Things I Totally Misunderstood as a Kid

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt, "Things I Totally Misunderstood as a Kid," guarantees funny stories at http://www.longandshortreviews.com/miscellaneous-musings/wednesday-weekly-blogging-challenge-for-June-19-2024/ 

A lot of things in this world don't make sense to very young children. 

I've mentioned, in other posts, misunderstanding some of the songs in my parents' Jim Reeves record collection. One that I've not mentioned because it's soooo obvious, it's hardly even funny, was the song "How Can I Write on Paper." 

Could it be? Adults finally thought of writing a song about something that made sense to four-year-olds? I could relate to a song about someone who couldn't print fast enough to get what he wanted to say down on paper! 

I could relate to that song so well that I taught myself to type at age seven. I didn't get a typewriter until next Christmas, by which time I was eight. But I started learning the keyboard in grade two.

Later I joked about having learned to type in order to speed up the writing of all those penalty lines Mrs. Ratfink in grade two used to make me write. Mrs. Ratfink did keep me in the classroom writing penalty lines during several recess periods, which I did not actually mind, since the Weepy Weed was one of those horrible children who have one cold virus or another all winter long. But I was equally motivated to write brilliant stories that would delight the world. One story that I actually wrote down as a picture book, and illustrated, was a happy fantasy story in which a teacher who looked and talked like Mrs. Ratfink broke a leg and had to sit still and pay attention to what the children had to say. I liked that story a lot and didn't understand why no adult seemed to like it.

Something I totally misunderstood as an old enough kid that the story might actually be useful to some reader had to do with a buzz word of my youth, "self-esteem." 

In my teens I thought people who talked about kids' self-esteem actually wanted us to like ourselves as we were. I could see some possible problems with that, but I didn't find it all that hard to like myself. I was a nice, quiet child who left other people alone and would never have told someone else, even Mrs. Ratfink, that everything they wrote was "all wrong" because they didn't shape their letters exactly the way my grandmother did. If anything, I thought, I might have trouble with excessive self-acceptance, as in wanting to build strength, but not minding the flabby condition I was in enough to stick to an exercise routine at college.

Well, not during freshman year, anyway. By sophomore year I'd built up the courage to go out for long brisk walks. By junior year I'd added the self-awareness to understand that going to a noisy gym full of other people's stale breath, not to mention sweat, was a source of stress, whereas walking alone in nature parks was a source of renewal. I had no trouble sticking to a regimen of walks in nature parks.

But the fad in education, as it was being practced on us and taught to those of us who were doing any kind of teaching, tutoring, or counselling, was "We must always build up their self-esteem" even when "we" wanted "them" to be discontented with the current conditions of their selves, and improve themselves, discipline themselves, learn things, etc. 

It took a few years of paying attention to these people for me to work out a rule that may be useful to the young, at some schools, even today:

1. If you are actually telling people that you hate yourself, think you're no good, see no reason to live, or similar advertisements of negative self-esteem, then it is possible that someone who talks about your self-esteem actually does want you tofeel better about yourself as you are. Very few kids actually do this. If you are one of those kids, you might want to think about the reasons why. Are you saying these things because a friend, or someone you'd like to claim as a friend, or even a character in a movie, book, etc., said them? (Did it work for that person? Did adults give that person a break? Did someone attractive put an arm around the person?) Are you trying to get people to leave you alone? Do you, in fact, even when no one else is giving a hard time, seriously think you are worthless? 

2.If you are just doing what you believe is required of you, and some person, as it might be a teacher who feels entitled to see more evidence of "effort" on your part, starts blathering about your self-esteem? That person does not want you to feel better about yourself. You already do feel good enough about yourself to believe you can do an assignment, a job, etc., and do it as well as you believe it needs or deserves to be done. If the person talking about your self-esteem wated you to feel good about yourself, person would be talking about the mistakes you made in the assignment, job, or whateer. Since the person is trying to reduce your self-esteem and is not talking about mistakes you made, the chances are that you did a good job and the person is a hater who doesn't want to admit you did a good job. Another possibility is that you made a mistake, but the person is not competent to explain or correct the mistake. Your self-esteem is fine. The person is a bunghole. A person who has something to teach you would be talking about the job you did, and explaining things, as it might be, ""When your in-box is empty, cleaning out the file cabinet looks better than playing Minecraft on the office computer," or "Before doing a term paper on the approaching ice age, it would have been useful to have read some more recent theories about global climate change." 

My generation and the one before us said enough idiotic things about other people's self-esteem that anyone who paid attention to it is probably in a mental hospital now. By and large we said those things because we did not know what we were talking about. We wanted to say things like "Whatever gave you the idea that a college degree program that gave credit for video game studies would be worth the paper it was printed on?" and we thought it would at least sound trendier, and perhaps in some mystical way even help, to say instead "You ought to like yourself better!" 

Forgive us. It was the 1980s. We had inhaled a lot of mimeograph ink fumes.