It’s definitely not 1-1, but while my neuroatypicality doesn’t overlap much at all with either autism or adhd, that doesn’t make it not neuroatypicality, and I’ve got that in some pretty big ways.
(And it’s atypical enough that the collection doesn’t have a name. So that’s fun.)
Former public school edumacator-type here. Definitely a strong correlation there. The vast majority of “gifted / talented students” I assessed were in some variety of neurodiversity. And since I had to meet with their parents often, I also noticed strong neuro-d traits in them, too. The kid apple doesn’t fall far from the neuro-d tree.
“We didn’t have no brain problems back in MY day!” Uh-huh, so that can’t possibly explain why Grandpa knows everything there is to know about stamps and ate the same seven meals every week for 50 years.
Ayup. 3 generations of autism, and probably more if we could go back and check my dead grandfather.
Almost makes one think that autism isn’t a disorder so much as a perfectly normal human trait that society treats as abnormal much as we used to with left handedness.
Dorothy is likely using it here as a “safe way” to refer to autistic burnout due to internalized ableism she has yet to really confront. I did the same when I was formerly repulsed by the label.
Dorothy was clearly identified as gifted. Dina knew herself to be autistic and was identified only as ESL. I’m not sure on what basis Dina would be offended by Dorothy referring to herself as a former gifted kid. I certainly don’t have a problem with it, as a former gifted kid myself.
Gifted is a seperate diagnosis (though plenty of Autistic kids are also gifted).
When I was in school, Gifted meant you had an IQ of at least 130. We were in a different class all day long, with only other gifted kids, and a teacher with the additional credential of “Special Ed: Gifted”. Because, gifted kids legit learn differently from average kids.
Now / in the US, you typically get into a gifted program by getting good grades, and the diagnosis doesn’t typically get you anything that fancy — way closer to pulling you out of class for 30min of worksheets, as Walky describes.
And in many parts of the US “Gifted and Talented” programs were cut to provide services to meet other IEP needs. At least in the school districts where I taught. LD/Gifted certificates in the late 1900’s, now long out of date.
I did that back before Gifted and Talented programs were a thing (and then did the programs once they were). I assume people still do it from time to time?
I think one reason some students who meet “gifted” criteria might not skip a grade is social skills. For some students, especially 2E (gifted & neurodiverse), social skills might already be a challenge in a way that might just be worse if they skipped a grade.
This. I was definitely better off staying with my age cohort.
Back in my day, at my school anyway, what you got if you blew through the standard schoolwork and got bored is that once in a while a teacher would notice and offer extra material that was more challenging. I don’t think we had any formal program, just caring teachers. My thanks to them all!
One other thing, that I may have mentioned before, was the “SRA box”. In one class, if you finished the seatwork early, you could get other interesting stuff to work on, right there in the classroom. It was self-paced enrichment, in effect. I liked that a lot and I think it was good for me.
Schools don’t get paid to let kids skip grades. As such, letting kids skip grades costs them money, because they’re letting those kids go at least one year early.
My school system claimed they weren’t letting me skip grades because my lack of friends in my grade clearly showed I lacked social skills. I lacked friends in my grade because I kept blowing the curve.
Note that kids being able to “blow the curve” shows a critical lack of understanding of statistics on the part of the teaching staff. The correct approach to curving grades would be to compute the score histogram.
How exactly to apply that’s a subject for some debate, but it’s probably more important to note that most teachers wouldn’t want to go to that effort, and would just like a better approach to dealing with curve breakers.
Fortunately, there is one, and it’s really simple to do. “Throw out the outliers” is the statistics principle. The officially correct way to do this would be to compute the standard deviation of grades and not include any that are more than two standard deviations from the mean in the curve. That is, when the mean was 62% and the standard deviation was 12%, that kid who got 100%? They still get an A, but that’s not the top of the curve. Nor is it the second highest grade at 89%. The top of the curve is that guy who got an 83%. Compute the curve without those two really high grades in the list.
But a lot of teachers would prefer to just eyeball it, and that’s fine also. In that case, the curve might be +11% instead of +17%.
Unfortunately, the kids might be clever enough to recognize that the teacher should’ve ignored two grades when computing the curve instead of just one and blame the teachers. So the teachers instead do curves entirely wrong and just blame the students who probably shouldn’t have been in their class in the first place for them not doing their jobs well.
Honestly have never known a teacher to actually grade on a curve. Mostly just flat scores, sometimes with a boost based on a curve in advanced classes.
Also, another reason (also connected to funding) why schools might not want a student to skip a grade– standardized test scores. If you’re bringing up the average for your grade, but presumably wouldn’t be bringing up the average quite as much if you skipped a grade, what makes the school look better?
I never graded on a curve, but I did vaguely use one a a check on myself, to make sure I was teaching the material correctly and was making the tests appropriately challenging.
I mean, I didn’t plot them out or anything, but I could at least ask questions like “Were there more As than Fs?” and so forth.
When I was in elementary school, the gifted program– called PACE– was like that, where kids would be pulled from class for chucks of time. At one point, I was in a group being tested on if we would qualify for PACE, and it was in the format of these sort-of games. I was doing well at them at first, but I started thinking, “My friends who are in PACE come back with more math worksheets; meanwhile, enough of the class goes that when they’re gone, the teacher mainly uses the time to read aloud to the rest of us. Why, exactly, would I want to be in the math worksheets group over the story time group?” So I just stopped answering things.
All these responses really make me miss the congregated Gifted classes (Canadian public school in the 1990s). We almost never did worksheets — we were skipping the horrible drills that our brains pretty much didn’t need. We did experiments, and read books, and wrote stories and poems, and built little cars to run down ramps, and solved problems like how to drop eggs off the roof without breaking them. So cool!
And then the budget got cut.
The dumbest idea that was floated at the time was that the gifted kids would teach the remedial kids. Can you imagine? Just because you do well on IQ tests does not make you patient or deft or skillful at teaching! Teaching special ed involves, like, actual skills. So insulting to think that clever 10yr olds could do it.
Anyway then I came to the US, in a poverty-stricken rural community, where everyone was in the same class and the 6th Graders next to me couldn’t read. Wacky times.
Wait, seriously? I got into gifted programs in the 70s (in the U) by, yes, having strong IQ tests at 4.
I got kicked- out- of gifted programs for 2 years by having poor standardized tests (because of my learning disability; result was that I had perfect unfinished tests; of course, learning disabilities are universally another form of neuro-diversity).
Then I got into an entire gifted -school- (one of the best in NYC) due to a standardized test, which, at least when you take it without prep, does more or less correlate to an IQ test much more to the constellation of abilities and work that get you good grades.
So the idea that a school would take their strong performers regardless of whether their skills were due to hard work vs IQ and throw them into a class together because they are too good at school (as opposed to making a special class for fast learners and letting them learn together so they don’t get bored and spend half the class reading under the desk [lolno they’ll do that anyway] and make dooles [ditto]) seems bizarre. The students that aren’t getting bored and are getting good grades because they’re good where they are are doing fine; don’t mess with that.
It’s possible that it’s not 1-1. That said, what *is* autism?
It’s basically a bucket to put people who don’t “communicate well” with normal people. They’ve identified a bunch of traits that are strongly associated with communication difficulties and defined the syndrome based on being too far from “normal” on those traits.
The gifted program I was in actually tested for some of those traits. They weren’t officially looking for autistic kids, and they were certainly only testing for the “too much” side of that delta rather than looking for “too deviant’ like the normal autism test does. But it wasn’t particularly surprising that basically every kid in that program was on spectrum, given that aspect of the testing. Also, some of the other testing was looking for ‘out of the box thinkers’, and that’s also pretty highly correlated with autism (but definitely not 1-1.)
To be clear, I have known a bunch of gifted people who didn’t really seem like they were autistic. They didn’t get into that gifted program, but in some cases that was at least partially due to the fact they didn’t go to that school system. But what i find interesting about that group of people is over half of them have since admitted that they were autistic the whole time, they just mask well.
