What specific anecdotes eroded your trust in adults growing up?
Do you want anecdotes that eroded trust or anecdotes about events that eroded trust?
I can't think of any specific things that happened to me, though I do remember that general feeling of having had your motives completely misconstrued.
I had authority issues from about 5th grade on, but I don't remember not trusting adults, per se. I just found it galling that they got to call the shots no matter what.
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I got one of those $20 drugstore bruxism guards (as opposed to the $300+ ones from the dentist) but I couldn't get myself to sleep in it last night. I was afraid I'd be awakened by a loud party, sit bolt upright, hit my head on a paper lantern, and yell "MISS GORIGHTRY! I PROTEST!"
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When you talk about trust, do you mean a general sense that the adults are malicious and doing you wrong? For example, your anecdote seems to describe someone out to get you. The other kind of trust relates to knowing that an adult's judgment is not great or that an adult can't be trusted to be reliable--even if the adult has your best interest at heart.
Outside of situations of serious neglect and mental illness, I think that this second type can be a bigger problem for precocious, bright children. Sometimes those children are affected more by things like natural disasters. They know that the adults want to protect them, but they also know that the events are out of their control. This is not exactly the situation in my type 2. Nobody would call the adults unreliable or that their judgment is poor when they try to reassure the child that s/he will be safe. Nevertheless the child knows that the promise can't be relied upon.
When you talk about trust, do you mean a general sense that the adults are malicious and doing you wrong? For example, your anecdote seems to describe someone out to get you. The other kind of trust relates to knowing that an adult's judgment is not great or that an adult can't be trusted to be reliable--even if the adult has your best interest at heart.
I just want to be entertained.
This sounds worse when I say it out loud than when I think about it, but I don't recall ever trusting adults at all, in the sense of believing that I had any shot of successfully communicating what was troubling me about any situation or getting assistance with it. Didn't think of them as malicious, and life was generally fine even in the absence of successful communication, but there wasn't anything useful to be achieved by going to them for help with anything.
It didn't affect my trust in adults, but when I was a senior in high school I was very distressed to learn that the assistant librarian really disliked me. She walked up to me in the hall, unprompted as far as I could tell. She told me I was arrogant and then walked away. It was toward the end of my senior year, so I must have been arrogant, but the rest of the class couldn't have been that different. And, it was her first year there and I don't think I'd spoken to her before that. It may have been about her name, which started with "Dz" that pronounced was like a 'J'. But I don't know how she could have found out I was mispronouncing her name or why I should be blamed for not knowing Polish consonant sounds.
You weren't arrogant enough to guess that she was flirting with you.
3rd and 4th grade with ancien regime teachers who were clearly sorta disgusted with me all the time were probably the main things that made me so anti-social. But it's not like I trusted other kids more or something.
Also, the neighbor lady continually ratting me and my friends out for harmlessly playing with fire was pretty irritating. I'd be a lot less sneaky if it wasn't for her.
8 was basically me. There were adults I liked, and didn't distrust as such; my parents and my uncle, I suppose. But generally, teachers or other adults, not at all. I also always had issues with authority. Not in the sense of being actively badly behaved. I just didn't respect adults in authority, much. Largely, but not totally, I was quite good at keeping that secret from them.
11.last: Given that I've started a grass fire twice without trying to, I'm not unsympathetic to your neighbor.
I was probably most disappointed by the realization that Baptist adults were not theologically consistent.
8 was me too. I never got the sense that one could actually ask an adult for help and get anything like help in return. If I was lucky, I'd ask for help and nothing at all would happen. If I was unlucky, I'd set into motion a juggernaut of humiliation.
I was always pretty sure that adults would agree with me if we could just have some reasonable discourse around here. When I got to a teacher who used "No backtalk" with me, it was like someone was asking me to walk around with a blindfold. That doesn't make sense! Why would anyone impose such an odd restriction?
What is the Heinlein quote? "Most men have an unhealthy tendency to obey laws."
That describes me relatively well (and I've always hoped that Heinlein meant that as a gendered comment, and that he believed men were more likely than women to blindly support the existing social order).
As a child I spent a lot of energy carving out time/space when I had explicit permission to be by myself because I was so disinclined to actively resist adult authority when it was present.
That isn't to say that I was always invested in pleasing authorities but that I accepted the legitimate authority of parents/teachers to set basic ground rules, and tried to have as much freedom as possible without violating those guidelines.
I never understood why adults were constantly encouraging me to lie if I found myself tempted to say anything that might not be the most appealing possible answer to any question. So I'd ask if being liked is more important than being honest. Their answer was usually some form of "yes."
I was always pretty sure that adults would agree with me if we could just have some reasonable discourse around here.
My son shares that belief. It is probably a good sign for his verbal ability and also the most annoying thing ever. All too often the discourse is taking place at 4 a.m. and the topic is "Resolved: We should go play Lego Star Wars."
