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Is there a moment in each gifted child's life when you know so much that everyone accuses you of making things up?
My 8 years old daughter was trying to tell her classmates about tardigrades -- tiny animals that are so resilient they can survive extreme temperature, pressure, starvation, dehydration, radiation, air deprivation, even exposure to outer space.
First her classmates accused her of believing AI hallucinations. (Yes, my daughter often asks AI for information. Yeah, we told her not to believe everything. So far, the AI was mostly reliable.) Then they called a teacher, and she said that those are probably made up animals from my daughter's stories. (She likes to invent various stories, sometimes she writes them down or records them, but mostly just tells other people.)
I guess it does not increase credibility to mention that tardigrades are also called "water bears" in English, "slow ones" in Slovak, and "little turtles" in Czech.
So my wife printed a short summary from Wikipedia and a few other pages, and gave it to her to show at school. I am curious whether it will convince anyone.
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8
Maybe not "everyone", but...
When I was 10 entering 5th grade, so not that young, my new science teacher remarked in her first lesson that Pluto was no longer a planet because "it had gone supernova". The rest of my classmates dutifully wrote this down in their notebooks.
I was outraged by the propagation of this untruth by an authority amongst my unwitting classmates. I had to protect them from this, you see? So I stood up and said "no teacher, Pluto is no longer a planet because the IAU redefined 'planet' and Pluto failed the 3rd condition of having cleared its orbital neighborhood". My teacher responded by blowing up at me for daring to question her authority, and worse, for doing so by making things up, yelling at me for what felt like minutes. This made me cry, so she asked me to stand outside and be quiet and "see me after class".
I feel for your daughter. I hope she gets accepted into a gifted program or similar.
50
I was taught at elementary school that Alexander the Great founded a city called Alexandria. I have read an encyclopedia at home, which said that he actually founded multiple cities with that name. When I said it at the exam, the teacher made fun of me in front of the class -- the idea of multiple cities having the same name was clearly absurd. At that moment history became my most hated subject.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandria_Ariana
31
when i was a kid, i would tell my friends all about the cool cutting edge gadgets i have and obviously i wasnt able to bring them to school and was called a show off and liar.