I should also point out that the gifted program I went to wasn’t just about getting additional math worksheets. I don’t think we actually got any additional math worksheets. If they gave us math worksheets with actual interesting problems, that would’ve been cool. But our gifted program was mostly about stuff that wasn’t in the general curriculum at all, and the stuff that was came in much later. For example, we were learning foreign languages in elementary school, which didn’t start for regular school for us until most of the way through junior high school.
Dunno if it’ll confirm it (tho i imagine like 50% of the cast is either lgbt, neurotypical or both) but i imagine there were some ‘gifted kid programs’ or so tho idk if they’d still call it that these days to make the ‘average’/students with lower than average grades feel worse but i know in high school at least htere were some AP/IB classes but i odn’t think it wasnecessarily forced on anyone (Tho i’m sure a handful of ppl signed up for it b/c helps with early college prep or just looks good on ur record or so)
Dorothy’s parents are either late Gen X or early Millennial at this point. Maybe she learned it from one of them, who got their own “gifted kid” education in their time.
I hear “gifted kid” more often these days than I did growing up– my school had a gifted program, but it wasn’t called that, and I, at least, didn’t exactly think of it that way (more, these kids are good at school AND have parents who push them pretty hard). Now “gifted kid” shows up in online spaces more, often in the discussion of burnout, from what I’ve seen.
When I was a kid they called it the “Accelerant Class,” basically where all the kids who were learning fast enough that reigning it in for the rest would hold them back, so they got put in another class and got to read the more advanced books. And yes, there was some burnout that thinned the herd – I didn’t last long in the Accelerant classes, just because the homework got to be a burden. Of course, nowadays the kids aren’t being given homework apparently because they realised during the pandemic that it’s just busywork that doesn’t actually reinforce the lessons and just creates more work for teachers.
Haven’t most mainstream education systems just been herding kids from kindergarten through graduation whether they’re absorbing the material or not, ever since “no child left behind” passed? And the lockdown years only exasperated the problem?
At least that’s the impression I’ve been getting from lurking on /r/teachers… Kids know they don’t have to do anything but play with their phones all day and they’ll still pass, or at worst they’ll have to take a six week summer school course.
Moving masses through the program in lockstep is what’s rewarded now, so, yeah?
It’s being inflicted on colleges too, where the Legislature calls it “finishing on time” or some such malarkey. Me, I needed nine semesters to finish my B.S. but I turned out so well that the school hired me.
It’s very hard to hold a student back (in K-5, at least) unless a parent wants it as well. And at the same time, there was a law here for a few years saying if kids weren’t reading at a certain level by 3rd grade, they would be held back– but I don’t know if that was ever actually enforced; there were a lot of complicating factors and then they got rid of it. Now there are pushes to get rid of honors classes and such– there are a lot of downsides to tracking, but the proposed move to have secondary teachers teaching three different levels within each class doesn’t seem realistic either.
besides the historical widespread adoption of IQ tests and later derived aptitude tests in the US having very racist motivations, the unspoken aim of identifying “gifted individuals” in our country’s education system for special treatment has always been the product of elitist and conservative sentiments,
i.e. the underlying belief that “the freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use” (Fredrik Hayek)
OTOH, some people are either more prepared or more capable at school than others, and removing access to advanced education from public schools only results in gatekeeping students who would be able to flourish with more challenging curriculum than the standard, but can’t afford private tutors.
Is why I like video games better than US schools, you can advance hands on and other learning without a class directing you at a “one-size-fits-all” pace XD
My interpretation (as someone who very much enjoys leveling up): Video game progress is self-directed, based on the time and effort you put in. You move on to greater challenges at your own pace, so you can choose to grind when you think you need it and race ahead when you think you can handle it. A good educational game (can be hard to come by) covers all the same content as a class, but in this format.
In the education system, you are tied to a grade level, then a unit, then the instructor’s (or state’s) schedule. If you need to spend more time on something, it usually needs to be done outside of school hours. If you’re ready to move ahead, you either need to skip an entire grade or wait until the teacher serves you the new content and assignments.
In theory, but I really doubt “good educational games” exist – at least in the “can broadly replace human teachers” format we’re implying here.
They would also have the problem of being self-directed, which means using that format entirely would mean students could skip things they need and focus on things they find easier or more fun.
But really the issue is more that the good educational game is personalized, while human teachers need to teach whole classes, rather than work one on one with each student.
Hm. I hear a lot about how “capitalism” is so bad and all, but when we try to actually meet each person “according to his needs” suddenly that’s elitist and we have to crush everybody into the same mold.
Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative. And I am listening.
To a point.
Part of the problem is that we’re not great and definitely biased about who needs and deserves that extra help.
And even in socialism, resources are limited, so when we try to meet students “according to their needs”, we still have to choose between putting those resources into students who are struggling and falling behind and putting them into those who are already excelling but could do even more.
The aim of identifying gifted individuals, in most educational programs, is to give them what they need. Gifted programs have been traditionally classified as a type of “special education”, at least around here, which is just a general term for programs dedicated to students whose needs are not being met by the standard approach and curricula.
The label is, like all special education labels, there to provide information on which special education framework is likely to be most suitable for the students needs.
The move to get rid of gifted programs has, generally, been actively harmful to the students who would previously have fallen under that label, even if the previous gifted programs often fell short of what they should be. Throwing our hands up in the air and just saying “welp, guess there’s nothing we can do” is not in the best interests of the students.
I wish more parents understood this about gifted programs. I definitely feel my school district had parents pushing for their kids to be in the gifted program because it proved they were smart, and so it probably wasn’t operating as it was meant to.
When my kids were put in the G&T program they were were labeled “severely and profoundly” gifted, like it was a disability, because G&T was using the same bucket as learning disabled kids. Basically my kids were taking money away from kids with learning disabilities because of federal rules about teaching.
In my case at least, getting praised for working hard would have backfired, since I wasn’t working hard. I was more the Walky type. I could coast by without doing much work, so I did.
Didn’t really lead to problems until later in college. 🙁
But I don’t think we really had “Gifted” programs when I was in school.
Yes. I would prefer to give (and receive) praise for results rather than effort. You praise effort when the results fall short of the mark. One is appreciation, the other encouragement.
OTOH, what lead to problems later in college was that I’d always coasted and never had to work at learning things, so there are flaws in that approach too.
The big thing school is supposed to be teaching is how to do the work of learning things, so how do you encourage that
I don’t think “gifted kid” and neurodivergent are very tightly correlated. The strongest correlation is probably to having parents that teach you how to read outside of school.
My experience (as a gifted, neurodivergent, learning-disabled former kid) is that gifted and LD are more than a little corellated. It seems like this is because it’s harder to notice LD unless the kid is -also- clearly smart, so ti’s “ok, so you seem brillaint but your writing and ‘show all work’ math is super slow, what’s going on?” (this is me) or “you seem brilliant but though your work is fine the results are wrong; something seems off” and hopefully you get the unlimited time and special needs accomodation but maybe not (activist parents help a lot; mine had me tested for things after eelmentary school but before 7th grade, which helped a ton).
I’ve noticed a return of the R word among a certain segment of Americans.
Thing is, I wasn’t diagnosed until after the term became a slur and fell out of use. After it “came back” it didn’t get turned against me, but I am certainly thinking of kids and adolescents.
as a kid who grew up in the BD (behavior disorder) classes which I’m sure we all know what everyone including the teachers back in the 80s actually called those classes, but was also the kid that would get all the classwork for the day at the beginning of class so I could finish it and spend the rest of the day reading a book, I 100% get the correlation part. I was the gifted R-word throughout my K-12 life. ~<3
I was considered a gifted student back in the day, but was never diagnosed as autistic – although in hindsight I can certainly see that I was lighting up all the correct bulbs.
Autism wasn’t yet a ‘thing’ back in the 1960s. You were ‘bored’ or school ‘wasn’t challenging enough for you’, hence the busy-work Walky alludes to, or in some schools you were placed on an accelerated track – they tried to jump me from first to third grade (my parents made them roll that back, as I was already one of the youngest kids in my regular grade … I’d have been almost two years younger than everybody else otherwise, and I was already enough of a social misfit without adding that card to the deck), and I was in ‘honors’ classes when I attended a Catholic high school.