I was preparing to relate my story of a dentist who through inattention thought, and told my mother rather than me, that I was being very rude, but in retrospect I was indeed being at least a little rude. Fortunately, my mother listened to my explanation and dropped the issue.
I've mentioned before my 3d grade teacher who was convinced, and taught, that the Mayflower pilgrims had started their settlement before the Jamestown colony, and that any reference material I might bring in to the contrary was erroneous. She never admitted error, but must, at some point after that, have realized that she was wrong.
2 tooth-fairy-related incidents that eroded my trust in adults. If we had celebrated Santa Claus I imagine I would have applied my experimental skills to that phenomenon instead.
1) I must have been pretty young, but no younger than 5. I was fairly sure the tooth fairy didn't exist, but wanted incontrovertible proof. I lost a tooth when my parents were out, and asked the babysitter not to tell my parents, so that any gift I received under my pillow would have to be from the tooth fairy herself. I was pretty pissed off to find a gift under my pillow, because my prior that the tooth fairy existed was already quite low, meaning that almost certainly experimental protocol had been violated.
2) The second time I was a little smarter about it, and trusted no one with the secret. When I woke up I was pleased to note the absence of a gift, but upset that it was now nearly certain that my parents had told me something untrue, on purpose. When I confronted my father, instead of congratulating me on a successful experiment, he made up some obviously silly story about what I had to do to make the tooth fairy come. He has a good heart and thought he was comforting me, but what I needed was encouragement, not bullshit.
Somehow I never modified my authority-obeying behavior based on this knowledge that the authorities don't know what they're doing. Probably I am following plenty of rules that I shouldn't.
Here's my answer to the OP, instead of going through the whole story again. Note that this was in A MATH CLASS.
In training for my bar mitzvah, I learned a specific prayer that one is supposed to recite while putting on the prayer shawl. The Sunday School seemed to think it was important to learn this thing, and it was emphasized that the truly devout would say this precise thing every single day of their lives, so we could at least learni it to say once for the bar mitzvah. So backstage in the rabbi's study before the bar mitzvah, it was time to put the thing on. I dutifully said the thirty second prayer. The rabbi and the cantor both just put theirs on without bothering to say anything.
I wasn't a believer, or at all religious, but it surprised me that the rabbi and the cantor weren't either. They wore the costumes properly, but it was just show biz.
You know, you know combine the two themes of the OP's title--arbitrary grading can do its part to undermine one's trust in adults! Though one would think that, by college, that ship would have sailed...
i suppose i never had much trust in adults - at least in the "will they do what they said they would" sense. i found it much better to assume promises were contingent.
my well-meaning but bi-polar and multipally-addicted mother probably had something to do with that.
24: That sort of thing gradually eroded my trust in religious authorities, long before I noticed that I didn't actually think there was a god.
24: Stuff like that really burns me up. So much energy gets poured into making kids feel like shit for not being more devout, when everyone knows adults don't actually care about religion when no one's looking.
I was actively mocked and harassed for YEARS as a child at church because I admitted that I listened to secular music, which, ffs, is not even a thing in Baptist theology. Kids taunted me every fucking week for years because of what they perceived as my failure to be religious enough. They'd ask us to go around and say what we wanted to be when we grew up, and everyone would smile and say, "Oh, a missionary, definitely!" or "I want to marry a pastor of a church!" and I said I wanted to be a surgeon. I might as well have said I wanted to be a crack whore.
Church was the worst. And you know what? Those same little kiss-asses who made fun of my secularism were all bragging about how many blowjobs they gave/got on the youth mission trip.
28 was about the kids, but I guess it's not their fault, because the stupid idiot adults in charge of children's and youth church encouraged duplicity and sanctimony.
I've spent more time playing for the other team obviously. Not sure I've mentioned telling my daughter that the game hide and seek was actually "Haydn Seek," and had been invented when Haydn was looking after child prodigy Mozart.
I thought it transparent. She earnestly told teachers and friends.
30: You need to do this one as well:
http://www.dangerousminds.net/comments/france_is_bacon/
I had no problems with adults. They were far more trustworthy than my peers, who seemingly betrayed me at every turn. Those fuckers can burn in hell.
In 5th grade we went to one of those confidence courses for corporate training, with trust falls and lots of climbing and spotting and stuff. I knew it would be hard for me because I had terrible balance due to a series of really bad ear infections, but I tried to throw myself into it. At the first obstacle, I was chosen to walk along a wire 5' in the air with two spotters on each side. When I fell (of course), the spotters on that side each took a step back to let me fall full force onto a rock with my back. Seriously, hell is too good for those little pieces of shit.
My kindergarten teacher guessed that a cygnet was a baby seal because she didn't know it was a baby swan. I was appalled.
