Member-only story
How Smart You Are Is Relative
It depends on who else Is there.
I declared in second grade that I wanted to be a teacher and then a principal. That was in 1956–57.
Everyone thought that was fine.
When I took the National Teachers Exam proficiency test in my last year of college, I scored so high that I was confused about what such a score would mean for who else was going into teaching.
The teacher training coursework I’d taken throughout my college years seemed unrelated to what an actual classroom would be like. As it turned out, that was a fairly accurate assessment on my part; learning how to make lesson plans was not at all helpful in classroom management or what children of different ages and abilities would be like.
On top of that, my family background had no examples of women working in careers; they were all corporate housewives.[i] And I learned later, in 1971, when I started teaching, that women’s liberation and equal rights meant that fewer women as intellectually different (gifted) as I were going into teaching. Instead, many were going into higher paying and higher status careers with others who had the ability and potential to do well in such roles, people who might turn out to be “true peers.” There were indeed some, but you get my point here.
