The devil is in the details

My poor sister (part 1)

Sometimes, I feel bad for my little sister. It must be awfully hard having to put up with me.

I had a few (one in particular) big academic achievements in high school and some relatively large non-academic successes as well. The hoopla around all of these events (and some other academic events that don't matter nearly as much) was rather ridiculous. I have a large scrapbooks with all of my newspaper clippings and video tapes of when the local TV news did stories on me. While I think it is important to reward kids for their successes, the whole thing was just really out of hand in my case and I wasn't nearly the superstar that some people tried to make me out to be and it certainly didn't contribute to my having an ENORMOUS ego as a high schooler or anything. Oh no, not at all. Little sis and I were looking through the scrapbook last time that I was home (we were trying to find something else and she was like "What's this?" and then it went on from there.) It is hilarious. We were both doing impressions of what the newspaper reporters seemed to have had, laughing at the details they found necessary to report, laughing at the quotes from my teachers and counselors, etc. (Little sis's important observation: "None of these articles mention your dear, sweet then-six year old sister and how she inspired you and helped you achieve greatness. That's not fair. You KNOW that if I do the same things, there will be an entire paragraph in my newspaper articles that says:

'LS is only the second person in the history of our small town/this part of the state/the entire world to achieve this feat. Eleven years ago, LS's wonderful sister was the first to do it. Since then, the sister has gone on to get a degree from Duke, become a PhD student from Harvard and become Grand Sultaness of the World. Please bow down before her. Isn't she wonderful?'")

We had a good laugh about that. (Before you think this whole thing is entirely glib, I want to point out that I REALLY worry about the pressure that all of this puts on her and that other people don't value her as much as they should. I mean, she's a snarky little kid who makes jokes about it, but I wonder how much it bothers her. As for the people who are obnoxious about it, I might have to kick them.)

Anyway, I started taking high school courses in 8th grade, as did she. This matters because as high schoolers in NY, we have to take NYS Regents exams which matter a lot, at least in NY. One of the not-terribly-important-in-the-long-run things that I did was to get a 100% on the Earth Science exam that I took in 8th grade. I was the first person in our school district to ever do so. This is all well and good, except that my sister had the same teacher 11 years later. He announced that his students' goal should be "to be just like LS's sister and get a 100 on the Regents" on the first day of class, and he proceeded to remind her of my score throughout last year. She got a 99 and was quite dismayed.

posted by Immunegirl @ 1:48 PM