Am I too Stupid for Grad School?

There were points over the last semester that I felt like I am too stupid for grad school. I was taking a required course on art theories. I have taken history classes but not a graduate level theory class. I desperately want to learn the information provided in the class. I knew it would be difficult because I struggle with absorbing information through reading. The class is a lot of reading -well, skimming is the expected technique to get through the readings. I can read fine but I don't read fast and my brain wanders off easily -usually on a topic related to what I am reading but not the actual topic I'm supposed to be reading. I try really hard to ignore the many references I want to follow. The more I try to focus on ignoring where my brain wants to go, the less I can absorb. (Maybe I need a bandwidth upgrade. Is bandwidth still a thing?) This has always been a problem for me but the more subjective the information the slower I need to absorb it. Art theory makes me feel like I am drowning in an ocean of subjective thought. This semester I treaded to the point of exhaustion and began to sink.

I have developed techniques that keep me on task in written word heavy learning. I write things down word for word. I don't do this because I want to reference my notes later. I do it because the act of copying the words makes them stick in my brain better. Each word is like a little drawing. I notice its shape, especially where it raises above and below the centerline. When I need to connect two sentences I picture the shape of the previously written words in my mind and scan the page for those shaped drawings. Over time while writing things down I start to lose focus if I don't have an action that refocuses my attention. Different things can be speed bumps to keep my brain from running away on a tangent; switching pencils, sharpening pencils, clicking a pen, drawing a doodle, making faces, asking questions, using a post it note, highlighting something, or even just pinching myself or shoving one fingernail under another fingernail. (How people take it: barely noticeable if I already have them out, annoying, really fucking annoying -it even annoys me when I do it, looks like I am not paying attention even though it is helping me pay attention, pure hatred, irritation and assumption I didn't do the reading, distracting and performative, performative, odd, no one notices because I can hide that I am doing it while performing socially acceptable paying attention.)

Different conditions allow for different types of adapting. The summer class I am taking is online. It offers multiple ways to interact with the information. I can pause and go back to rewatch the lecture as much as I need to when I didn't understand what was said or need more time to write things down. I can print things out so I can physically touch the words and use a highlighter. I can use all of my techniques at home because I am the only one judging what I am doing and I am not distracting others. In the lectures the instructor breaks down the theories in the readings and helps guide understanding of the material. After taking in all the information and running through it in different ways; reading, visual/auditory of the video lecture, writing down the lecture, highlighting the reading, and then trying to write about it in my own words, I feel like I am absorbing the information. The summer class is a 300 level undergraduate course -not a graduate course. After not being believed that my struggles with the graduate course in the spring semester were about my ability to absorb the information -not about my time investment, I was wondering if my learning style is bad for graduate school learning. Is it just not something I am not going to be able to absorb?

One day I was trying to do my summer class work and just could not stop thinking about being labeled as a problem student during my spring semester. My summer school class is Sociology of Deviance. It is about how deviance is defined, how people become labeled as deviant and what that label does to the individual and the society that labels them. I find it fascinating and informative for my art practice as well as my personal experience as an individual labeled as difficult. The personal bits and the difference in the level of difficulty I have had in these classes are hard to get out of my mind. As a way to relieve the distraction (after googling "am I too stupid for grad school" and not getting very good results) I googled, "Is my learning style not good for mfa learning?"

This article was the first result, https://www.thegoodtrade.com/features/my-learning-style/ -it made me feel normal. Well, not fully normal because, I mean, what is normal? and do I want to be that? But it made me feel like the way I learn is ok because it usually works for me. I can learn the information but it may not be through the way it is being presented. I may need to create an art theory class for myself.

A moment of realization.

I was figuring this out in real time while making the video.

The article is written by a millennial. I'm gen x. My experiences in school when I was young were a bit different. There were mostly set ways to learn and bending the children to fit those rules was often the only goal. I have memories from kindergarten of being told not to use my left hand. I used both and it was decided that my life would be easier if I learned to only use my right. I have a memory of being corrected during a coloring assignment. I was turning my paper and taking turns coloring with both hands depending on what gave me the best angle to see what I was doing. I'm sure it looked chaotic. I'm sure I was in the zone and did not care how the other kids colored. I was doing what worked for me. What I remember most vividly was being corrected by the teacher. She told me not to turn my paper, to color with my right hand and to hold my crayons correctly. She turned my paper to the proper vertical orientation, she moved my colors to the right side of the paper and showed me how to hold my crayon -by putting a crayon in my hand, moving my fingers to the right positions and holding my hand to color on my paper. I remember her hand lingering on my paper and squeezing my hand. It felt like she didn't want me to enjoy coloring. I remember not wanting her to touch my hand. I didn't want her marks on my paper. I remember feeling disappointment that I had done something wrong and that my coloring was bad. Memory is a complicated thing that can be difficult to trust but I remember that incident sticking with me for years. I was so afraid another teacher would correct me that I was very careful to only color the way my kindergarten teacher required and never offered an answer in class unless I was absolutely sure it was correct.

I mostly got through school by studying the teachers and learning what they wanted. In college being able to choose teachers, drop classes and try the class another time gave me more opportunity to focus on learning the information instead of being liked by the instructor in order to get a good grade. Art classes are often graded on a purely subjective basis. Many times I have had instructors that do not give any reasoning for the grades they give and have been offended by requests for explanations of the grading process. I was a senior before I had an art instructor that provided a thorough rubric with an actual point system explaining grades. That instructor is my model for how I want to teach. She allowed for personal expression but set specific goals to be achieved and provided objective feedback with specifics on how to improve.

The class that I taught during the spring semester went really well. There are many ways for me to improve (it was the first time I have taught a class completely alone) but my students told me they enjoyed the class and most of them felt they learned something. There was a wide range of established skills going into the class. I gave opportunities for my students to find a way that worked for them to meet the objectives of each assignment. I provided a specific way to go through each assignment but did not require that they follow that path as long as they met the requirements for the assignment. Some students were happy to do exactly what I instructed and others needed other ways to get to the end goal. I don't think one way is better than the other. Requiring them to follow my exact instructions makes the class about me and how I want to do things. Letting them find a way that works better for them is about each student getting to the objective in the way that works for them.

I don't know how we as a society got to the point of expecting everyone to be the same and learn the same. It seems really absurd to me. This seems like an obvious statement but there is a wide range of people. But I may feel that way because no one in my family fits the norm. We're a bunch of unique individuals that have moments of similarity with the biggest connection being we don't fit society's expectations and honestly don't want to. It seems that not wanting to fit the norm is what causes the most problems. My youth was spent trying to fit the norm. It didn't work out that great and I'm really not interested in trying to do it anymore. Why work so hard for something you don't want and has no reward? Maybe I'm just too stupid to understand it.