CSotD: There is no greater burden than an older sibling
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Edge City seems to have a predeliction for picking up little moments in family life that haven't yet been hammered to death on the funny pages. They don't slam every ball over the fence, but they get a lot of extra base hits, while just the originality makes the strip worth following (and they do wallop their share into the stands).
Sibling rivalry isn't new, and there are strips where the kids aren't presented as a sort of unitary bloc of obnoxious behavior — for instance, Jan Eliot of "Stone Soup" and Bill Amends of "Foxtrot" differentiate their kids enough that either could have a field day with this theme. They're probably touched on it, but Edge City is where I'm reading it fleshed out as a full story arc, and I'm giving points for that, because it's no small matter.
Here it is, the first day of school and I already hate this teacher. It's not that she remembers Carly's older brother. I don't expect amnesia. But I would like some discretion, and I've seen this from both sides.
Whether it inspires unrealistic hopes or unjustified foreboding, it's almost impossible not to judge the younger sibling based on the older. But, either way, it's unforgiveable to talk about it.
I mean, to start with, it's extremely unprofessional. But it's also rude.
It didn't often happen that teachers discussed my older siblings to my face, but I knew it was an issue. They were top of their classes while, if I were in school today, the counselors would have me pumped so full of behavioral adjustments that I'd have to trail an IV stand down the hall.
I was not only a waste of great potential, but I was also a grave disappointment in light of their previous experience and, yeah, some of them told me that outright.
The younger daughter of a girlfriend faced the same thing: It wasn't just that she had her own academic issues to deal with, but she was following an older sister who was an honor student, and so she wasn't expected to just do well. She was expected to be like her sister and was more than once directly, specifically asked why she wasn't.
Meanwhile, my boys reversed it. My older son was much like me, and I got to endure the same "great potential" lectures on parent/teacher night that my parents used to hear.
Little brother, however, was more like his mother and was comfortable in school. But he has told me since that it often took him a few weeks or months to get out from under the thumb of teachers who felt that having the younger brother of the Great Potential in class meant getting out the truncheons on Day One.
In his case, he could readily overcome his teachers' prejudice, because he not only turned in his work on time (and kept his hijinks below the radar) but was a high honors student. Had he only been average, he might not have escaped so easily.
I don't take this stuff lightly. I've seen too many examples of how bad it can be.
I was at a reunion a few weeks ago and had a good conversation with a buddy who is a Vietnam veteran that began with my telling him I'd run into a mutual friend who had experienced a very hard landing on his return from Vietnam but is now clean, sober, married and happy.
We talked about the experiences of some of our schoolmates, and I recalled sitting in a diner with another fellow back in 1966, trying to talk him out of leaving school to take a factory job in Rochester.
I admitted, and my buddy quickly and whole-heartedly agreed, that I couldn't come up with much of an argument for his staying in school. He was a good guy, but he had a familiar name in the community and started each school year on the faculty hit list because of his older cousins and siblings.
By what should have been his senior year, he was two grades back and there was no reason to expect that he was suddenly going to be offered a break.
However, dropping out of school turned out to work in his favor. The factory job didn't last long, and when he found himself at Parris Island, something happened that he'd never experienced before: His last name was on his uniform, but nobody down there paid any attention to it.
They didn't give a damn what his name was or what his older relatives were like. What they cared about was that he was a bright, willing recruit who could drop and give them 50 — or 100 if they wanted — and that he could pick flies off the wall with a deer rifle at 100 yards.
He got blowed up real good over there, but he overcame the worst of his wounds and returned, not a "better man" — he had always been a good man — but a man who knew his worth for having finally been given a fair chance to show it.
Is that really too much to ask?
I want to see where Patty and Terry LaBan take this storyline. Not into the dark places I've just dragged it, I'm sure, but I'll be watching with interest nonetheless.
As said, it's inevitable that teachers will remember siblings, and it's not fair to demand they be superhuman and completely wipe the comparisons from their minds.
But every kid deserves to start with a clean slate, and good teachers do their best to provide it.
(Side note: I live about five miles from the Center for Cartoon Studies, whose library is on the banks of the White River. While the building was threatened, and may have been irreparably damaged, by Irene's floods, their collection is safe. I was going to go by yesterday and see how they were doing, but the street was blocked off and full of mud. However, here's a report from Tom Spurgeon at Comics Reporter.)
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