to fail. My mom was buying me “how to get into the Ivy Leagues” books when I was 12. I felt way too pushed into things. Like I was always getting grades for someone else. As if someone else was living their life through me. And so actively negating all this brightness, all this potential and these expectations was the only way I felt like I could act that would be for myself. It was the only active choice I could see that asserted myself as a person and master of my life.
I always kind of always believed I couldn’t fail, and it was around that time that I realized that I could. I was amazed at all that possibility. I wanted to prove that I could do all kinds of stuff- including outright not succeed. I’d hide bad tests and steal my report cards from the mailbox- even though I knew I’d be found out in the end- because I could. It amazed me that I could be a “bad kid”. That I could just outright disregard consequences like that. It felt like power. And it felt good, too, to finally be free of the pressure to always get 4.00s, to become valedictorian, to never ever screw around even a little bit. Middle school seemed like the right time. Public schools treat their kids like a mix of small children and criminals. It’s humiliating, boring, and pretty pointless. It’s pretty hard thing for a smart independent thinker to buy in to.
And of course, the more I was nagged, the more I rebelled. The more dedicated I became to doing exactly the opposite of what people wanted me to do. The more people tried to push me into their mold, the more I sought to do anything but what they wanted me to. I’ve always been a pretty stubborn person. I’d cut off my nose to spite my face any old time. It’s not the pressure so much as pressure mixed with coercion that gets me. I still have problems not resenting my own brightness and all the expectations that come with that.
I became secretive because my mom asked a lot of questions. It made me feel like a non-human to have every trivial aspect of my life- from who I was fighting with to what I carried in my backpack- be considered a valid topic of public conversation, to be probed and dissected and hung out in all its glory. It made me feel like my life wasn’t my own. Like I didn’t even own my own friends, my own private time, my own right to my thoughts. If you had asked me a question about why I packed my backpack a certain way, I’d feel like I was being criticized, and that you were taking away my right to make small, arbitrary decisions, and that no corner of my life would be free from relentless probing. I’d wonder why the hell you thought it was any of your business if I carried unnecessary burdens or not, and probably conclude that you were on some weird power trip to micromanage my life and make me feel stripped bare whenever possible. Every time mom asked me a question, I felt invaded. It made me angry and helpless and eventually I started telling the easiest answers instead of the true ones because that would usually stop the onslaught of questions, and still protect what I considered “mine”.
I had a hard time socially because middle school children are stupid and annoying. While I was pondering the effects of social policy, discovering Communism and trying to figure out the meaning of life, my peers were gossiping, spreading rumors and acting like the vacuous and vicious hormone crazed children that they were. People spread horrible rumors about me- like that I had STDs. People threw rocks at me. The administration seemed to accept bullying as a normal part of human development. There wasn’t any coherent geek culture. I still thought I wanted to be one of the popular people even though I knew I was made out of different cloth than them. So I just felt left out and alone. I became withdrawn and depressed. When forced to interact, I acted hostile towards people because it was the only kind of interaction that didn’t leave me both hurt and feeling stupid.
Middle school was obviously a hard time for me. Then everything got better.
In High School, I discovered punk rock, which is actually a fairly thoughtful lifestyle. It gave me a healthy outlet for all these heavy thoughts I had about world politics and the like and all the emotions they stirred up in my immature mind. It’s a very ethical and political movement that gave me the framework for all these thoughts that I was missing. It also made me feel like I belonged to something, and the Do-It-Yourself ethic inspired me to take more active, positive steps in my life and my community. I began to take on my own creative and ambitious projects directly as a result of punk rock values. But I still got to be rebellious and reject the parts of society that bugged me- that’s what punk rock is all about. Plus, I had a hell of a lot of fun skulking around punk rocks shows as a teenager, and those are some of my fondest memories of teenagerdom.
Punk rock, combined with a wider selection of more mature people found in high school, taught me that there were things to do besides try to fit into the mainstream or just sit around negating everything. I discovered geeks and drama people and all the fun loving and thoughtful freaks that populated my large diverse high school. I began to build up my own identity apart from what people expected of me. People started liking me. I got attention from boys. I stopped trying to dress like the cool people and started dressing myself in creative and unique ways. I realized it was okay, even cool to be different. I was never Miss Popular, but I was a small scale social superstar. I’ve never had any social troubles since, and have a smallish circle of very close friends- many from high school- and have no problems getting the boys.