I don't think I ever had a single "light bulb" moment of not trusting adults, mostly because my parents always encouraged mild, respectful skepticism of everything. I've had problems with the respectfulness but I don't recall many issues with the skepticism.
At my old law firm we went on one of those corporate training confidence courses, and there were many incidents like 33. These involved people in their 30s-60s. Also, one of the name partners of the firm, to his lasting credit, said, "fuck this, I'm out of here, and who ever wants to join me can meet at the bar" during a particularly annoying trust building exercise. That was pretty great.
21: She was wrong on that, but it is strongly emphasized to New England children that Jamestown was started first but did not last.
Neither I, nor as far as I know none of my other siblings (and 2 of them have said as much) ever felt that either of our parents was ever less than honest with us. I'm not sure that that did us much long-run good, not because we became too trusting, but because we judged others by that standard, and worse, because we believed that it was possible to get through life being straightforward.
31 -- She's 25 now, so I don't think I could pull it off.
I think at least one teacher believed the Haydn Seek story.
I'm often at least as afraid to be the spotter in those trust exercises as the person falling or balancing. A lot of them seem to be designed such that even if all the other spotters were right where they should be, I could still be dealing with a lot more weight coming down on me than I'm comfortable with.
This was in Texas, BG, so it was all mere prelude to that apotheosis of human endeavor, the defense of the Alamo. (Actually the trilogy: Alamo, Goliad, SJ).
19 All too often the discourse is taking place at 4 a.m. and the topic is "Resolved: We should go play Lego Star Wars."
You should ship him off to live with one of my college roommates. They'd get along famously.
She was wrong on that, but it is strongly emphasized to New England children that Jamestown was started first but did not last.
This is wrong, yes? Skimming Wikipedia, the original settlement would have failed but John Rolfe revived it as a going concern prior to 1620.
There are many anecdotes, and #14 is among them, but the first one that came to mind was this: 2nd grade, I had Mrs. Fish as a teacher. Her face and manner were just as you would imagine from the name Mrs. Fish. I think she was about 150 years old. Anyway, on the drive to school one day, we found that our cat had been hit by a car on the road. Aghast, and in a rush, my mom got out of the car and put the corpse in the trunk to take home and deal with later. Being a sensitive girl, and a second grader who was fond of her cat, I cried inconsolably in the back seat. When we arrived at school, I still couldn't stop crying, though I tried to keep it to sniffles and not let myself sob. I lapsed into a sob in the back of the class, and Mrs. Fish had had enough with my dramatics. She sent me out into the hallway.
Now keep in mind that this was in Alabama in the 70's, and corporal punishment was the norm. There was no reason to send a kid into the hallway unless you intended to paddle them. That's how these things work. Often there would be a line of ne'er-do-wells standing in the hallway outside a classroom, awaiting their beatings at the teacher's convenience. So I stood in the hallway, alternately sobbing and shaking in fear that I'd be paddled with the big wooden paddle with holes drilled into it. I was a good girl and had never been paddled before. And the paddle was half as tall as I was, or at least it seemed so.
Eventually Mrs. Fish came out and read me the the riot act for acting like a baby. She didn't paddle me, though, and I believe she thought herself a saint for her restraint. God, I hated that woman.
44: Hah, I had some long pedantic thing about this written up and then deleted it as I figured no one cared. It's certainly wrong in the broader sense - the colony that evolved out of Jamestown succeeded, and while it was never as healthy as Plymouth or New England at large, it made far more money for the British empire and then for the US, and certainly had just as much cultural impact as Massachusetts. (Think back to all those early Presidents and all those Virginians.) But, Jamestown itself is no longer a settlement, this is true, and they had some supremely horrible years at the start. But it certainly didn't disappear like Roanoke.
Fsck. First case of likely cheating on the final, and it's the first problem that wasn't announced beforehand. There might be an explanation, but it's flagged & I'm sad.
Also angry.
5th grade. A teacher told the class about how Colombus discovered that the world was round a few days after I read about how that was rubbish. I said so, and the teacher told me either that I was wrong or just to hush up. I tried to have a reasoned conversation. This is when I realized 1) that teachers can just be wrong and 2) that truth isn't necessaraly particularly valued by teachers. And this was in a UMC suburb of Boston.
I learned very quickly not to trust adults b/c if I let down my guard they would frequently prove to be bent on breaking the fairly simple rules request by my parents: "please do not feed her meat or make her play with meat." Favorite examples of adult transgressions include trying to sneak salami strips into a salad or telling me that gello was made from fruit and sugar alone or that no, I really had to make the birdfeeder out of a pinecone slathered with chopped beef, my religious prohibition was about *eating* beef, not playing with it. By the middle of kindergarten I could read and demand to be shown the ingredients and I could also recite, with both memory and comprehension, a fairly complete list of what I should not have to touch or eat. But the many dramatic near misses made a deep impression on me.
