Alceste
Vagabond
Here's more stuff I remember - the guidance counselor told me they don't ordinarily discuss the results of these tests with the students. I took Scholastic Aptitude Tests about every 2 years - that I remember because I really enjoyed them - but nobody ever got any "marks" for them. I liked that part in particular, because I hated comparing grades with other students. It made everybody uncomfortable. The guidance counselor had a record of all my scores, going back to grade 3. She said my score was in the 99th percentile on all of them except the one in grade 5, about the time my dad went off his meds and was sent off to the nuthouse, and at the same time I was first targeted for bullying by all the other students. She said I must have been having a tough time that year.
She said the reason she wanted to discuss it with me was to help me make a plan for university, since she thought I could get accepted anywhere, for anything. We looked at various scholarships, and she told me I should have been in an IB program, because it would help the process along. I was skeptical, since I perceived IB as more work for worse grades. At that time I was thoroughly jaded and skipping 60 % of my classes because I simply couldn't stand the boredom. The classes I went to I slept through, or wrote notes to my friends, or doodled. I know the exact figure because they had started tracking absences and sending a little report to parents that year, as well as implementing a robo-caller that would inform parents every time you missed a class. It said "This call is to inform you that your son or daughter was late or absent for one or more classes today." I heard that on the answering machine every day until my mom demanded they take our number off the system, so I've got no trouble recollecting it.
Anyway, I suppose it was a combination of all these factors that made the guidance counselor make an exception to the general rule of not revealing the scores on those tests to students.
I remember quite a lot from grade 5 to grade 12 because it was difficult. The excruciating boredom, my family situation at home, my social situation at school, and my gradual realization that I am trapped in a sick society; one that expected me to arbitrarily pick an extremely specialized life-long occupation at 16 and go into huge amounts of debt to achieve it. A paranoid society that expected me to be ruled by fear - fear of failure, fear of loneliness, fear of alienation, fear of death, fear of judgment, fear of poverty. An insane society that actually believed in the possibility of perpetual exponential growth in a world with finite resources and expected me to believe in it too. A catastrophic society that measures your value by the how much of the earth's resources you are able to consume in your short and pointless life. A delusional society where people abdicate their personal responsibility for their own evil deeds in the name of their gods and call it good.
Anyway, I remember much from that time because it was a pretty big deal.