Well hopefully it’s easy to move in, or like a ‘jumper/romper’ where it’s attached like shorts would be but still feminine-looking (tho not like that should matter in a superhero costume like this), but i think it’s still better than her having a cape attached or so/couldn’t get stuck on something or too loose flowing
Not at all, it’s still on Crunchyroll as far as I know. And it recently it got bough up by VIZ after Rooster teeth went under so there will be more seasons hopefully.
Ice queendom it’s like a spin off/alternative universe kind of thing or at least something that could had happened between seasons. It is made by a Japanese studio which is funny considering the original show got a lot of inspiration from anime.
I’m on the fence. Proxiehunter is right in that AG did seem a bit eager to get back in action and Incelerator proves stupid shit will keep happening that will likely need her intervention. It’s just that AG’s motivation’s were mixed at best when she started her vigilante career and the fallout of it ended tragically. But maybe this time she can do better. I believe. She’s already approaching it with a better attitude based in de-escalation….Which almost immediately kind of got undercut….I still believe.
No I agree with your first statement. Amber and Amazi-Girl both have good and bad parts. It was Amber who helped Joyce clean the whiteboards, who finally shook hands with Sal, who befriended Dina, helped Ethan come out, and who saved Walky’s grades. I think Dorothy said recently that Amazi-Girl had very catholic vibes, and as a former catholic I think I agree. It’s pretty catholic for guilt and shame to shove everything you think is “bad” about yourself into one bucket of self-loathing.
I want to add that Amazi-Girl’s the one who stalked and instigated a fight with Sal, she’s the one who broke up with Danny for hypocritical reasons, and she’s the one who kept Mike’s life ending injury a secret from herself. And AG has a bit of ACAB energy going on, So she’s not objectively better than Amber. They both have their strengths and flaws.
Maybe the first. Maybe. I’m not sure about authorial intent when that was written. In retrospect, it was definitely AG for that first fight in the parking lot and AG stalking her later, after they were clearly distinct.
By the time she broke up with Danny, they were clearly distinct personalities. You can even see the shift in that scene as AG took over when they saw Danny with Sal.
She was trying to get away from dressing up and beating up random people, because it’s not good for her and presumably because beating someone up for littering or underage drinking is a flaw in her idea of Order.
It’s like if someone decides they want to stop doing coke, and aren’t doing coke, but when they think nostalgically about doing coke, there’s a guy with a bump, pleased with himself that he got their energy back.
What did Dorothy actually do to bring Amazi-Girl back? Sure, she messed with the outfit, but AG already had it out working on it, so this was in the works.
Also, does Dorothy know that Amazi-Girl isn’t Amber?
So we have the anxiety-autism combo in Dorothy and the depression-ADHD combo in Walky, now we just need “the kid who actually *was* neurotypical before school broke them” and “the rich kid from a good school with supportive parents who was put in the program because they just got a better education than everyone else” and we’ll have every type if gifted kid.
Sarah would be the closest on the first, since she doesn’t seem to have any sort of “gifted kid”, she just works her ass off for grades, and juggling school and drama makes her abandon her social life and become grouchy.
The latter is probably either Jennifer, Carla, or both.
Dorothy’s comment in the second panel is… lowkey icky. AG definitely pushes back against it a bit by saying she doesn’t typically wear skirts, but there’s a lot of people who do wear them and aren’t girls (hi).
(This is a comment directed at the character, not the writer; it’s probably setup for some kind of arc)
Part of me wonders if Jocelyne also picked up on the weirdness of that remark, being trans–but then, I think a trans*masc* would be a lot more likely to be irked by it. Ik skirts can feel really gender-affirming, after all (and that’s valid as hell! it’s just that more than just girls can feel happy in them)
I agree on the ick. There are tons of girls who really strongly dislike skirts for myriad reasons, and plenty of men and nonbinary people who do enjoy wearing skirts. My personal grievance would be woth Dotty making such a dramatic change to the costume’s design without consulting AG. Even if it works out well… I’d be uncomfortable with someone modifying any part of my wardrobe without me asking.
https://www.dumbingofage.com/sneakingback/
Practically, I don’t know how she could have lengthened the top, scissors usually don’t do that. But storywise, this fits the pattern (pun not intended) of Dorothy deciding she knows better than someone else what they want, and acting on it.
She’s been studying stage magic, specifically that illusion wherein you hold up a knotted cord, cut the knot, pass your hand down the cord, and the knot is gone and the cord is in one piece and longer.
It is something you get used to i suppose (tho idk how hard it is to fight in a skirt even if it’s more of a full body top/tunic over some leggings), tho even tho she did say she’s ok with it, surprised they glossed over that Dorothy was the one who adjusted it and like “run this by me next time” or something unless there wasn’t time between this and dorothy in her room to have sent a text or so
And gender/fashion aside i’m surprised there’s more men who wear skirts if only b/c more comfortable, other than kilts in certain cultures or so. (even if you don’t like anything too feminine/’flashy’ looking i’m sure you can find some beige/neutral tone ones or so)
Eh, a skirt doesn’t really decrease mobility, so it’s not really much different physically. Watch women’s tennis. And AG’s skirt is smaller than those: if you look at her entrance two strips back, she’s got plenty of leg extension.
There’s a small risk that it can be grabbed if you’re doing something fancy where your waist is arm-height (like attempting a Black Widow headscissors takedown move), but skirts provide less material than even a cape does, and the anchor point is distributed around your entire waist (which is larger than your neck, and closer to your center of mass), so even if they got ahold of it, they don’t have that much leverage. Unlike with a cape, they can’t loop it around their hand for more leverage, either.
The fact that Amaz-Girl said she was “surprisingly okay,” with the skirt suggested to me that she might have a little internalized misogyny over “girly” things, rather than suggesting other genders don’t wear skirts. Dorothy is simply happy that a girl can be amazing, and wants to acknowledge it. I think that fits in with the theme of our antagonist Incelerator telling women to be less.
This. I tried to untangle it in another comment, but it seems to me like Dina keeps pulling it all back in. So many DoA characters are always in motion, yet Dina keeps defining grounded.
I’m seriously amazed at how David Willis keeps Dina so real. It’s like he’s juggling flaming balls, and Dina is the only extinguisher.
Even as someone who’s dealt with a loooot of gifted kid burnout, I’ll still say that the GT program (although I think it was called “Aplha” at my school at the time) is the only part of elementary school I really have any happy memories from. My “regular” first grade teacher, who for some ungodly reason was chosen to be the “regular” teacher for all of the gifted kids in the grade, was a strict disciplinarian who eventually got fired for slapping a kid in the face. And after being branded a troublemaker, I didn’t manage to shake that off until middle school. My school’s GT teacher was the only person in that whole goddamn building that made me feel understood at all, and the only reason I made it through that time of my life remotely “okay.”
She’s gone now. She spent too much of a too short life having to fight to keep it. I just wish I could tell her how thankful I am that she was there for me. Nobody else was.
She clearly did something great with the time she had for you to talk about her this way. There’s something very meaningful in that. I’m glad you had somebody like that supporting you.
Well over 90% of the time when someone tells a story of their time at school I get angry at the existence of school. It is child abuse. It is a dysfunction generator. If we put enemy soldiers through all that it would be a war crime.
I’m really glad you had a good teacher in addition to all the bad stuff.
Amazi-Girl being back is good I guess? Not against it, but AG at leasy seemed like she wanted to retire and find different outlets for herself. Eh, maybe she’ll get more into volunteering.
Jocelyne and Joe, you are no longer Amazi-Girl newbies! You have now been first-blessed as bystanders. Feel free to exchange variations on “WTF” amongst yourselves.
I first visited DoA immediately after Dina appeared in Questionable Content nearly a decade ago (!!), and I simply followed her back. While I love everything DoA, the Dina moments bring me special joy.
