Mason  🏃‍♂️ ✂️

Variations on "intelligence isn't good for much" or "other things are more important than intelligence". I wasn't young enough to be fooled by that. But unfortunately, I was young enough to try to reverse the stupidity and believe that intelligence must be all that mattered.

Eliezer's teen rebellion, folks

I don’t want to derail your thread, but the honest answer is politics. I had a great deal of complex theory pushed on me long before I had context for it or any understanding of the world outside its confines, with poor results. No child should feel compelled to hate themselves.

This is one of the reasons I think kids should be allowed to be kids. It does them no good to be expected to be so far ahead of their peers just for the sake of being ahead

It’s a suspicious, inconvenient, or outright wrong thing to progress faster than the children around you.

I got to adulthood before I realized that “Assign Patrick busywork as punishment for reading ahead” was a *classroom management technique.*

My math teacher told me, "Some kids just aren't good at math". He neglected to see that I sat in the corner to avoid the other kids, avoid being called on, and be the first to leave. Oh, and he was my math teacher from 7th grade until 12th.

In my early 20's I realized how impactful this one person may have been. So I went and bought some math books. Then watched a ton of math videos (thanks @3blue1brown ) and got excited by what I could do with math. So uh, now I'm getting a degree in math.

To be honest, I don't really think I have any ability to trace present-day effects to unique causes in childhood conversations with adults.

I'm not asking for a present-day effect, I'm asking for an effect notable enough to be remembered in the present day