too smart for you

(This post is looooong, sorry about the spam)

While on the train today, I remembered something that really annoyed me.

It's something I remember now and again, and it never ceases to annoy me =__= I really need to get over it.

And then I realised something. Year 8 was the only year where I absolutely hated English. Okay, every other year I hated the public speaking part of English, but I hated English in year 8. I hated my two English teachers, one who couldn't give clear instructions and another who made patronising assumptions.

The me of now, who's used to lecturer and course evaluations, can point out so many things wrong with the teaching. The requirements of assessments were not explained, nor was it made known to us, the standards of assessments were not known, the teacher herself had a strong Indian accent that was almost incomprehensible, and yet she tells us "you neeed to prrrrronoooounce your words cleearrrly." She tells us to make a Shakespeare scrapbook and stick everything we find in it. When we do exactly that, she spent one entire period yelling at us for not doing what she asks. "Don't just stick whatever you find in it!" ...Umm, get your head checked for Alzheimer's, lady.

It was that stage of life when you become too smart for an adult's expectations. For the sake of simplicity, let's call the two teachers P and M. For a speech we did for M, after I had given mine, she sarcastically said, "I don't want you to come up here and read something you copied from the encyclopedia."

.....I'll take that as a compliment. I wrote every bloody word myself.

For an article I wrote into the scrapbook for P, remarked, "Have you any idea what you just copied?"

.....I DIDN'T COPY IT, YOU LOSERS.

I'm not sure if that's when I started hating my school. There's so many other factors too.

I wonder if year 9 was so much easier because my results went down. That's why I really liked the three years I spent in NSG. That's why I'm kind of sad I didn't do as well as I could have in that school, but NSG gave me so much freedom. It wasn't even the whole idea of "being in a school where everyone's really smart", because there's heaps of very intelligent high-achievers in St George, who do so much better than me at a lot of subjects.

It was that at NSG I could do as well or as badly as I wanted. It was a school where I could get the top mark in the grade (albeit only once =P) and have people come up to me and sincerely say, "Good work. Well done."

Maybe it's because people have matured by then, they know their worth isn't measured by their school marks. So what if you do better than me on one exam? I can do better than you on another. So what if you do better than me on all exams? I am happy in other ways.

I'm not articulate in these things. Maybe that's what I should have said back then. But for the younger me, I remember how claustrophobic that world was getting. I ran away to NSG, and maybe my HSC results did suffer, but it's a part of my life I treasure.

I treasure how Jones or even Robert-Smith would stand up in front of the year 11s and 12s and tell us to choose what we want to do, instead of as in other selective schools, tell us to not do something because we're not good enough to pull up the school marks.

It's those talks that allowed me to do 4U English, the only thing (and bio) that made me last through the HSC year. Looking back now, does HSC marks even matter any more? I got in the 70s for HSC chemistry, but high distinctions for university chem...and trust me, if you think shipwrecks and salvage is hell, in uni it's covered (in greater depth) in less than 10 lectures.

...I've really diverged from my original topic. I guess year 8 and 9 is that age when you're growing too fast for those around you to deal with it. I hated the patronisation. Maybe that's why one of my favourite manga of all time is Kodomo no Omacha (and Gakuen Alice, which is very similar), because neither of them assumes children are idiots.

It's a time when the world starts clearing for you. Suddenly the people you've always respected as being an absolute authority are flawed and unreasonable personalities. It's a time of rebellious scorn, because suddenly adults are no longer invincible in their superior knowledge, yet they continue to assume that role.

For many reasons, it's these feelings and thoughts that I don't want to forget.

Because I really hate fictional teenage main characters who has all the personality and intelligence of a beheaded boar. It screams condescension on so many levels and brings back these bad memories.

Because while at that age you might be ignorant and inexperienced, your morals and intelligence and personality are already settling. At that age, people have the mind to decide for themselves, and sometimes in that youthful optimism, they see the world clearer than those too engrossed with the material world.

Maybe that's my abiding principle for my characters.

Because though I hated P, I remember this she said - "intelligence comes with nature, knowledge comes with learning, and wisdom comes with experience".

By that age, teens are old enough to exercise their first gifts.

Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm also well aware that stupid teenagers exist and may well in fact be the larger majority. I also realise that sentence just now made absolutely no sense whatsoever, because larger = majority. But at least give the smart ones some credit.