Prodigy or prodigal? What would psychologists have thought of a young Tim?
You can’t swing a cat today without hitting a new worrisome mental affliction infecting our youth. We even have “anxiety anxiety,” which is the fear that we are assigning too many mental afflictions on our youth to the point that it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
It’s bad to be dim, of course, but now it’s even bad to be too bright. The Economist recently wrote about “the curse of genius” and detailed the travails of gifted children.
There was a time, briefly, when my own elementary school teachers were convinced that I was a genius, sure to go on to receive a doctorate at some Ivy League school and put my community on the map as the small town that was home to a national hero of great accomplishment and intellect.
It was all a misunderstanding, obviously.
When I was in second grade we, like every public school classroom, had a full set of the World Book Encyclopedia, which was essentially an Encyclopedia Brittanica dumbed down so that it could be understood by Americans who, in the ’60s, were fully entertained by a TV show about a talking horse.
Our edition had cream and forest-green hardback covers and included, I guess, around 20 volumes — one for each letter, except for the loser letters like J and K that had to share a single volume.
I don’t know what first lured me to the World Book Encyclopedia, but every day I would go over to the shelf, pull out a volume and return to my desk. After a while, Mrs. Keiter — a wonderful and inspiring teacher — began to take notice.
Before long she began calling in other teachers to watch. Even though she held her hand over her mouth I could still hear her whisper, “That’s Timmy Rowland. He’s reading the World Book Encyclopedia in his spare time.”
What Mrs. Keiter didn’t know, what no one knew until now, is that I always went for the same volume, the one that covered the letter D. There, I went straight to the entry on “Donuts.” A scan of the page is still burned into my memory: three columns of text interrupted with a large photo of a smiling baker dressed in white in front of a piece of gleaming stainless steel machinery from which emerged a conveyor of donuts.
For whatever reason, it was fascinating to me. Day after day it was the same. I’d grab Volume D of the World Book and stare at the entry on donuts the way your dog watches you make his breakfast. I guess I just liked donuts.
I believe today that the inclusion of the World Book on the shelves of a second-grade classroom was aspirational, and that much of it would be over the heads of second-graders. I remember “reading” the donut entry, or trying to, and I think I had the first three paragraphs pretty well deciphered, but I honestly can’t say that I ever made it all the way to the end.
The teachers did not know that, I guess, and watched wide-eyed as I supposedly consumed the knowledge of mankind. But even as a 7-year-old my conscience began to weigh on me. I understood I was being watched as teachers waited for me to grab the World Book, much the way fair-goers waited for a new word to appear in Charlotte the spider’s web.
I tried to fulfill their expectations by reading other entries, but nothing else interested me. Dominoes, Dow Jones, Dominican Republic — pretty soon I’d be bored and go right back to the donuts. I feared that I would be revealed as a fraud — like someone would ask me about the works of Dostoevsky and I’d have nothing.
If there was any outcome of this I don’t remember it, but I know in today’s hyper-vigilant world of mental maladies they’d have hauled me away as an obsessive-convulsive.
Good thing my genius peaked early.
When a headline worms its way into your brain, you have to take a second look
Tim Rowland is a Herald-Mail columnist.
This article originally appeared on The Herald-Mail: Maybe we're assigning too many mental issues to our youth