The thing is, at the time, I had no clue why Dina pulled at me. Then, 4 years later (6 years ago), I was diagnosed with ADHD, and many things in my life suddenly made more sense and had some context. Including Dina.
Now I see why Jeph has called David Willis “evil”. Dina is like a Ginsu Knife for entangled plots, slicing the Gordian Knot. Something Pintsize could never do (he ties knots).
Then again, Amazi-Girl is truly next-level. Amazi-girl extrapolates, Dina contextualizes. Yin-yang. Or maybe yo-yo. IDK.
1) Assuming others are incapable of doing things on their own.
2) Using phrases like “gifted kid” when, in the past, she’s said extremely abelist things about autism when Sarah jokingly suggested she had autism (plus the fact that Dorothy thinks having a disability while being in a position of authority is a liability).
3) We’ve been shown that she has some sort of weird resentment for Joyce’s autonomy (grabbing her, “I’m not going crawling back to her”, the entire laundry thing), so I very much think that saying that exact phrase in front of Joyce (plus Joyce’s reaction) is not there for nothin’.
4) “Could a depressed person make an entire superhero costume in 12 minutes?!”
Okay yeah half of that is nonsense she isn’t doing and the other half is completely unrelated to the current strip you are commenting on. Thanks you for explaining and confirming it for me.
I see it. I don’t know if it’s what you see exactly. I see her feeling like she has no control on her life, so she’s presuming control over her projects, deciding there’s things they’re incapable of deciding on their own and doing them without even offering or asking first.
If someone doesn’t think that’s a problem, I don’t think any amount of explanation is going to help them understand.
Right, the projects thing is bad, but how is it ableist? Looking at things from a different angle doesn’t make people incapable of understanding at all, it means they’re not thinking the same as you. People aren’t unreachable (or implicitly immoral) just because their thoughts aren’t identical.
It doesn’t matter if that’s the word you used, let’s not be coy. You know what you said, you know what it looks like you’re implying, and I don’t have the patience to play little games of “I didn’t say you said I said you said”.
I remember being in the “gifted and talented” (or whatever they called it) program in middle school, all it meant was for part of the school day I went to a separate classroom with some other “gifted” kids and we did unusual projects. I think we made robots out of Legos for a few months, it was weird. I was only in it for a year or two before I got tired of it and asked to be put back in my regular classes.
I don’t know how many of the other kids in that program with me might have been neurodivergent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some were, though maybe undiagnosed like I was. I got diagnosed as autistic years after I graduated college, in my 30s.
I wasn’t in the ‘gifted’ program in middle school because my school district chose their gifted students not by grades but by street address.
I lived in the white trash/’ethic’ part of town, so the fact that I had top grades didn’t matter; I got put in the class for remedial students because classism.
I somewhat made things up in high school when I could choose my own classes, but missing out on certain prereqs in middle school cost me the chance to take calculus in high school, a fact that I remain bitter about over two decades later.
My wife and I were both the “gifted” kids who never learned to “work” at things because we never had to, and it can definitely be great having each other’s support for navigating the adult world.
Dotty’s got really good work ethic though. She just doesn’t know when to stop for her own health.
Dorothy’s the other kind of gifted kid. The one for whom maybe it doesn’t come as easy, but they’re pushed or push themselves really hard to excel anyway.
That’s the “burnout” version, as I understand it. The Walky version doesn’t really burnout, just hits a point where it doesn’t come naturally anymore and flounders. But they don’t burn themselves out working harder to get through that because they don’t know how/aren’t driven to do so.
If it was longer and that tight, it would restrict her movement. She has leggings, so it’s just for looks and she doesn’t actually care if anyone sees under it.
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hoping for an amazi-girl/incelerator roller skate chase
I’m picturing it as the one from “The Muppets Take Manhattan.”
Carla joins in, just because
Carla’s not a joiner. She’s a leader. But getting out the skates just to kick ass is definitely her wheel-house.
ugh, “gifted kid”?
Is what I hate about social perceptions of autism in the US, it either you have superpowers or you’re called the R-slur (-_-)
take note that Dina also probably heard Dorothy and probably also knows what she means 👀
I don’t know if Gifted Kid should be considered a 1-1 correlation with autism. I think it’s overperformers in general
It’s definitely not 1-to-1, but nearly every former “gifted kid” I know ended up some sort of neurodivergent and/or mentally ill
I resemble that remark.
Dittos.
a-Yup.
It’s definitely not 1-1, but while my neuroatypicality doesn’t overlap much at all with either autism or adhd, that doesn’t make it not neuroatypicality, and I’ve got that in some pretty big ways.
(And it’s atypical enough that the collection doesn’t have a name. So that’s fun.)
Relating so hard right now
Former public school edumacator-type here. Definitely a strong correlation there. The vast majority of “gifted / talented students” I assessed were in some variety of neurodiversity. And since I had to meet with their parents often, I also noticed strong neuro-d traits in them, too. The kid apple doesn’t fall far from the neuro-d tree.
Funny how genetics works like that.
“We didn’t have no brain problems back in MY day!” Uh-huh, so that can’t possibly explain why Grandpa knows everything there is to know about stamps and ate the same seven meals every week for 50 years.
Ayup. 3 generations of autism, and probably more if we could go back and check my dead grandfather.
Almost makes one think that autism isn’t a disorder so much as a perfectly normal human trait that society treats as abnormal much as we used to with left handedness.
Dorothy is likely using it here as a “safe way” to refer to autistic burnout due to internalized ableism she has yet to really confront. I did the same when I was formerly repulsed by the label.
I don’t think Dorothy knows she’s autism coded.
Dorothy was clearly identified as gifted. Dina knew herself to be autistic and was identified only as ESL. I’m not sure on what basis Dina would be offended by Dorothy referring to herself as a former gifted kid. I certainly don’t have a problem with it, as a former gifted kid myself.
Gifted is a seperate diagnosis (though plenty of Autistic kids are also gifted).
When I was in school, Gifted meant you had an IQ of at least 130. We were in a different class all day long, with only other gifted kids, and a teacher with the additional credential of “Special Ed: Gifted”. Because, gifted kids legit learn differently from average kids.
Now / in the US, you typically get into a gifted program by getting good grades, and the diagnosis doesn’t typically get you anything that fancy — way closer to pulling you out of class for 30min of worksheets, as Walky describes.
And in many parts of the US “Gifted and Talented” programs were cut to provide services to meet other IEP needs. At least in the school districts where I taught. LD/Gifted certificates in the late 1900’s, now long out of date.
Whatever happened to skipping a grade?
I did that back before Gifted and Talented programs were a thing (and then did the programs once they were). I assume people still do it from time to time?
I think one reason some students who meet “gifted” criteria might not skip a grade is social skills. For some students, especially 2E (gifted & neurodiverse), social skills might already be a challenge in a way that might just be worse if they skipped a grade.
This. I was definitely better off staying with my age cohort.
Back in my day, at my school anyway, what you got if you blew through the standard schoolwork and got bored is that once in a while a teacher would notice and offer extra material that was more challenging. I don’t think we had any formal program, just caring teachers. My thanks to them all!
One other thing, that I may have mentioned before, was the “SRA box”. In one class, if you finished the seatwork early, you could get other interesting stuff to work on, right there in the classroom. It was self-paced enrichment, in effect. I liked that a lot and I think it was good for me.
Schools don’t get paid to let kids skip grades. As such, letting kids skip grades costs them money, because they’re letting those kids go at least one year early.
My school system claimed they weren’t letting me skip grades because my lack of friends in my grade clearly showed I lacked social skills. I lacked friends in my grade because I kept blowing the curve.
Note that kids being able to “blow the curve” shows a critical lack of understanding of statistics on the part of the teaching staff. The correct approach to curving grades would be to compute the score histogram.
How exactly to apply that’s a subject for some debate, but it’s probably more important to note that most teachers wouldn’t want to go to that effort, and would just like a better approach to dealing with curve breakers.
