Amy Sullivan inadvertantly steps in it.

The Kids Are Alright

In an otherwise unremarkable post celebrating a teenager who aced the SAT and ACT's she throws in this line:

is surprising is that by all accounts Willa is no vocab-memorizing automatron but rather a normal, down-to-earth kid with a playful sense of humor.

For reasons that are obvious only to those who know me, this raised my hackles.

Here are my two responses:
I'm going to look at this as an opportunity to examine prejudice as a general phenomenon. Amy writes this:

What is surprising is that by all accounts Willa is no vocab-memorizing automatron but rather a normal, down-to-earth kid with a playful sense of humor..

And no one seems to notice that she's no less guilty of trying to pigeonhole people than someone would be if they made blanket assumptions about hip-hop fans or Muslims.

There's a smart kid who's otherwise just like kids everywhere. The only thing surprising is that anyone finds that surprising.

There is a great deal of cultural pressure in this country to NOT succeed academically. Without even delving into how such forces can disproportionately impact minority students, anti-intellectualism is a potent and exceedingly harmful force in this country. Don't believe it? Let us relive those heady weeks of 'bittergate' and remember how much backlash there was against Obama for the crime of being 'elitist'