Eons ago when I was taking my first engineering class, my instructor was an older gentleman with a Slavic name and accent. My name was of Polish origin, and while it lacked a z,* j*, or ski, it was recognizable by a fellow eastern European for what it was. Ergo, I had an instant rapport with him.
In one of the first class sessions, he asked a question, and I knew the answer. He decided then and there that I was some sort of genius, and my presence in the classroom was merely a formality in order to get the diploma. (I wish.) From that day forward, every time he asked a difficult question, he gave me a look that said “I know that you know the answer, so I’m not going to waste our time by calling on you. Let’s see what these other schmucks think.”
The fact is, I struggled in the class just to get my B. Still, he assumed the best. Two years later, he was covering another prof’s class, and he treated me the same way. I got a lot of mileage out of one correct response.
I’ve always had good grades in English and French. But that fat horse faced twat Mrs. Whatshername in grade 8 english hated my guts for reasons I never could figure out. My grade slid from a B to a D in her lit class. My parents gave me a bit of a hard time to get my grades up all year. I managed to finish off the year with a C in english lit.
The next year, I had a new English teacher. My grade was back to a B+ in the first semester. No problem. My parents were relieved. However, my French grades dropped to a D. Guess who my French teacher was that year? Just guess?
My parents immediately recognized the pattern and didn’t pressure me as much as they had in the previous year.
I acquired an unearned reputation on my first day of a freshman philosophy class. When the professor saw my name, he recognized my surname [let’s say it was “McGillicuddy”), and he asked me, “Are you any relation to Ignatz McGillicuddy [pseudonymous name for my dad]?” I answered “Yes, Ignatz McGillicuddy is my father.”
As it turned out, my father, who had graduated from the same university twenty years earlier, was a living legend in the philosophy department. Being related to him gave me an intellectual glow that I probably could never have achieved on my own. Unfortunately, this also put me on the spot to produce brilliant term papers, since I had some large shoes to fill.
pinkfreud, my poor sister had to deal with a similar fate by following me. Not that I was a genius or anything, but I did well enough in school - mostly As and Bs. She, who was a year behind me, struggled to get Cs and Ds. It got easier on her when we went to high school - I was in the college prep track and she was in the business track, so we never had the same teachers.
Well, I did end up minoring in philosophy. The easy-A aspect was the main reason. Somehow it never occurred to me that the classified ads aren’t filled with openings for entry-level philosophers.
My parents sent us to a private school in Mexico so to our new neighbors we were nasty little snobs of course. It cost a whopping fifty dollars a month to send us to that private school and we wouldn’t have known snobbishness if it bit us.
I managed to speak more or less proper english, was prepared for class, and shy, so I was that know-it-all, superior, goody two shoes. Being snubbed did help I suppose. I did fairly well academically, ranked third in my class, and my teachers thought I walked on water. My little sister is smart as a whip but had serious trouble reading and writing. Most of her teachers figured that she and I were not a matched set and treated her as an individual pretty quickly.
Except in art class. The first and only discipline referral my little sister received was after enduring a month of the art teacher unfavorably comparing her work to mine in front of the entire class. This was doubly unfair because I’d been studying art for years before her classes and went on to major in art. My sister finally snapped and called the teacher an alcoholic cow (true on both counts) and asked if it was being blind or stupid that made it impossible to realize she wasn’t the same person as her sister. I was so proud of her.
In one of the high schools I went to in upsate NY in the early 1980’s the fact that I was a guy who was quiet, liked to read and did well in school indicated to some of the other guys that I had to be homosexual.
A couple of years later I graduated from a different high school as did my younger brother. We had the same English teacher two years apart. I did OK in his class, I probably got a B one semester and an A the other, or something like that.
My brother claims that in the teacher’s memory I was some kind of brilliant, ideal student…made his year with him hell. Hee hee!
I was fairly consistently told by nearly every teacher I had from seventh grade until I graduated that I “wasn’t working up to my full potential.” I still don’t quite understand how they saw any potential in the slacker, bitter, unhappy, antisocial kid who never did her homework, ever.
Other than the teachers who’d had my older sister. She was a golden girl - involved in all sorts of clubs, academic overachiever, etc. I was, of course, just a miniature replica of her. :rolleyes:
I got much of the same, NinjaChick. I did consistently improve up to my graduation, but everyone seems to think that I can do better. And, really, I can. Because I’m a reasonably intelligent fellow who happened to be… slacker, bitter, unhappy, not so much antisocial, but never popular.
I can tell you from working at a middle school after-school program during my first year of college (this past year) that a smart kid - even a slacker smart kid - is easy to spot. Everything from the questions they ask, to the answers they give, to the wisecracks they make are indicators. The smart kids stand out. So it may be that the teachers picked up the fact that, although you slacked off, you were no dummy.
I myself had a bit of an undeserved reputation for being a “know it all” who always thought he was right - mostly because I’ll only argue with someone when I’m reasonably certain that I’m correct. Add to that a heaping helping of stubborness, and that reputation stuck with me.
A little background: when I was 30, I decided I wanted to go into medicine. I had previously taken a couple of years’ college, mostly in language studies. And even that was 7+ years in the past. No chemistry, biochem, physics; all of which seemed to be necessary even to qualify for med school.
I did have a long history of reading popular science and science fiction, though. Thank you, Isaac Asimov!