Fortunately, there is one, and it’s really simple to do. “Throw out the outliers” is the statistics principle. The officially correct way to do this would be to compute the standard deviation of grades and not include any that are more than two standard deviations from the mean in the curve. That is, when the mean was 62% and the standard deviation was 12%, that kid who got 100%? They still get an A, but that’s not the top of the curve. Nor is it the second highest grade at 89%. The top of the curve is that guy who got an 83%. Compute the curve without those two really high grades in the list.
But a lot of teachers would prefer to just eyeball it, and that’s fine also. In that case, the curve might be +11% instead of +17%.
Unfortunately, the kids might be clever enough to recognize that the teacher should’ve ignored two grades when computing the curve instead of just one and blame the teachers. So the teachers instead do curves entirely wrong and just blame the students who probably shouldn’t have been in their class in the first place for them not doing their jobs well.
Honestly have never known a teacher to actually grade on a curve. Mostly just flat scores, sometimes with a boost based on a curve in advanced classes.
Also, another reason (also connected to funding) why schools might not want a student to skip a grade– standardized test scores. If you’re bringing up the average for your grade, but presumably wouldn’t be bringing up the average quite as much if you skipped a grade, what makes the school look better?
I never graded on a curve, but I did vaguely use one a a check on myself, to make sure I was teaching the material correctly and was making the tests appropriately challenging.
I mean, I didn’t plot them out or anything, but I could at least ask questions like “Were there more As than Fs?” and so forth.
When I was in elementary school, the gifted program– called PACE– was like that, where kids would be pulled from class for chucks of time. At one point, I was in a group being tested on if we would qualify for PACE, and it was in the format of these sort-of games. I was doing well at them at first, but I started thinking, “My friends who are in PACE come back with more math worksheets; meanwhile, enough of the class goes that when they’re gone, the teacher mainly uses the time to read aloud to the rest of us. Why, exactly, would I want to be in the math worksheets group over the story time group?” So I just stopped answering things.
All these responses really make me miss the congregated Gifted classes (Canadian public school in the 1990s). We almost never did worksheets — we were skipping the horrible drills that our brains pretty much didn’t need. We did experiments, and read books, and wrote stories and poems, and built little cars to run down ramps, and solved problems like how to drop eggs off the roof without breaking them. So cool!
And then the budget got cut.
The dumbest idea that was floated at the time was that the gifted kids would teach the remedial kids. Can you imagine? Just because you do well on IQ tests does not make you patient or deft or skillful at teaching! Teaching special ed involves, like, actual skills. So insulting to think that clever 10yr olds could do it.
Anyway then I came to the US, in a poverty-stricken rural community, where everyone was in the same class and the 6th Graders next to me couldn’t read. Wacky times.
Wait, seriously? I got into gifted programs in the 70s (in the U) by, yes, having strong IQ tests at 4.
I got kicked- out- of gifted programs for 2 years by having poor standardized tests (because of my learning disability; result was that I had perfect unfinished tests; of course, learning disabilities are universally another form of neuro-diversity).
Then I got into an entire gifted -school- (one of the best in NYC) due to a standardized test, which, at least when you take it without prep, does more or less correlate to an IQ test much more to the constellation of abilities and work that get you good grades.
So the idea that a school would take their strong performers regardless of whether their skills were due to hard work vs IQ and throw them into a class together because they are too good at school (as opposed to making a special class for fast learners and letting them learn together so they don’t get bored and spend half the class reading under the desk [lolno they’ll do that anyway] and make dooles [ditto]) seems bizarre. The students that aren’t getting bored and are getting good grades because they’re good where they are are doing fine; don’t mess with that.
we cannot forget the contribution of ADHD
It’s possible that it’s not 1-1. That said, what *is* autism?
It’s basically a bucket to put people who don’t “communicate well” with normal people. They’ve identified a bunch of traits that are strongly associated with communication difficulties and defined the syndrome based on being too far from “normal” on those traits.
The gifted program I was in actually tested for some of those traits. They weren’t officially looking for autistic kids, and they were certainly only testing for the “too much” side of that delta rather than looking for “too deviant’ like the normal autism test does. But it wasn’t particularly surprising that basically every kid in that program was on spectrum, given that aspect of the testing. Also, some of the other testing was looking for ‘out of the box thinkers’, and that’s also pretty highly correlated with autism (but definitely not 1-1.)
To be clear, I have known a bunch of gifted people who didn’t really seem like they were autistic. They didn’t get into that gifted program, but in some cases that was at least partially due to the fact they didn’t go to that school system. But what i find interesting about that group of people is over half of them have since admitted that they were autistic the whole time, they just mask well.
I should also point out that the gifted program I went to wasn’t just about getting additional math worksheets. I don’t think we actually got any additional math worksheets. If they gave us math worksheets with actual interesting problems, that would’ve been cool. But our gifted program was mostly about stuff that wasn’t in the general curriculum at all, and the stuff that was came in much later. For example, we were learning foreign languages in elementary school, which didn’t start for regular school for us until most of the way through junior high school.
Dunno if it’ll confirm it (tho i imagine like 50% of the cast is either lgbt, neurotypical or both) but i imagine there were some ‘gifted kid programs’ or so tho idk if they’d still call it that these days to make the ‘average’/students with lower than average grades feel worse but i know in high school at least htere were some AP/IB classes but i odn’t think it wasnecessarily forced on anyone (Tho i’m sure a handful of ppl signed up for it b/c helps with early college prep or just looks good on ur record or so)
Dorothy’s parents are either late Gen X or early Millennial at this point. Maybe she learned it from one of them, who got their own “gifted kid” education in their time.
I hear “gifted kid” more often these days than I did growing up– my school had a gifted program, but it wasn’t called that, and I, at least, didn’t exactly think of it that way (more, these kids are good at school AND have parents who push them pretty hard). Now “gifted kid” shows up in online spaces more, often in the discussion of burnout, from what I’ve seen.
When I was a kid they called it the “Accelerant Class,” basically where all the kids who were learning fast enough that reigning it in for the rest would hold them back, so they got put in another class and got to read the more advanced books. And yes, there was some burnout that thinned the herd – I didn’t last long in the Accelerant classes, just because the homework got to be a burden. Of course, nowadays the kids aren’t being given homework apparently because they realised during the pandemic that it’s just busywork that doesn’t actually reinforce the lessons and just creates more work for teachers.
Truly I was born in the wrong time.
lmao they called it accelerant? Like what you add to fuel to make it burn faster? That’s too good.
Haven’t most mainstream education systems just been herding kids from kindergarten through graduation whether they’re absorbing the material or not, ever since “no child left behind” passed? And the lockdown years only exasperated the problem?
At least that’s the impression I’ve been getting from lurking on /r/teachers… Kids know they don’t have to do anything but play with their phones all day and they’ll still pass, or at worst they’ll have to take a six week summer school course.
Moving masses through the program in lockstep is what’s rewarded now, so, yeah?
It’s being inflicted on colleges too, where the Legislature calls it “finishing on time” or some such malarkey. Me, I needed nine semesters to finish my B.S. but I turned out so well that the school hired me.
It’s very hard to hold a student back (in K-5, at least) unless a parent wants it as well. And at the same time, there was a law here for a few years saying if kids weren’t reading at a certain level by 3rd grade, they would be held back– but I don’t know if that was ever actually enforced; there were a lot of complicating factors and then they got rid of it. Now there are pushes to get rid of honors classes and such– there are a lot of downsides to tracking, but the proposed move to have secondary teachers teaching three different levels within each class doesn’t seem realistic either.