Academically, I promised myself I wouldn’t even try for valedictorian. I semi-purposefully futzed a few classes because I didn’t even want to begin with the pressure of having this 4.00 that I’d always have to worry about for four years. I focused more on art and after-school activities than my classes. I was active in drama and the poetry magazine, along with a myriad of my own projects. But I never applied myself that hard academically. Not that I did terribly (I graduated with a 3.63- just barely didn’t make the top ten percent of my class) but good enough to get into the only college I was interested in (which I had decided on as like a sophomore, and which was a great choice). I did pretty stellar on tests, and got 5s on a couple AP exams. I was part of the “other”, non-preppy intellectual elite. We were the presidents of the art clubs, the ones that read Russian novels in class just to be punks, the ones that would hijack classroom discussions into the realm of politics and philosophy and all the stuff we’d read about and discuss over lunch to each other and with our teachers after school. If class was boring, we’d draw, talk about our own things, read other books under our desks or work on any of the creative random projects we had going on. We weren’t the preppy 4.00 people. We were edgy. We had sex and did drugs (but shockingly responsibly). We came to class bleary eyed after late punk rock shows. We read existentiasm and wore armbands to school to protest wars, and dressed in lots of black leather and spikes and miniskirts. But we held our own intellectually and honestly I think we got more respect from our teachers.
I never did get the hang of math. Something about algebra in all its forms eludes me still. I know I start with one number and I have to get another number and I have to do some kind of voodoo in between, but I never quite grasped what I was supposed to do and why it was so important to get that number exactly right. Math was a struggle (except geometry, which I got an A in) and I barely passed the mandatory two years. It involved lots of cheating on homework and crying over tests. But I passed my last math class Jr. year and realized I never had to take math again, so it was okay.
In college I did great. As in completely fantastically. I went to a school without grades, and that freed me from having to worry about stupid arbitrary numbers all the time and focus on what I was learning. Free from naggings and worries about “will this look good on my college application”, I started to take control of my education and delight in my studies. I felt like I was finally following my interests, for my benefit, with only myself to answer to. I talked to my mom all about what I was studying and what I was writing but I never let her see my evaluations. I was perfectly capable of providing enough pressure of my own to succeed. I’d often go way beyond expectations (another thing that I think was encouraged by not having grades) The only problem is I had a hard time getting close to teachers, because I was afraid of all their expectations. But anyway, I graduated with honor in my college and my department.
I’m still prone to depression and I’m still very secretive around my family. I still feel defensive and probed when I come home and my mom unleashes the onslaught of questions about what I consider the most private and personal little bits of my life. But we don’t scream and fight anymore and we get along pretty well as adults.
So I don’t have any good answers. I just waited things out until high school. Counseling might have helped my depression. Some kind of change in schooling might have helped me get through those years a little less painfully, but home schooling a might have made me feel smothered. An intellectually advanced (which, for a bright kid, means not boring) magnet school that enourages kids to follow their interests might have helped, even though it seems counter-intuitive. But then that might have been even more pressure. I don’t know. I wish I could have done the whole “gradeless” thing in middle school and high school, but I don’t know of any programs that do that. What encouragement I did get to persue my art and follow my own personal interests did help a lot. I had a few extra-curricular classes with other bright, like minded people and those were great as long as the “this will look good on your college application” aspect was avoided. You might also look into some “unschooling” advocates that focus on the teen years for ideas. Unschoolers are usually bright kids that just get sick of the indignity of having to raise their hands to go to the bathroom and the total lack of challenge most schools present. Even if unschooling isn’t a good idea on the whole, it helped me to know there were alternatives, and generally that I wasn’t going to be stuck in all this stupidity forever.
Good luck! I hope I offered you some insight and maybe some good advice. I’m sorry you have to go through this. I’m certainly glad I never had to be my parents.