I was probably most disappointed by the realization that Baptist adults were not theologically consistent.
You should have tried growing up Anglican. Nobody ever thought they were theologically consistent, so that was OK. OTOH 32 and 48 are both true as well. Most people just want to win the current argument and then who cares.
Wild relief, it was just algebraic incompetence.
49 is disturbing. Adults can be so terrible and petty.
Aww, I was really aiming for an entertaining tone. I find it amusing myself, in retrospect. I don't think they were truly malicious so much as very, very unclear on the concept and sort of very stubborn about it, and unhappy on being lectured about it by a talkative 5-year old.
OT request for a future thread, I'm sure there's some good comment fertilizer in this: http://slatest.slate.com/posts/2011/12/19/james_franco_nyu_jose_angel_santana_says_he_was_fired_for_giving_franco_a_d_in_mfa_class_.html
As a middle-school kid, I was reading the 1988 Newsweek post-election issue and the word "bestiality" was in there. I asked my Dad what it meant and he said with a straight face, "the reality of the best."
I've been a skeptic of other people's definitions of words for a very long time now.
I never had any teachers who really added disproportionately to my erosion of trust, rather it was the various principals of my schools who to my mind would just blather the most insane shit over the PA system and in assemblies.
*Most could not really keep on maps and geography but it's not like I held that against them.
Our PA was broken and nobody even pretended they wanted it fixed. The speakers stayed, probably because nobody wanted to fix the holes in the wall that would result from removal.
But, Jamestown itself is no longer a settlement,
I think that this is what they were emphasizing. And my main point is that what CC was mentioning would not have been the view of just one rogue teacher.
In any case, a good friend of mine from college is married to a Yankee from the South Shore who is a firm Plymouth-first proponent. Her mother is from Maryland and is a Jamestown partisan. Apparently, they have a running thing where they provide each other with educational materials.
44: And I'd love to read your long pedantic thing.
one of the bigger faults in how i was raised was insufficient exposure to foolishness and unfairness.
My family drilled in to me that Mary Had a Little Lamb was written by Sa/ra Jos/epha Ha/le, since my family is descended from her husband's brother Sal/ma. She published it. Henry Ford was really invested in a theory that said someone named Roulstone wrote it about Mary Sawyer (whose house, alas, burnt in 2007). The encyclopedia at my school said that it was by Mary Sawyer and gave no other background information. That was when I learned that short entries in reference books could be wrong too. Our version might be wrong, although it was published under her name, but the Encyclopedia was more wrong for not giving background information.
And sex with robots was wrongest of all.
I think that this is what they were emphasizing. And my main point is that what CC was mentioning would not have been the view of just one rogue teacher.
Accepted, but I would still think of anyone who seriously, and independently of a curriculum, touts this fact as a very silly regionalist. They moved the town 12 miles away; the colony has continuity with present-day Virginia. Saying it "didn't last" is like saying the US Congress didn't last because Federal Hall lies empty. (self-ban)
63: Mary Had a Little Lamb. It Had Some Sex With Robots. That Was Always Wrong and It Died in a Hale Of Bullets.
My teacher was not making a nuanced (and false) argument about ultimate success of the colony. She was making a provably false assertion about foundation.
How do the Plymouth faction account for Stephen Hopkins?
How do the Plymouth faction account for Stephen Hopkins?
Of course, while he may have been the instigator that the MF compact was designed to thwart, he was not at the Alamo, and so barely counts.
66.2: Probably by denying their identity. Wikipedia on that subject starts with "There is some evidence that..."
Why does it matter which of Jamestown and Plymouth is second place?
How do the Plymouth faction account for Stephen Hopkins?
My family is decended from Stephen Hopkins, and we brag about it to each other constantly. "We're so OG, we was kicked out of Jamestown, and landed on Plymouth Rock instead!"
I'll just let y'all get on with this one.
no, OK, my 6th grade teacher in georgetown, carolina didn't know the word "mire." we lived in a swamp. wtf.
71 beat me to it, although I should note that Santa Fe itself was founded a few years after Jamestown. The original capital was at San Gabriel del Yunque and was founded in 1598, however. It's no longer occupied, of course, but then neither is Jamestown.
And, of course, this is the sort of stuff that the schools in NM emphasized, although they did of course discuss Jamestown and Plymouth etc.
I'm all itchy. But scratching feels terrific!
When I was thirteen or so, I helped push my neighbor's car away from the curb. We'd gotten a little snowstorm, and the guy kept trying to turn his wheels all the way without getting some momentum.
I finally told him to straighten his wheels until he got rolling a bit before turning. I was shocked to discover that I knew more than a grown man did, even if the grown man was a doofus.