The gifted kid label does so much damage. If I never got it and instead got praised for working hard, I wouldn’t have burned out when I hit a wall
much more damage than you think
besides the historical widespread adoption of IQ tests and later derived aptitude tests in the US having very racist motivations, the unspoken aim of identifying “gifted individuals” in our country’s education system for special treatment has always been the product of elitist and conservative sentiments,
i.e. the underlying belief that “the freedom that will be used by only one man in a million may be more important to society and more beneficial to the majority than any freedom that we all use” (Fredrik Hayek)
(for reals fuck that shit) (9_9)
OTOH, some people are either more prepared or more capable at school than others, and removing access to advanced education from public schools only results in gatekeeping students who would be able to flourish with more challenging curriculum than the standard, but can’t afford private tutors.
i mean why shouldn’t they be able to move on without the “gifted kid” label?
the way education in the US works to say the very least is in need of MASSIVE overhauls
Well sure, but more often what is being done is instead just getting rid of the idea of putting kids in advanced classes at all.
Is why I like video games better than US schools, you can advance hands on and other learning without a class directing you at a “one-size-fits-all” pace XD
I fail to see the correlation
My interpretation (as someone who very much enjoys leveling up): Video game progress is self-directed, based on the time and effort you put in. You move on to greater challenges at your own pace, so you can choose to grind when you think you need it and race ahead when you think you can handle it. A good educational game (can be hard to come by) covers all the same content as a class, but in this format.
In the education system, you are tied to a grade level, then a unit, then the instructor’s (or state’s) schedule. If you need to spend more time on something, it usually needs to be done outside of school hours. If you’re ready to move ahead, you either need to skip an entire grade or wait until the teacher serves you the new content and assignments.
In theory, but I really doubt “good educational games” exist – at least in the “can broadly replace human teachers” format we’re implying here.
They would also have the problem of being self-directed, which means using that format entirely would mean students could skip things they need and focus on things they find easier or more fun.
But really the issue is more that the good educational game is personalized, while human teachers need to teach whole classes, rather than work one on one with each student.
Hm. I hear a lot about how “capitalism” is so bad and all, but when we try to actually meet each person “according to his needs” suddenly that’s elitist and we have to crush everybody into the same mold.
Yes, I’m being deliberately provocative. And I am listening.
To a point.
Part of the problem is that we’re not great and definitely biased about who needs and deserves that extra help.
And even in socialism, resources are limited, so when we try to meet students “according to their needs”, we still have to choose between putting those resources into students who are struggling and falling behind and putting them into those who are already excelling but could do even more.
The aim of identifying gifted individuals, in most educational programs, is to give them what they need. Gifted programs have been traditionally classified as a type of “special education”, at least around here, which is just a general term for programs dedicated to students whose needs are not being met by the standard approach and curricula.
The label is, like all special education labels, there to provide information on which special education framework is likely to be most suitable for the students needs.
The move to get rid of gifted programs has, generally, been actively harmful to the students who would previously have fallen under that label, even if the previous gifted programs often fell short of what they should be. Throwing our hands up in the air and just saying “welp, guess there’s nothing we can do” is not in the best interests of the students.
I wish more parents understood this about gifted programs. I definitely feel my school district had parents pushing for their kids to be in the gifted program because it proved they were smart, and so it probably wasn’t operating as it was meant to.
When my kids were put in the G&T program they were were labeled “severely and profoundly” gifted, like it was a disability, because G&T was using the same bucket as learning disabled kids. Basically my kids were taking money away from kids with learning disabilities because of federal rules about teaching.
In my case at least, getting praised for working hard would have backfired, since I wasn’t working hard. I was more the Walky type. I could coast by without doing much work, so I did.
Didn’t really lead to problems until later in college. 🙁
But I don’t think we really had “Gifted” programs when I was in school.
Yes. I would prefer to give (and receive) praise for results rather than effort. You praise effort when the results fall short of the mark. One is appreciation, the other encouragement.
OTOH, what lead to problems later in college was that I’d always coasted and never had to work at learning things, so there are flaws in that approach too.
The big thing school is supposed to be teaching is how to do the work of learning things, so how do you encourage that
I don’t think “gifted kid” and neurodivergent are very tightly correlated. The strongest correlation is probably to having parents that teach you how to read outside of school.
It really is just the old “Autism vs Asperger’s” thing again, huh.
yup, the historical rationale on behalf of the term’s eponymous creator tells you all you need to know about why the distinction was discarded 👀
What’s really fun is when you’ve been labelled Gifted Kid and also have undiagnosed dyscalculia.
“You’re struggling with maths? Well, you’re so far ahead in English that I know it’s not because you’re stupid, so you must just be lazy.”
Ow! That is not good pedagogy. Or humanity.
My experience (as a gifted, neurodivergent, learning-disabled former kid) is that gifted and LD are more than a little corellated. It seems like this is because it’s harder to notice LD unless the kid is -also- clearly smart, so ti’s “ok, so you seem brillaint but your writing and ‘show all work’ math is super slow, what’s going on?” (this is me) or “you seem brilliant but though your work is fine the results are wrong; something seems off” and hopefully you get the unlimited time and special needs accomodation but maybe not (activist parents help a lot; mine had me tested for things after eelmentary school but before 7th grade, which helped a ton).
I’ve noticed a return of the R word among a certain segment of Americans.
Thing is, I wasn’t diagnosed until after the term became a slur and fell out of use. After it “came back” it didn’t get turned against me, but I am certainly thinking of kids and adolescents.
Thanks, conservatives!
as a kid who grew up in the BD (behavior disorder) classes which I’m sure we all know what everyone including the teachers back in the 80s actually called those classes, but was also the kid that would get all the classwork for the day at the beginning of class so I could finish it and spend the rest of the day reading a book, I 100% get the correlation part. I was the gifted R-word throughout my K-12 life. ~<3
I was considered a gifted student back in the day, but was never diagnosed as autistic – although in hindsight I can certainly see that I was lighting up all the correct bulbs.
Autism wasn’t yet a ‘thing’ back in the 1960s. You were ‘bored’ or school ‘wasn’t challenging enough for you’, hence the busy-work Walky alludes to, or in some schools you were placed on an accelerated track – they tried to jump me from first to third grade (my parents made them roll that back, as I was already one of the youngest kids in my regular grade … I’d have been almost two years younger than everybody else otherwise, and I was already enough of a social misfit without adding that card to the deck), and I was in ‘honors’ classes when I attended a Catholic high school.
Never wearing skirts is what makes it a good disguise, or something.
Well hopefully it’s easy to move in, or like a ‘jumper/romper’ where it’s attached like shorts would be but still feminine-looking (tho not like that should matter in a superhero costume like this), but i think it’s still better than her having a cape attached or so/couldn’t get stuck on something or too loose flowing
It looks short enough and loose enough to not get in the way and since she’s wearing pants under it, she doesn’t have to worry about exposure.
I wasn’t even really thinking of it as a skirt until Dorothy said so. More like a long shirt.
Mr. Walker, passing by: “Not a skirt. A tunic.”
Dumbing of Age Book 15: I Am Unharmed, Only Pissy
Still no upvote button, even tho’ sorely needed!
+++
just noticing that amazi-girl isn’t messing up her hair like before. maybe it isn’t important now that half of campus knows her identity anyway
I mean, depending on how much she fights, it’d get messed up eventually? tho with her hair being longer i imagine a ponytail might be more helpful
But she’s still doing THE VOICE….
THAT’S NOT BUSY WORK THATS COLLEGE PREP ok yeah busywork.
“It’s a combat skirt!” -RWBY
It’s called “battle dress”, cretin!
I never did finish that series.
I wonder if it’s too late.
It’s too late.
Not if you have an eye patch and a parrot. And Viz might be bringing it back.
Yeh, RT folded. There are nine seasons out there, tho!
Not at all, it’s still on Crunchyroll as far as I know. And it recently it got bough up by VIZ after Rooster teeth went under so there will be more seasons hopefully.
Okay nevermind I checked and it got pulled out apparently, that id a bummer. But still as others had said you can always pirate it.
RWBY is in production.
Ooookay?
They’ve apparently got something called Ice Queendom, but that looks odd and peculiar so I’m wary.
At least they’ve got peak anime like Cowboy Bebop and Dragon Ball GT.
Ice queendom it’s like a spin off/alternative universe kind of thing or at least something that could had happened between seasons. It is made by a Japanese studio which is funny considering the original show got a lot of inspiration from anime.
