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Mar. 11th, 2006 04:28 pmBack when i was younger, i formed a theory that the more intelligent someone is the more fucked up they tend to be. My reasons for this were based on a couple of people i know who got accelerated at school, but had the social skills of a brick. Or were just plain weird. Or were like me. And by intelligent i don't necessarily mean the people who were getting the highest marks either (high marks at school only proves the ability to study effectively :p The girl in my year who got 100 UAI was definitely not the most intelligent in the year) Then i got to uni and found out that its more than possible to be gifted yet relatively normal, so i forgot about my theory for quite a while. When i started going out with Matt i resurrected the theory based on how he told me about a couple of friends of his who had various physical allergies and mental disorders like manic-depression and yet were amazingly intelligent creative people.
And so it turns out that The Mentee From Hell (TMFH) is the way he is for a damn good reason. A couple of damn good reasons actually. Firstly, he is only 15. Secondly, because he's one of those freakishly gifted kids, he was homschooled by his mother for most of his life, because regular schools refused to accelerate him too far, arguing that he needed to be socialised with kids near his own age. And boy did she screw him over well. This case study she wrote up about him makes it apparent that for his whole life he has had no social interaction and has been taught repeatedly that he is smarter and better than normal people. Furthermore, having been exposed to so many tests during his lifetime, he likely gets validation by continually doing tests to keep proving how smart he is compared to the people around him. Overnight, he has turned from a target of ridicule into a one of sympathy. This brings me to one of my pet hates: acceleration of kids who are obviously emotionally/socially unready for it. People like this kid's mother don't seem to realise that they're not doing their kid any favours by making them so different from their peers. If it weren't for the fact that someoen found the case study about him on the Internet, everyone would just have assumed that he was a jerk and not worth anyone's time. And so he would then never get a chance to learn that interacting with people correctly can be its own reward, and that his current behaviour is going to make it very hard to bounce ideas off people since first he needs to get people willing to talk to him for long enough to listen.
And so it turns out that The Mentee From Hell (TMFH) is the way he is for a damn good reason. A couple of damn good reasons actually. Firstly, he is only 15. Secondly, because he's one of those freakishly gifted kids, he was homschooled by his mother for most of his life, because regular schools refused to accelerate him too far, arguing that he needed to be socialised with kids near his own age. And boy did she screw him over well. This case study she wrote up about him makes it apparent that for his whole life he has had no social interaction and has been taught repeatedly that he is smarter and better than normal people. Furthermore, having been exposed to so many tests during his lifetime, he likely gets validation by continually doing tests to keep proving how smart he is compared to the people around him. Overnight, he has turned from a target of ridicule into a one of sympathy. This brings me to one of my pet hates: acceleration of kids who are obviously emotionally/socially unready for it. People like this kid's mother don't seem to realise that they're not doing their kid any favours by making them so different from their peers. If it weren't for the fact that someoen found the case study about him on the Internet, everyone would just have assumed that he was a jerk and not worth anyone's time. And so he would then never get a chance to learn that interacting with people correctly can be its own reward, and that his current behaviour is going to make it very hard to bounce ideas off people since first he needs to get people willing to talk to him for long enough to listen.
