name that has a meaning in plot

me every single time:

Aoyama: Physically, oui. Mentally? I’m in a renaissance painting wearing a silk dress and looking wistfully into the distance

Hi, my name is Av, and seeing Ethan’s genuine fear and shame and stress in this video has re-engaged my anger with the American public school system. (Specifying because it produced both Ethan and I, and I haven’t been to school anywhere else to see how things line up in other places.)

Those shakes that he got, the blanking out and the test anxiety even though he wasn’t under any pressure? Yeah, that’s an EXTREMELY common learned response this education system creates in people around math, even those that don’t have any sort of reading or educational impediment. There is so much pressure put on children in this country to perform well, immediately and with no assistance when it comes to math, and so much weight placed on being immediately good at it as an indicator of both intelligence and personal worth, that genuinely bright, engaged kids come out of our schools beaten down, anxious, and absolutely convinced that they’re stupid for not living up.

Prior to my current major, I was actually in STEM! I was majoring in theoretical physics, and almost across the board, the response from people involved some version of a fearful shudder combined with “There’s so much math in that though, don’t you hate it?? That’s too smart for me, I could never understand that.” Except then when I would explain theories, they understood things perfectly. When I used to tutor friends and help out with math assignments, they would seem so sheepish and rueful, and admit feeling incredibly stupid, until I just sat down with them and explained how the calculations worked, the tricks I had learned, etc. And there was always this sense of awed confusion, both at how quickly they actually could learn math, and at the mere concept of someone being patient with them and not judging their entire character based on how little I had to put into their understanding of the math. 

Kids in this country have been done so dirty and so wrong by the public education system in a thousand little ways, but this is one of the worst, because not only does it rob people of their curiosity, and their ability to give themselves credit for the ways they ARE smart because they’ve been taught that their intelligence isn’t the “correct” sort, but it also creates a cliff from which the fall is inevitable for students who do catch on without the assistance that they deserve. The crash that nearly all “gifted” students face when they eventually, at some point, collide with something they don’t immediately understand is harsh and debilitating, because children rewarded for not needing to ask for help and not needing to study never learn how to do those things, so when they DO need help or DO need to study, they can’t do it! So people burn out of fields for which they are genuinely passionate (as I did, in some ways) because our education system is designed at every turn to crush that passion out of people. (in a lot of ways it is designed to send poor people of color to prison and poor white folks to work retail, but that’s a separate essay.)