Big thanks for the RWBY reference! My brain was sliding all over the place, and that was the anchor I was looking for. Y’all have deep brainz!
Republic Commandos approve of the battle skirt.
I don’t know if getting your friend to start dressing up as a Superhero again is necessarily a good thing to be doing Dorothy.
Yeah, it feels more like enabling than anything else.
I’d compare Dorothy to Edna Mode, but (1) Dorothy is nowhere near _that_ level of awesome, and (2) Dorothy’s not opposed to capes.
She doesn’t have the life experience Edna did. She hasn’t gotten anyone killed with her fashion choices. Yet.
I don’t like the sound of that. “Yet.” What do you know?! AG! Stay away from any jet engines!
I’m on the fence. Proxiehunter is right in that AG did seem a bit eager to get back in action and Incelerator proves stupid shit will keep happening that will likely need her intervention. It’s just that AG’s motivation’s were mixed at best when she started her vigilante career and the fallout of it ended tragically. But maybe this time she can do better. I believe. She’s already approaching it with a better attitude based in de-escalation….Which almost immediately kind of got undercut….I still believe.
Amazi-Girl is the best part of Amber.
Trying to suppress her is bad.
I don’t like the idea that Amazi-Girl is “the best” part of Amber, since that implies Amber is the worst part of Amber, which is a bit…
(Remembers that the last time we saw Amber she was trying to create unnecessary relationship drama for lols.)
Never mind, carry on.
No I agree with your first statement. Amber and Amazi-Girl both have good and bad parts. It was Amber who helped Joyce clean the whiteboards, who finally shook hands with Sal, who befriended Dina, helped Ethan come out, and who saved Walky’s grades. I think Dorothy said recently that Amazi-Girl had very catholic vibes, and as a former catholic I think I agree. It’s pretty catholic for guilt and shame to shove everything you think is “bad” about yourself into one bucket of self-loathing.
I want to add that Amazi-Girl’s the one who stalked and instigated a fight with Sal, she’s the one who broke up with Danny for hypocritical reasons, and she’s the one who kept Mike’s life ending injury a secret from herself. And AG has a bit of ACAB energy going on, So she’s not objectively better than Amber. They both have their strengths and flaws.
I think those first two were before AG was a full separated personality and it was just Amber with a costume.
Maybe the first. Maybe. I’m not sure about authorial intent when that was written. In retrospect, it was definitely AG for that first fight in the parking lot and AG stalking her later, after they were clearly distinct.
By the time she broke up with Danny, they were clearly distinct personalities. You can even see the shift in that scene as AG took over when they saw Danny with Sal.
Wrong.
She was trying to get away from dressing up and beating up random people, because it’s not good for her and presumably because beating someone up for littering or underage drinking is a flaw in her idea of Order.
It’s like if someone decides they want to stop doing coke, and aren’t doing coke, but when they think nostalgically about doing coke, there’s a guy with a bump, pleased with himself that he got their energy back.
What did Dorothy actually do to bring Amazi-Girl back? Sure, she messed with the outfit, but AG already had it out working on it, so this was in the works.
Also, does Dorothy know that Amazi-Girl isn’t Amber?
There was also this encounter.
So we have the anxiety-autism combo in Dorothy and the depression-ADHD combo in Walky, now we just need “the kid who actually *was* neurotypical before school broke them” and “the rich kid from a good school with supportive parents who was put in the program because they just got a better education than everyone else” and we’ll have every type if gifted kid.
I have never met any of the latter two.
I was the latter.
But I benefited from the fact I was also neuratypical anyway!
🙂
Sarah would be the closest on the first, since she doesn’t seem to have any sort of “gifted kid”, she just works her ass off for grades, and juggling school and drama makes her abandon her social life and become grouchy.
The latter is probably either Jennifer, Carla, or both.
– A –
_A_
_A_?
The way her chest ‘A’ merges with her belt.
Isn’t that the name Apocalypse goes by on Krakoa?
When we’re pretending he’s not the Mutant version of the Red Skull?
Dorothy’s comment in the second panel is… lowkey icky. AG definitely pushes back against it a bit by saying she doesn’t typically wear skirts, but there’s a lot of people who do wear them and aren’t girls (hi).
(This is a comment directed at the character, not the writer; it’s probably setup for some kind of arc)
Part of me wonders if Jocelyne also picked up on the weirdness of that remark, being trans–but then, I think a trans*masc* would be a lot more likely to be irked by it. Ik skirts can feel really gender-affirming, after all (and that’s valid as hell! it’s just that more than just girls can feel happy in them)
I agree on the ick. There are tons of girls who really strongly dislike skirts for myriad reasons, and plenty of men and nonbinary people who do enjoy wearing skirts. My personal grievance would be woth Dotty making such a dramatic change to the costume’s design without consulting AG. Even if it works out well… I’d be uncomfortable with someone modifying any part of my wardrobe without me asking.
Wait, what? Was the costume alteration being Dorothy’s fault mentioned in the comic somewhere and I missed it, or is this speculation?
The last comic Dorothy was in was her altering Amazi-Girl’s costume
https://www.dumbingofage.com/sneakingback/
Practically, I don’t know how she could have lengthened the top, scissors usually don’t do that. But storywise, this fits the pattern (pun not intended) of Dorothy deciding she knows better than someone else what they want, and acting on it.
She’s been studying stage magic, specifically that illusion wherein you hold up a knotted cord, cut the knot, pass your hand down the cord, and the knot is gone and the cord is in one piece and longer.
It is something you get used to i suppose (tho idk how hard it is to fight in a skirt even if it’s more of a full body top/tunic over some leggings), tho even tho she did say she’s ok with it, surprised they glossed over that Dorothy was the one who adjusted it and like “run this by me next time” or something unless there wasn’t time between this and dorothy in her room to have sent a text or so
And gender/fashion aside i’m surprised there’s more men who wear skirts if only b/c more comfortable, other than kilts in certain cultures or so. (even if you don’t like anything too feminine/’flashy’ looking i’m sure you can find some beige/neutral tone ones or so)
Eh, a skirt doesn’t really decrease mobility, so it’s not really much different physically. Watch women’s tennis. And AG’s skirt is smaller than those: if you look at her entrance two strips back, she’s got plenty of leg extension.
There’s a small risk that it can be grabbed if you’re doing something fancy where your waist is arm-height (like attempting a Black Widow headscissors takedown move), but skirts provide less material than even a cape does, and the anchor point is distributed around your entire waist (which is larger than your neck, and closer to your center of mass), so even if they got ahold of it, they don’t have that much leverage. Unlike with a cape, they can’t loop it around their hand for more leverage, either.
So yeah. It’s basically a non-issue.
The fact that Amaz-Girl said she was “surprisingly okay,” with the skirt suggested to me that she might have a little internalized misogyny over “girly” things, rather than suggesting other genders don’t wear skirts. Dorothy is simply happy that a girl can be amazing, and wants to acknowledge it. I think that fits in with the theme of our antagonist Incelerator telling women to be less.
Let’s go with that, if only to make Incelerator sad.
Every spoken word of dialogue in this scene reveals layers of mental illness that each person here has buried.
And Dina is once again my spirit animal
This. I tried to untangle it in another comment, but it seems to me like Dina keeps pulling it all back in. So many DoA characters are always in motion, yet Dina keeps defining grounded.
I’m seriously amazed at how David Willis keeps Dina so real. It’s like he’s juggling flaming balls, and Dina is the only extinguisher.
Kicking ass in skirts, as the Scottish have been doing for ages.
Lass, if ya keep makin’ fun of the Scots, ya might get kilt.
She should watch some Samurai Jack to learn how to properly diss people while wearing a kilt
You think anyone ever made a mash-up of Gloria (Pokemon Sword and Shield female PC) spitting the Scotsman diatribe at another character in-universe?