The first day of Chem 1, the professor passed out a baseline quiz to estimate the extent of his class’s knowledge. A lot of it seemed familiar: Which of these elements is most similar to carbon? Well, silicon-based life was at theoretically possible, so go with that… How much does a mole of lithium (atomic weight given) weigh? Oooh… there was that essay on Avogadro in that paperback book with a giant ice cube on the cover… it was funny, I remembered well… etc.
Ok, without previous courses in the subject and years out of school, I was still impressive. And a bit of a smartass. I embarked on a four-year path of playing with the subject to keep it fun. To do this, I naturally had to listen very carefully, get a grasp on the material, then crack jokes and draw cartoons about it. I was the class clown and the class brain at once.
It all came together quite well. I finished the degree and was accepted to med school.
Ha! Try having 6 brothers & sisters all go through the same school system as you did, all of them ahead of you! There wasn’t a year I didn’t have at least one teacher who remembered a sibling, either kindly or with venom. And in high school the asst. principal had had most of my sibs in his economics classes back when he was still teaching, so had it out for me from the moment I walked through the door. I mostly blame my brother Bob. He was/is smart, irreverent, a trouble maker, and cruel. I still avoid him. Also, in high school a lot of the young new teachers were friends of my older sibs. Hard to take a teacher seriously when you knew them as a pimple faced brat sneaking smokes behind your garage.
I was the kid who knew all the answers in any math class. I’d read the entire text book in the first week or two, then coast through the rest of the course. The teacher never called on me unless no one else knew the answer, and I always did (even sometimes when the teacher didn’t). This was especially awkward in 8th grade, when I had a **huge **crush on my math teacher.
Art class was a problem because everyone knew that both my parents were artists. I was always being accused of getting my homework done by my parents, even though they never really taught me how to do anything. But things got easier in college, since no one knew about my parents. In a Color Theory class, at the beginning of each class we had to put our homework assignments on the wall, anonymously, so the class could critique them. Whenever she got to mine, the instructor would say, “Well, we all know who did this one.”
My last two summers of college I worked on the ore boats on the Great Lakes. The summers before that I had worked in a tool shop and a foundry and had built up my upper body strength. I had always had a fascination with ships, so I knew a lot about them even before I sailed the first season. In my second season, I began with that much more knowledge and we had a series of deckhands (and one deckwatch) who were stumblebums and slackers, making even my most mediocre efforts look spectacular.
The summer after my second season on the lakes, my younger brother got a job on the boats and was assigned to the same boat I had last worked. So, he comes aboard, a skinny kid with no work experience and no real knowledge of the routine or the rules and makes the mistake of admitting he was my brother. For the rest of the summer, he was constantly compared (unfavorably) to me. I know darned well he was a hard worker, but my reputation had achieved a glow that he could never attain.
Mine is of a decidedly more sorid sort, and most underserved.
So I moved from Boston to California two months ago. My boyfriend is moving out at some point in the near future. Some of our mutual friends don’t see what we see in each other. He was talking to a group of them. One asked him why he was willing to drop everything and move cross country to be with me. He started with the truth: we’re in love, we feel this relationship is worth it, we’re happier together than we’ve ever been … etc. They didn’t see this to be a valid reason to move, because they’re all unromantic clods. He’s normally very gentlemanly and doesn’t devulge anything private or romantic about our relationship to anyone, so when he said “Plus you can’t imagine what that girl can do with her tongue and an ice cube” they were all shocked. It was a total lie, but I’m reasonably sure that everyone I know on the east coast has heard this story by now. I’m waiting for someone to say something to me about it when I’m back in Boston visiting him at the end of the month. This was not the reputation I wanted … although I’m mildly amused. Mildly.
Dude, that’s not a lie, it’s a challenge. Perhaps it’s time for you to find out what exactly you can do with your tongue and an ice cube. Mix margaritas, make very small portions of ice cream, perhaps a miniature sculpture of a swan, the possibilities are endless. I suppose if you asked your BF, he might come up with more suggestions.
At work, I have an undeserved reputation as being very clever.
New vending machines were recently installed in the break room. (They’re the kind you put a quarter into and then turn the knob.) I overheard somebody saying that they wanted a handful of peanut M&Ms, but didn’t seem to have a quarter, only a dollar.
So I told him to put the dollar in the pop machine, then hit coin return. Clink. Clink clink. Clink. Four quarters!
He looked at me in pure awe, as if I had discovered immortality.
I apparently impressed the chair of our department during my oral qualifying exam. (That’s the exam you have to take after your first year of grad school. Technically, if you fail it you get booted, but really they use it to probe for holes in your preparation, and the worst is they’ll make you take or retake some classes, and retake the exam the next year.) I’d forgotten a simple formula so I quickly derived it. This feat is much less impressive if you know that I was taking a class in that subject that semester, so a) it’s somewhat pathetic that I didn’t know the formula off the top of my head, and b) I’d seen the derivation fairly recently, so it was no big deal to rederive it. But, mysteriously, he apparently thinks of me as a person who can think quickly on my feet rather than as a dolt who forgets simple formulae.
On a considerably less serious note, one of the unofficial mottos at games club is “Get Podkayne, she’s winning.” This meme persists even though one of its main propagators admitted shamelessly that she uses it to get people to gang up on me while she perpetrates her fiendish strategies unmolested. Some people still insist that I “always” win, which it is obviously untrue. I toyed with the idea of keeping track of how often I won in 2-player games, 3-player games, 4-player games, etc. to see if the percentages were higher than 50%, 33%, 25%, etc., but I thought that might have the appearance of being obsessive, egotistical, or both. And, hey, it might turn out that my percentages are lower, and, I don’t want to ruin my rep.
