Past Me Scares Me

   Past me scares me. Not just because I flipped my lid often and sometimes beat up girls for no reason. Crap, that sounds horrible. No, though, I'm (mostly?) over that. Looking through my old education files, I found a lot dealing with... my education, in those files. Yeah. Not just being taught, you understand, but learning. Looking through my education files, I learned how I learned.

   Was I really so paralyzed? Now I can (hopefully) catch my own awkwardnesses (how's my slouching? Is it really all that bad? It doesn't it make me look like I have special needs, does it? Oh, man. I don't do that thing where I curl my hands, do I?) but back then I must have been blind. Maybe Mrs. Rigg-Anderson's anecdote about the student who went around imitating a robot all the time with his parents thinking that it'd be perfectly abnormal for a second grader to do anything else, maybe her telling that was somehow triggered by something I did (it was Rigg-Anderson, right?) Either way, yes, I did no that acting like a robot was not "just a second-grade thing."

   Past me also scares me because of, in spite of all that, how bright I (once again, allegedly) was. I've seen my IQ scores from back then, and they aren't all that high. Well, not as high as you'd expect from such a student. I've also seen my drawings from back then, which weren't very good either, but I was supposed to be a pretty good artist so maybe they've just got different standards for kids. (I've heard that.) Self-esteem is important...

   I've also seen my IEPs. Well, that's where I mostly retrieved the IQ information from, so, yes, I've seen those. Yeah, let's talk about that. The other parts of my IEP, the parts of my Individualized Education Plan that actually planned my education. This is it, this is the heart of it. Why I'm afraid of who I was.

   They had set goals for me, like, Eric will learn to make eye contact where appropriate, 80% of the time. I don't recall being trained like that. I don't even recall learning to make eye contact until I decided to do so on my own. Past me scares me because it's weird to think of my strings being pulled by unseen puppet masters throughout my schooling. I've clearly made improvements in those areas, but the implications as to how that happened are kind of disturbing. Most of my knowledge of IEPs came from being required to attend the personal parent/teacher conferences where they talked about me. I was totally oblivious otherwise. It's not like I knew that other kids didn't have little rituals they did with their teacher whenever they overheated.