Oh that would be beautiful! I went to Youtube to check and sadly there is only a very short bit from that scene
Even as someone who’s dealt with a loooot of gifted kid burnout, I’ll still say that the GT program (although I think it was called “Aplha” at my school at the time) is the only part of elementary school I really have any happy memories from. My “regular” first grade teacher, who for some ungodly reason was chosen to be the “regular” teacher for all of the gifted kids in the grade, was a strict disciplinarian who eventually got fired for slapping a kid in the face. And after being branded a troublemaker, I didn’t manage to shake that off until middle school. My school’s GT teacher was the only person in that whole goddamn building that made me feel understood at all, and the only reason I made it through that time of my life remotely “okay.”
She’s gone now. She spent too much of a too short life having to fight to keep it. I just wish I could tell her how thankful I am that she was there for me. Nobody else was.
She clearly did something great with the time she had for you to talk about her this way. There’s something very meaningful in that. I’m glad you had somebody like that supporting you.
what the Armadillo said.
Well over 90% of the time when someone tells a story of their time at school I get angry at the existence of school. It is child abuse. It is a dysfunction generator. If we put enemy soldiers through all that it would be a war crime.
I’m really glad you had a good teacher in addition to all the bad stuff.
The school system has made note of this “good teacher” situation is working to remedy it as we speak.
Take what she gave you and pass it on.
I deeply feel Walky in the last panel. It felt like I was being punished form being too smart.
Amazi-Girl being back is good I guess? Not against it, but AG at leasy seemed like she wanted to retire and find different outlets for herself. Eh, maybe she’ll get more into volunteering.
She also felt really eager to unretire when Dina and Charlie went missing.
Oh I never even thought of it as a skirt, just the flared bottom of a coat because, you know, winter costume.
That’s more how I was thinking about it.
Jocelyne and Joe, you are no longer Amazi-Girl newbies! You have now been first-blessed as bystanders. Feel free to exchange variations on “WTF” amongst yourselves.
I first visited DoA immediately after Dina appeared in Questionable Content nearly a decade ago (!!), and I simply followed her back. While I love everything DoA, the Dina moments bring me special joy.
The thing is, at the time, I had no clue why Dina pulled at me. Then, 4 years later (6 years ago), I was diagnosed with ADHD, and many things in my life suddenly made more sense and had some context. Including Dina.
Now I see why Jeph has called David Willis “evil”. Dina is like a Ginsu Knife for entangled plots, slicing the Gordian Knot. Something Pintsize could never do (he ties knots).
Then again, Amazi-Girl is truly next-level. Amazi-girl extrapolates, Dina contextualizes. Yin-yang. Or maybe yo-yo. IDK.
Damn, I love this stuff!
You know what would make this *chefs kiss*?
Rollerdouche starts taunting Amazi-Girl about how she can’t catch, only get get blindsided by Carla.
“to get”
He endangers Charlie, he gets torn to shreds by Ruth Tech Drones
No, wait, was it Rutt Tech? Why do I keep mixing Carla and Ruth up… must be the red hair.
“The Over-Achiever Bandit strikes again!”
DOROTHY.
BAD DOROTHY.
Doing an ableism (in front of two autistics no less) and also regressing.
Okay I really gonna need you to walk me through your logic here because I am actually autistic and this looks like nonsense.
Agreed.
Thirding this.
1) Assuming others are incapable of doing things on their own.
2) Using phrases like “gifted kid” when, in the past, she’s said extremely abelist things about autism when Sarah jokingly suggested she had autism (plus the fact that Dorothy thinks having a disability while being in a position of authority is a liability).
3) We’ve been shown that she has some sort of weird resentment for Joyce’s autonomy (grabbing her, “I’m not going crawling back to her”, the entire laundry thing), so I very much think that saying that exact phrase in front of Joyce (plus Joyce’s reaction) is not there for nothin’.
4) “Could a depressed person make an entire superhero costume in 12 minutes?!”
Okay yeah half of that is nonsense she isn’t doing and the other half is completely unrelated to the current strip you are commenting on. Thanks you for explaining and confirming it for me.
No. You’re wrong.
I see it. I don’t know if it’s what you see exactly. I see her feeling like she has no control on her life, so she’s presuming control over her projects, deciding there’s things they’re incapable of deciding on their own and doing them without even offering or asking first.
If someone doesn’t think that’s a problem, I don’t think any amount of explanation is going to help them understand.
Right, the projects thing is bad, but how is it ableist? Looking at things from a different angle doesn’t make people incapable of understanding at all, it means they’re not thinking the same as you. People aren’t unreachable (or implicitly immoral) just because their thoughts aren’t identical.
Thanks, this comment rub me the wrong way but I couldn’t put it into words.
I didn’t say immoral. you made that up.
It doesn’t matter if that’s the word you used, let’s not be coy. You know what you said, you know what it looks like you’re implying, and I don’t have the patience to play little games of “I didn’t say you said I said you said”.
I think it’s considerably less likely to register as a problem for Joyce than for Dina, though.
American schools are weird.
I remember being in the “gifted and talented” (or whatever they called it) program in middle school, all it meant was for part of the school day I went to a separate classroom with some other “gifted” kids and we did unusual projects. I think we made robots out of Legos for a few months, it was weird. I was only in it for a year or two before I got tired of it and asked to be put back in my regular classes.
I don’t know how many of the other kids in that program with me might have been neurodivergent, but I wouldn’t be surprised if some were, though maybe undiagnosed like I was. I got diagnosed as autistic years after I graduated college, in my 30s.
I wasn’t in the ‘gifted’ program in middle school because my school district chose their gifted students not by grades but by street address.
I lived in the white trash/’ethic’ part of town, so the fact that I had top grades didn’t matter; I got put in the class for remedial students because classism.
I somewhat made things up in high school when I could choose my own classes, but missing out on certain prereqs in middle school cost me the chance to take calculus in high school, a fact that I remain bitter about over two decades later.
Dorothy and Walky both have “gifted kid burnout,” but from very different causes and manifesting in very different ways.
I really am rooting for them as a couple, seeing them hopefully overcome those things together.
My wife and I were both the “gifted” kids who never learned to “work” at things because we never had to, and it can definitely be great having each other’s support for navigating the adult world.
Dotty’s got really good work ethic though. She just doesn’t know when to stop for her own health.
Dorothy’s the other kind of gifted kid. The one for whom maybe it doesn’t come as easy, but they’re pushed or push themselves really hard to excel anyway.
That’s the “burnout” version, as I understand it. The Walky version doesn’t really burnout, just hits a point where it doesn’t come naturally anymore and flounders. But they don’t burn themselves out working harder to get through that because they don’t know how/aren’t driven to do so.
I have to wonder where Amazi got the yellow boots. I want yellow boots.
On one hand, it’s nice to see a revitalized Dorothy.
On the other hand, that’s a skirt?!?
If it was longer and that tight, it would restrict her movement. She has leggings, so it’s just for looks and she doesn’t actually care if anyone sees under it.
If that’s a skirt, it’s the kind that make others remark that it’s more of a belt.
Aww… Nice to see Dorothy excited!
Dorothy could be a cute gal friday to Amazi-girl…..
i dont know if encouraging amazi-girls whole… thing is a good idea tho
Dorothy’s Mary Worthing it up.
You know, she needed the win, we talk about how healthy this is later.
OMG did they really do that? Poor kids! We got to draw and color and stuff and also help other kids sometimes.
being a gifted kid would’ve sucked way less if not for the adults
Now Dina’s gonna have to get more cereal. The stakes have never been higher.
Good time for Becky to say, “hey, Dina, lemme getcha some more cereal”?
Dina has never eaten cereal in her life, and I don’t think she’s encountered Becky before this scene.
Damn, I really wanted to see that guy skate backwards down a flight of stairs.
Happy solstice to those who care!
*Plays on the hacked muzak*
Honestly it’s less a skirt and more that the whole thing is a tunic
Your mom is a tunic. (This is the first thing that comes up in my brain)
And yours is a gambeson
Had to Google what that was and honestly that looks pretty cool thanks
I think Hatsune Miku has worn one of these before, of course she can sport just about anything but still ^^